2 Australian journalists arrested in Rangoon and deported/ ၾသစေတးလ် သတင္းေထာက္ ၂ ဦး ရန္ကုန္တြင္ အဖမ္းဆီးခံရ ၿပီး ျပန္လည္ပို႔ေဆာင္ျခင္းခံရ

AUSTRALIA has complained to Myanmar after two Australian journalists investigating media freedoms were arrested and deported from the country, days after much-criticised elections, officials said on Friday.

A foreign affairs spokesman said Australia had raised the matter with senior officials in the military-ruled country, claiming it was not informed of the arrests of its citizens, who were working for public broadcaster ABC.

The spokesman said Australia was 'concerned' over the arrests, adding that consular officials met the journalists before they were deported on Thursday, and confirmed they were safe and well.

http://www.straitstimes.com/BreakingNews/SEAsia/Story/STIStory_602383.html

သတင္းလြတ္လပ္မႈႏွင့္ ပက္သက္၍ စံုစမ္းမႈျပဳလုပ္ေနေသာ ေအာ္စထေရးလီးယား သတင္းေထာက္ႏွစ္ဦးကို ကဲရဲ႕မႈမ်ားစြာခံရေသာ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲက်င္းပအျပီး ရက္အအတန္ၾကာတြင္ ဖမ္းဆီးျပီး ျပန္လည္ပို႕ေဆာင္ခဲ့ေသာ ျမန္မာျပည္အစိုးရကို ေအာ္စထေရးလီးယား အစိုးရက ျပစ္တင္ေျပာဆိုလိုက္ေၾကာင္း အမႈေဆာင္မ်ားက ေသာၾကာေန႕တြင္ေျပာဆိုခဲ့သည္။

ေအာ္စထေရးလီးယား အေနျဖင့္ ABC သတင္းဌာနတြင္ အလုပ္လုပ္ေနေသာ မိမိတို႕ႏိုင္ငံသားႏွစ္ဦးအား ဖမ္းဆီးမႈအေပၚ အေၾကာင္းၾကားျခင္း မရွိေၾကာင္းဆိုကာ ျမန္မာျပည္ အထက္အရာရွိမ်ားထံ အဆိုပါကိစၥႏွင့္ပက္သက္၍ တင္ျပအေရးယူေဆာင္ရြက္ထားေၾကာင္း ေအာ္စထေရးလီးယား ျပည္ပဆက္ဆံေရး ေျပာေရးဆိုခြင့္ရွိသူတစ္ဦးမွဆိုသည္။
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Two Australian journalists making a documentary for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) in Burma have been arrested and deported, according to ABC news.

The journalists were making a film about independent media in Southeast Asian countries and had focused on the Rangoon-based Myanmar Times and its Australian editor, Ross Dunkley.

The journalists had long-stays visas for Burma but they were arrested and deported at the wish of the Burmese authorities, the ABC said.

Filmaker Hugh Piper, who was deported on Thursday night along with producer Helen Barrow, told reporters in Bangkok that he first learned of the deportation order when visiting the office of the Myanmar Times.

“There were a couple of guys inside the Myanmar Times newspaper who liaise with the government and they said 'you need to now return to your hotel where you'll be met by various officials from the immigration department who are going to escort you to the airport and expel you,'” Piper said.

Piper, who is now in Bangkok, said they were deported from Burma because of the sensitivity over foreign reporting on the country's election.

Speaking to the Irrawaddy on Friday, a Rangoon-based journalist said: “I’ve heard that the Australian crews were reporting on the election, which is why they have been deported. Every foreign journalist is tracked by intelligence officials, so the authorities know everything they have done.”

A Japanese journalist, Mr. Toru Yamaji who sneaked into Myawaddy on the Thai-Burmese border on election day was arrested by the authorities on Nov. 7 and deported on Nov. 9.

According to the ‘Press Freedom Index 2010’ published by Reporters Without Borders, an organization which fights for press freedoms around the world, Burma is one of the five worst countries suffering from restrictions on the freedom of press.

http://www.irrawaddy.org/article.php?art_id=20057