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Muslim mourners at funeral in Yangon
Minzayar Oo’s image of the funeral for 13 victims of a fire at an Islamic school in Yangon, April 2013. Photograph: Minzayar Oo/Reuters
Minzayar Oo’s image of the funeral for 13 victims of a fire at an Islamic school in Yangon, April 2013. Photograph: Minzayar Oo/Reuters

He captured a fresh start for Myanmar … and then its descent into tragedy

This article is more than 6 years old

Photojournalist Minzayar Oo tells how a shot of Aung Sang Suu Kyi changed his life and led to him winning a unique award

The first of April 2012 was a historic, emotional and profoundly hopeful day in Myanmar’s history. Aung San Suu Kyi, for decades an exile from the country and then a political prisoner under house arrest for 15 years, finally won a byelection vote for a seat in parliament. The following morning many citizens and the world’s media gathered in Yangon at the offices of her party, the National League for Democracy, to hear from or catch a glimpse of the new leader of the opposition.

Many renowned photojournalists were in attendance. Among the throng was a 23-year-old medical student called Minzayar Oo. A hobbyist with a camera – after six years of university, Minzayar Oo was just about to qualify as a doctor – but the news agency Reuters had said it would look at any pictures he took. In the event, he struggled to get close to Aung San Suu Kyi, jostled to the fringes by more experienced practitioners. He took a few snaps, some above his head, using a slow exposure.

“I’d just started as a stringer for Reuters and I was not doing very well,” he laughs. “That day I didn’t know what I was getting, but I was trying to be as focused as I can and just get a shot of her. Later on my colleague, who was the chief photographer for Reuters, was editing my pictures and he said there were some good ones. The next day one of them was on the front page of the International Herald Tribune.”

That set – which shows Aung San Suu Kyi poised and unflustered amid the chaotic melee – would launch a new career for Minzayar Oo, now 29. Since then, his work has chronicled, powerfully and with considerable humanity, the sometimes fraught political and social transition of Myanmar. His photographs are in demand in newspapers and magazines around the world, and on Monday night at Sadler’s Wells in London at the Rory Peck awards he will receive the 2017 Martin Adler prize, given to a local freelancer for their contribution to news reporting. He is the first photographer to be honoured in this category.

It seems then that Minzayar Oo made the right choice in swapping medicine for photography. “Still today, I never regret it,” he says. “It was a big decision and my parents were not very happy, but, given the nature of the country’s reforms, it was a very crucial time for Myanmar. I remember talking to a friend and we were thinking: ‘This is going to be something we will always remember, so I think we should just pick up the camera …’ And that’s what I did.”

For Minzayar Oo, like many in Myanmar, Aung San Suu Kyi represented the promise of a fresh start for an often beleaguered country. “I grew up hearing about her but never seeing much of her, because we had no internet, the country was shut,” he recalls. “People like my parents would carry a picture of her in their wallets, even though that was very dangerous.”

In 2015, the National League for Democracy won a landslide victory in elections; Aung San Suu Kyi cannot be called president, because of a clause in the country’s constitution, but her party entered a power-sharing agreement with Myanmar’s army in 2016 and she is the de facto leader. The new government, however, has not been the radical driver of change that many hoped. Most notably, Aung San Suu Kyi has presided over – or at least not condemned – what the UN regards as “a textbook example of ethnic cleansing” carried out by the military and police against the Rohingya, a long-persecuted Muslim minority who live in the west of the country, near the Bangladesh border.

Since September more than 400,000 Rohingya have fled the country for Bangladesh. Last week the New York Times ran an article headed, “Myanmar, once a hope for democracy, is now a study in how it fails”. The New Yorker called Aung San Suu Kyi, a Nobel peace prizewinner, “the Ignoble Laureate”.

Minzayar Oo has been documenting the crackdown on the Rohingya people for many years, spending weeks in refugee camps. In one poignant series, he stationed himself in a makeshift internet hut and captured portraits and snatches of dialogue as individuals and families contacted loved ones who had fled Myanmar for Malaysia and Thailand.

Through the captions it was revealed that it was commonplace for traffickers to kidnap relatives and demand exorbitant ransoms. These could be as high as $1,500 and would be paid to a middleman in a nearby village.

On a recent trip to the Bangladesh border, Minzayar Oo became embroiled in the Rohingya dispute personally. He arrived on 6 September with an assistant, took some photographs for the German magazine Geo, and the next day was arrested. He was then interrogated for seven days and spent 10 days in prison in Dhaka.

When we speak, Minzayar Oo has not long been allowed home, but he is remarkably sanguine about his experiences. “I wasn’t badly treated,” he says. “I didn’t know what was going to happen, I didn’t know if I’d be allowed to go back, or if I was going to be charged, but I was feeling hopeful, because I went to Bangladesh very neutral, just to do my job, and I was being honest with everybody.”

Mostly now, he feels gratitude towards the people who lobbied to have him and his assistant Hkun Lat freed. “I only realised when I got released on bail that many organisations from our community – the media and journalism community – have stood up for us,” he continues. “It was so amazing how the community came together very quickly for us.”

Photo by Minzayar Oo of a mosque amid debris from a house damaged in ethnic riots in Meikhtila, Mandalay, March 2013. Photograph: Minzayar Oo/Reuters

In Minzayar Oo’s photographs, Myanmar can come across as a troubled, dysfunctional place. One subject he has returned to over the years are the jadeite mines in Kachin state, in the north of the country. The area is home to the world’s largest deposits of the mineral: nearly 70% of the global haul comes from Myanmar. The industry is worth $31bn each year, but little of this trickles down beyond military leaders and the mainly Chinese firms that do the extraction. Meanwhile, around a quarter of Myanmar’s citizens live in extreme poverty.

Minzayar Oo mostly concentrates on the prospectors, who come from around the country to seek their fortunes. They tend to be on a futile mission as they can only search the waste that the mining companies have dumped. So-called “shooting galleries” – where shots of heroin are sold for $2 each – have become ubiquitous around the fringes to service the exhausted miners. HIV is widespread.

“All these miners came with an ambition and a dream to find a stone that would change life for them and for their family and then sooner or later they get trapped with heroin addiction,” Minzayar Oo says. “And there’s a lot of landslides, killing hundreds of people at a time.”

In the east of the country, meanwhile, Minzayar Oo has reported from Mong La, Myanmar’s “little Vegas”. Situated on the Chinese border, the town has special dispensation that means almost anything goes: prostitution, round-the-clock gambling and a macabre trade in exotic animals, dead and alive. The local tipple is tiger wine, a potent alcoholic brew made by infusing tiger bones and Chinese herbs in rice wine for up to eight years.

“I didn’t try tiger wine, but I saw many people enjoying it in Mong La,” he says. “It’s a very strange place, very sad.”

Is Minzayar Oo ever concerned that he’s not portraying his homeland in a more positive light? “Sometimes I get nervous,” he admits, “but as Myanmar transitions, I think it’s very important for us local journalists to try to push the boundaries. Of course, also living in Myanmar I would like the things to be positive, but still there are many that are not working well. They are very important and yet forgotten.”

Recognition at the Rory Peck awards gives Minzayar Oo courage that his instincts are right. “There are many journalists like me in the world, who are trying to highlight, document and expose these important issues,” he says. “And it can be sometimes very difficult for journalists from other countries to do. So the Martin Adler prize, I’m really honoured.”

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