Journalist faces 10 years' jail for video of orphans

If a shocking documentary about the fate of Myanmar's cyclone orphans wins a video-journalism award in London tomorrow, it will be some time before one of the men who shot it gets a chance to celebrate.

Six months after shooting the film, the cameraman, known only as T, was arrested coming out of an internet cafe in Yangon and taken to the city's Insein Prison.

Last week, after four months in jail, he was told he would be charged with the new offence of filming without government permission, which carries a minimum jail sentence of 10 years.

The Rory Peck awards are given annually to freelance video cameramen and documentary makers who run the sort of risks which Peck, who was shot dead while filming the siege of the Russian Parliament in 1993, take daily.

In Myanmar the challenges are rather different. The risks of getting shot or bombed while filming in the peaceable, agrarian Irrawaddy delta south of Yangon are low. But, in other respects, this must be one of the most dangerous assignments in the world.

T's film follows a number of children orphaned by Cyclone Nargis, which struck southern Myanmar in May last year, killing 140,000 people in the delta and making 2.4 million homeless, as they struggle to survive in the absence of their parents and with negligible assistance from the state.

T and his colleague, another Burmese identified as Z who is currently hiding in Thailand, even filmed an appearance by General Thein Sein, the junta's Prime Minister, telling a group of desperate villagers to get back to work and to expect nothing from the state for some time.

T joins 13 other cameramen working for the Oslo-based Democratic Voice of Burma (DVB) who have been jailed by the Burmese authorities since the Saffron Revolution of 2007 - the mass uprising led by monks which shook Asia's most repressive regime to the core.

Ever since the coup d'etat of 1962 which brought General Ne Win to power, Myanmar's ruling generals have done everything in their power to control the images of the country which reach the outside world.

But the internet and the shrinking size of video cameras have given dissidents new ways of getting their words and pictures out - as the junta discovered in September 2007, when freelance video cameramen working for DVB shot the swelling protest marches of the monks. The pictures were picked up by global news networks.

To stop this happening again, the authorities passed a new law banning filming without government permission, and began locking up for long terms those who defied it.

- INDEPENDENT