Rural Access Denied or Difficult: Foreign News Journalists from Germany Face Obstacles in Reporting about the “Rohingya” Conflict in Myanmar’s Northern Rakhine State

Abstract

In September 2017, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) correspondent Jonathan Head (2017) and 17 other local and foreign journalists were given the chance to visit Maungdaw district in Myanmar, just one district of those on the Bangladesh-Myanmar border from which hundreds of thousands of people had fled in the weeks before. The journalists were confronted by conflicting realities: the refugees reported that soldiers, policemen and civilians had murdered, raped and burned houses down, whereas the Myanmar government alleged that the refugees were terrorists and had burned down their houses themselves. After his journey to Maungdaw, Head considered himself in a position to unmask attempts at manipulation by the government, but the final truth about the mass exodus from Myanmar remained uncertain. Since that unsuccessful press trip, the attitude of Myanmar’s government towards foreign journalists has changed, and work has become even more difficult for reporters covering the so-called Rohingya conflict—“the fastest-growing refugee emergency in the world today” (UNHCR, 2017). This chapter explores how foreign news journalists (particularly from Germany) experience this conflict and what obstacles they face in reporting it. In addition to their own views on their work, it will examine their work practices, the internal structure of their media outlets and the external influences on their work in Myanmar and Bangladesh.The empirical part of this paper is based on findings drawn from qualitative semi-