On a typical day, Mai Rupa travels through his native Shan State, in eastern Myanmar, documenting the impact of war.

A video journalist with the online news outlet Shwe Phee Myay, he travels to remote towns and villages, collecting footage and conducting interviews on stories ranging from battle updates to the situation for local civilians living in a war zone.

"I have witnessed countless people being injured and civilians dying in front of me," Mai Rupa said.

"These heartbreaking experiences deeply affected me," he told Al Jazeera, "at times, leading to serious emotional distress."

Mai Rupa is one of a small number of brave, independent journalists still reporting on the ground in Myanmar, where a 2021 military coup shattered the country's fragile transition to democracy and obliterated media freedoms.

Like his colleagues at Shwe Phee Myay – a name which refers to Shan State's rich history of tea cultivation – Mai Rupa prefers to go by a pen name due to the risks of publicly identifying as a reporter with one of the last remaining independent media outlets still operating inside the country.

Most journalists fled Myanmar in the aftermath of the military's takeover and the expanding civil war. Some continue their coverage by making cross-border trips from work bases in neighbouring Thailand and India.

But staff at Shwe Phee Myay – a Burmese-language outlet, with roots in Shan State's ethnic Ta'ang community – continue reporting from on the ground, covering a region of Myanmar where several ethnic armed groups have for decades fought against the military and at times clashed with each other.

Fighting to keep the public informed

After Myanmar's military launched a coup in February 2021, Shwe Phee Myay's journalists faced new risks.

In March that year, two reporters with the outlet narrowly escaped arrest while covering pro-democracy protests. When soldiers and police raided their office in the northern Shan State capital of Lashio two months later, the entire team had already gone into hiding.

That September, the military arrested the organisation's video reporter, Lway M Phuong, for alleged incitement and dissemination of "false news". She served nearly two years in prison. The rest of the 10-person Shwe Phee Myay team scattered following her arrest, which came amid the Myanmar military's wider crackdown on the media.

Spread out across northern Shan State in the east of the country, the news team initially struggled to continue their work. They chose to avoid urban areas where they might encounter the military. Every day was a struggle to continue reporting.

"We couldn't travel on main roads, only back roads," recounted Hlar Nyiem, an assistant editor with Shwe Phee Myay.

"Sometimes, we lost four or five work days in a week," she said.

Despite the dangers, Shwe Phee Myay's reporters continued with their clandestine work to keep the public informed.

When a magnitude 7.7 earthquake hit central Myanmar on March 28, killing more than 3,800 people, Shwe Phee Myay's journalists were among the few able to document the aftermath from inside the country.

The military blocked most international media outlets from accessing earthquake-affected areas, citing difficulties with travel and accommodation, and the few local reporters still working secretly in the country took great risks to get information to the outside world.

"These journalists continue to reveal truths and make people's voices heard that the military regime is desperate to silence," said Thu Thu Aung, a public policy scholar at the University of Oxford who has conducted research on Myanmar's post-coup media landscape.

On top of the civil war and threats posed by Myanmar's military regime, Myanmar's journalists have encountered a new threat.

In January, the administration of US President Donald Trump and his billionaire confidante Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) began dismantling the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).

USAID had allocated more than $268m towards supporting independent media and the free flow of information in more than 30 countries around the world – from Ukraine to Myanmar, according to journalism advocacy group Reporters Without Borders.

In February, The Guardian reported on how the freezing of USAID funds created an "existential crisis" for exiled Myanmar journalists.

The situation worsened further in mid-March, when the White House declared plans for the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM) to reduce operations to the bare minimum. USAGM oversees – among others – the Voice of America and Radio Free Asia, which were both leading providers of news on Myanmar.

Last week, RFA announced it was laying off 90 percent of its staff and ceasing to produce news in the Tibetan, Burmese, Uighur and Lao languages. VOA has faced a similar situation.

Tin Tin Nyo, managing director of Burma News International, a network of 16 local, independent media organisations based inside and outside Myanmar, said the loss of the Burmese-language services provided by VOA and RFA created a "troubling information vacuum".

Myanmar's independent media sector also relied heavily on international assistance, which had already been dwindling, Tin Tin Nyo said.

Many local Myanmar news outlets were already "struggling to continue producing reliable information", as a result of the USAID funding cuts brought in by Trump and executed by Musk's DOGE, she said.

Some had laid off staff, reduced their programming or suspended operations.

"The downsizing of independent media has decreased the capacity to monitor [false] narratives, provide early warnings, and counter propaganda, ultimately weakening the pro-democracy movement," Tin Tin Nyo said.

"When independent media fail to produce news, policymakers around the world will be unaware of the actual situation in Myanmar," she added.

‘Constant fear of arrest or even death'

Currently, 35 journalists remain imprisoned in Myanmar, making it the world's third-worst jailer of journalists after China and Israel, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.

The country is ranked 169th out of 180 countries on Reporters Without Borders' World Press Freedom Index.

"Journalists on the ground must work under the constant fear of arrest or even death," Tin Tin Nyo said.

"The military junta treats the media and journalists as criminals, specifically targeting them to silence access to information."

Myanmar journalists wearing T-shirts that say "Stop Killing Press" stage a silent protest for five journalists who were jailed for 10 years on July 10, near the Myanmar Peace Center where Myanmar President Thein Sein was scheduled to meet with local artists in Yangon on July 12, 2014. Myanmar jailed five journalists to 10 years in prison with hard labour on July 10 over a report accusing the military of producing chemical weapons, a sentence denounced by campaigners as "outrageously harsh". Reporters Without Borders described the verdict as "very worrying for press freedom" in Myanmar. 

Despite the dangers, Shwe Phee Myay continues to publish news on events inside Myanmar.

With a million followers on Facebook – the digital platform where most people in Myanmar get their news – Shwe Phee Myay's coverage has become even more critical since the military coup in 2021 and the widening civil war.

Established in 2019 in Lashio, Shwe Phee Myay was one of dozens of independent media outlets which emerged in Myanmar during a decade-long political opening, which began in 2011 with the country's emergence from a half-century of relative international isolation under authoritarian military rule.

Pre-publication censorship ended in 2012 amid a wider set of policy reforms as the military agreed to allow greater political freedom. Journalists who had lived and worked in exile for media outlets such as the Democratic Voice of Burma, The Irrawaddy and Mizzima News began cautiously returning home.

However, the country's nascent press freedoms came under strain during the term of Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy government, which came to power in 2016 as a result of the military's political reforms.

Aung San Suu Kyi's government jailed journalists and blocked independent media access to politically sensitive areas including Rakhine State, where the military committed a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Rohingya community and for which it now faces international charges of genocide.

But the situation for independent journalists dramatically worsened following the 2021 coup. As the military violently cracked down on peaceful protests against the generals seizing power, it restricted the internet, revoked media licences and arrested dozens of journalists. That violence triggered an armed uprising across Myanmar.

‘If we stop, who will continue addressing these issues?'

Shwe Phee Myay briefly considered relocating to Thailand as the situation deteriorated after the coup, but those running the news site decided to remain in the country.

"Our will was to stay on our own land," said Mai Naw Dang, who until recently served as the editor of Burmese-to-English translations.

"Our perspective was that to gather the news and collect footage, we needed to be here."

Their work then took on new intensity in October 2023, when an alliance of ethnic armed organisations launched a surprise attack on military outposts in Shan State near the border with China.

The offensive marked a major escalation in the Myanmar conflict; the military, which lost significant territory as a result, retaliated with air strikes, cluster munitions and shelling. Within two months, more than 500,000 people had been displaced due to the fighting.

With few outside journalists able to access northern Shan State, Shwe Phee Myay was uniquely positioned to cover the crisis.

Then in January this year, Shwe Phee Myay also received notice that USAID funds approved in November were no longer coming and it has since reduced field reporting, cancelled training and scaled back video news production.

"We're taking risks to report on how people are impacted by the war, yet our efforts seem unrecognised," editor-in-chief Mai Rukaw said.

"Even though we have a strong human resource base on the ground, we're facing significant challenges in securing funding to continue our work."

During staff meetings, Mai Rukaw has raised the possibility of shutting down Shwe Phee Myay with his colleagues.

Their response, he said, was to keep going even if the money dries up.

"We always ask ourselves: if we stop, who will continue addressing these issues?" he said.

"That question keeps us moving forward."

Authors: Emily Fishbein and HpanJa Brang | Al Jazeera

Source: Al Jazeera

Photo credit: Reuters