Citizens bite: Part 2

“Everyone, from journalists to the people we cover to our sources and the former audience, must change their ways. The alternative is just more of the same” – Dan Gillmor (We the Media).

Speaking of changing ways, I must begin with a correction. I gave the impression that other Brisbane media did not attend the Citizen Byte new media symposium in Brisbane yesterday. That wasn’t true. Graham Young (OnLine Opinion, Ambit Gambit, What the People Want) was an invited speaker and there was also Wotnews.com.au. I have since found out that other journalists and academics would have attended with more notice. The proceedings were also filmed.

Citizen Byte is a community research project to “examine what the implications of the new media environment are on politics and the political sphere both in Australia and in Malaysia.” New media is having a bigger impact in Malaysia than in Australia. Yesterday I discussed keynote speaker Steven Gan. The editor of Malaysiakini is the “new media” go-to person for the White House and the New York Times and he has transformed a small online venture into Malaysia’s most popular news site. Now I discuss other Malaysian wisdom on offer at the symposium. Tomorrow I will conclude with some great observations by the conference’s only Australian speaker, Graham Young.

Not the least wisdom came from a member of Malaysia’s media elite: Datuk Azman Ujang. Datuk Azman is chair of the Malaysian Press Institute and editorial adviser at national news agency Bernama and broadcasting arm Bernama TV. He took up the latter two jobs having retired as overall GM of Bernama. Datuk Azman is an experienced powerful insider who can call a spade a spade in the corridors of power. He said the government admonishes him for being “too honest” but does not dare censure him further. Yet even he was disturbed by the last election result which was a wake-up call for the media as well the government. Azman said entrenched government support within the media has resulted in biased news for 50 years. The arrival of new media suddenly made credibility a marketplace issue for urban voters. Malaysiakini took up the challenge and inspired other news portals. Opposition politicians began blogging in numbers to enhance their appeal with younger audiences and crash through their lack of coverage in the MSM. They also used the world’s highest mobile penetration to spread viral political messages.

Most villages don’t have the Internet or mobile phones and the government won the election overall 60:40. Poorer states, particularly East Malaysia voted for BN. Entrenched corruption in Sabah and Sarawak has survived for half a century which KL turns a blind eye to. The government uses regulation of the broadcast spectrum and annual licensing of newspapers to keep the media in check. Azman said “unwritten laws” depended on the circumstances, mood and attitude of the government at a particular time.

Mohd. Zulkifli was the next to speak. Zulkifli is a content manager at Media Prima Berhad, Malaysia’s largest media company with four free-to-air TV channels. Zulkifli is bringing the power of new media to bear on many of those assets. He said audiences had to register to the websites but the content was free and 838,000 Malaysians have signed up.

Zulkifli says their biggest differentiator is video content but they are also providing Tweetdecks, SMS alerts (with video alerts starting next month), streaming content on mobiles, and interacting with television shows in innovative ways that would please fan theorists like Henry Jenkins.

Their websites are full of blogs and online discussions with network stars and there are discussion rooms where audiences have their say and affect the plots of soap operas. There is also an “Indie showcase” channel that deliberately attempts to “push the boundaries of censorship”. In 2007 Berhad released Malaysia’s first made-for-web drama. “Kerana Karina” which tells the story of overnight pop star Karina in 20 four-minute episodes. Though he didn’t mention it, Zulkifli also wrote the lyrics to the KK theme song.

What he did mention was Berhad’s investment in new media (including 60 staff) is paying off. The most popular site TV3.com gets 41 million hits each month. His job is to keep the revenue high otherwise, he said, he “wouldn’t be here next year”. Zulkifli says that social media is the big challenge of the next couple of years. Somehow, I don’t expect him to fail this challenge – Mohd. Zulkifli is definitely not “more of the same”.

Malaysiakini editor speaks in Brisbane

When Barack Obama’s campaign team and the New York Times online editor were scouring Asia-Pacific for innovative ways to harness the power of new media, they avoided Australia. There was little going on here they did not already know. Where they did go was Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, home to some of the most cutting-edge use of media in the world. The person both organisations sought was journalist and editor Steven Gan. Gan is editor of Malaysiakini (MK) an online citizen news service that has become the most trusted media organisation in the peninsula. MK publishes in Malay, Chinese, English and Tamil and has expanded into video.

Today, Brisbane was fortunate enough to host Gan and other key Malaysian new media players at an all-day symposium called “New Media and the Informed Citizen” at the Queensland Conservatorium of Music at South Bank. The conference outlined the vibrancy of the industry in Malaysia in front of audience of about thirty people. It was a shame more people in Brisbane didn’t get to listen to how the media is being shaped in new directions in our part of the world.

“Malaysiakini” means Malaysia Now and celebrates its tenth anniversary in November. Up to 1998 the Malaysian Barisan National (BN) government (which has ruled since independence in 1957) had a monopoly on news in cyberspace. But after visiting Silicon Valley, Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad introduced the Multimedia Super Corridor (now MSC Malaysia) to kickstart local IT industry. Bill Gates and others told Mahathir he should not censor the Internet. While Mahathir had misgivings (particularly over pornography) he saw the business benefit and agreed. Malaysiakini exploited the loophole, starting up with just four journalists.

Despite liberal censorship rules (by Malaysian standards) the new publication still attracted unwelcome attention. In January 2003, police raided MK offices looking for details of an anonymous letter writer who satirically compared a politician to the Ku Klux Klan. Gan refused to divulge his source. Police seized four servers and 15 central processing units from its office and interrogated Gan and senior staff. The move provoked an outcry with spontaneous protests outside the office and led to a coalition of groups condemning the raid. Police never formally raised charges and returned the now obsolete boxes two years later.

MK attacks on government corruption attracted a new readership unhappy with the servile nature of Malaysia’s mainstream press. In 2006 they broke the Petronas story over lies the oil company boss told about activities in Sabah. The following year they took on Abdul Taib Mahmud, long-term corrupt leader of Sarawak, over logging kickbacks to Japanese shipping firms. Last year MK played a pivotal rule in the general election (where the MSM supported the government) and BN had its worst result in 50 years, losing control of five states.

MK employs 30 journalists and has moved into video at www.malaysiakini.tv. They have also trained up citizen journalists and provided them with video cameras to report on local news across East and West Malaysia. MK grew steadily with a subscription only model (the advice Gan gave the NYT) and a large bed of content.

As the 2008 election got closer, Gan made an important decision. He opened up the site for free for the entire period of the election. By the time of the 8 March vote it had overtaken The Star newspaper as Malaysia’s most popular political site. Gan called the election a tsunami that almost completely overturned Malaysia’s political system (a later speaker said it wasn’t a new chapter in Malaysian politics – it was a new book).

Thanks to a corrupt government and the biased MSM, Malaysiakini established itself as the most trusted media brand and brought in thousands of new subscribers after the election. The badly shaken BN government admitted they lost the Internet war and have begun to negotiate with MK and other online outlets.

MK is now a thriving media organisation that has made a profit in each of the last four years. Gan says they were lucky they started their subscription model early. After the election he said big advertisers started to take notice. He described one of his proudest moments as a video they released of a “nude ear-squat” form of prisoner punishment the government claimed had not been used in decades. The video scandal caused a Royal Commission to be set up to investigate the affair. “A half minute video changed practices that were going on for years,” he said.

From Burma to Brisbane: A tale of Rohingya resilience

Sujauddin Karimuddin apologised for being late meeting me for a coffee. He was delayed next door at the Mater Hospital where a woman was having complications with the birth of her baby. The woman was a Burmese refugee and Sujauddin was translating symptoms and orders between doctor and patient. All in a days work for a remarkable young man who was a refugee for many years.

Both Sujauddin and the woman in the hospital are Rohingyas, a mostly Muslim people persecuted for decades by Buddhist Burmese military rulers. The 1982 Citizenship Act stripped them of their right to be Burmese. At a stroke of dictator Ne Win’s pen, a people who had lived in north-west Rakhine (formerly Arakan) province for centuries were declared unpeople with no right to jobs, land, marriage or travel papers.

Sujauddin went to high school in the early 1990s suffering under this injustice. He said he was one of the lucky ones. His father was a wealthy businessman in the sugar town of Kyauktaw and could bribe his way out of most problems. But even he was arrested for minor misdemeanours. Sajuaddin became involved in Rohingya support groups at school and wrote complaint letters to school and government authorities. He was arrested by military intelligence and charged with raising funds for armed groups in Bangladesh. His father bribed authorities to get him out. But his mother advised her son to get out while he could.

Sujauddin left his home town in 1998 and has never been back. Travelling without papers, he made the dangerous journey to Rangoon by boat and truck. Sujauddin was picked up at a military checkpoint 100km from Rangoon and sent to a prison camp. A new commander from up north was unaware he was a Rohingya and asked him why he was travelling without papers. Sujauddin told him he was just a poor person looking for a job in Rangoon. The commander admonished him and freed him with a note saying “this boy is respectable”.

The plan was for Sujauddin to stay in Rangoon and manage his father’s business. But he was defeated by Rangoon’s repressive laws. Citizens must report visitors on a daily basis with a penalty of two years imprisonment for non-compliance. After six dangerous months moving from friends to friends, Sujauddin admitted defeat. He hired an “agent” (what Australians call “people smugglers”) and took a bus to Thailand. He arrived in Bangkok and sold roti on the streets to survive.

He was caught and sent to an Immigration Detention Centre where they served him rice and pork. Muslim Sujauddin could not eat the pork, but as there was no other food he starved. He had no energy to walk and was dragged into a truck and deposited on the Thai-Burmese border with orders not to return. He ignored the order. Instead he contacted a cousin in Malaysia and asked him to send him money to come to Malaysia. He got back to Bangkok where he contacted another “agent” to take him south to the Malay border. After an all-night walk across the jungle, Sujauddin arrived in Malaysia in November 1999.

He took the train to Kuala Lumpur where he found a factory job. Because he was illegal, the conditions were pitiless. He earned just 20 ringgits a day for 12 hours work. He worked seven days a week and hid for a year. Every Sunday he went to the university where he found a Rohingyan professor who taught him English. He studied for three hours before returning to work. He got a better job in a shopping centre but lasted two months before being arrested a third time in a third country.

On arrival at a detention centre, he was ordered to strip naked in front of two thousand inmates. Sujauddin refused. “I am a Muslim,” he said. “I have my dignity”. The prison officers beat him up but he refused to obey the order. Prisoners shouted out for him to obey but despite the kicking and the bleeding, he refused obstinately. “I would rather die,” he said. He did not die, but he did not take off his clothes either. The camp foreman ordered him dragged away.

After three months he was put on a bus with other detainees and driven to a river on the Thai border. They were loaded onto a boat and pushed off shore with orders not to come back. On the other side they were picked up by Thai gangs who worked with police. They demanded 200 ringgits or else they would sell them for 200 ringgits to local fisherman. Those that were sold into slavery rarely made it out alive. Sujauddin promised to ring his cousin in the morning to pay the ransom. In the middle of the night he escaped and led captors on a scary chase through the jungle. Sujauddin could hear pursuers following on motorbikes but eventually found a highway petrol station where a couple helped him escape back to Malaysia.

He made it back to Kuala Lumpur where he got another job. This time he struck lucky and got a job with a fashion designer. He used his English to good effect and made himself indispensable to his employers. Having some fixity of tenure, he resumed activism and helped found the National Council of Rohingyas with his former English teacher. They succeeded in getting the UN High Commission of Refugees to issue a document to allow Rohingyas to get medical treatment in Malaysia. While doctors recognised the document, the police would not: 12,000 Rohingyan refugees in Malaysia remained vulnerable to arrest.

In 2005 Sujauddin married an Australian woman and arrived in Sydney in August that year on a six month 309 spouse temporary visa. The marriage lasted three months and Australia cancelled his visa. He applied for a refugee visa which took another nine months. He joined the local Rohingya support group and became secretary of the Sydney branch. He also became involved in wider Burmese issues. He joined the Burma Campaign Australian and worked with the Burmese Democratic Movement Association. During the Saffron Revolution he organised support rallies in Sydney.

He moved to Brisbane where he provides Rohingyan refugees with cultural and language support. The love for his Rakhine homeland shines brightly in his eyes and his biggest task is to be re-united with his family in refugee camps in Bangladesh. He wants the Australian Government to do more to help his people. “I want them to put pressure on the Burmese Government and raise the issue in the UN Security Council,” he said. “Enough is enough. Australia is the western country closest to Burma and should take more responsibility to solve the problem. It’s bad enough for the half million Rohingya in the camps but its worse for the several million still in Burma. It’s our job to provide awareness to the international community so that people know what’s going on”. With that, Sujauddin apologised once more and disappeared into the Brisbane rain. I cycled home, oblivious to the wet, pondering on what it meant to live in a world where freedom could not be taken for granted.