Expatriates' Web sites play role in wake of Myanmar cyclone

BEIJING — When the cyclone hit her homeland a week ago, Mya Moeswe was frantic about her sister in Myanmar. Thousands of miles away in Vancouver, B.C., the 38-year-old mechanical engineer sobbed as she tried to get through on downed telephone lines.

She turned to television networks and the mainstream media, only to find them overly broad, general, too out there.

The one thing that spoke to her: the network of expatriate Burmese Web sites stocked with up-close details that helped her make sense of the devastation before her sister finally called out that they'd lost a roof but were otherwise OK.

"These sites are hugely important for us," Moeswe said. "It's often the only thing we know."

Part newsstand, town hall, bulletin board and cheerleader, these virtual communities have played a vital role, managing to evade the long arm of the cyber police and thwart an isolated, repressive regime to bring news and personal information to the world.

Myanmar, which is also known as Burma, has one of the world's most censored media, according to Committee to Protect Journalists, a watchdog group, with a tightly controlled official media and Internet filtering that blocks Google and Yahoo e-mail, the BBC and the diaspora Web sites.

In this environment, news gathering for the expatriate Web sites is done by informal networks of anywhere from a handful to several hundred volunteers inside Myanmar sending stories, tidbits, video clips and still shots out through Internet cafes, public phones or with departing travelers.

In September, when pro-democracy monks in Myanmar rose up against the regime, these ragtag bands often had the best footage worldwide.

In this crisis, their role has been less newsworthy. But with the country battling power and Internet blackouts, an information vacuum and a rising death toll, their role arguably has been invaluable to the estimated 3 million to 5 million Burmese overseas.

"The diaspora media has been critical," said Aung Naing Oo, a political analyst in Thailand. "By using traditional networks of friends, they were able to get firsthand information about the cyclone."

Mizzima.com, one of the more popular expatriate Web sites, weathered its own storm last week.

Under the onslaught of 4 million hits in two days, Mizzima's servers crashed, forcing it temporarily to relocate its virtual community.

"It got overloaded," said Soe Myint, editor of the New Delhi-based operation, which has 30 employees. "But starting at 7 a.m. the day the storm hit, we did near-hourly updates, complete with photos and news."

Many editors and founders of the expatriate sites are exiled political dissidents who say the sites suffer periodic attacks from government hackers. There are unconfirmed claims that 1,000 low-level military officials have been trained in Russia to create and spread computer viruses, crash Web sites and launch disinformation campaigns.

Thailand-based Irrawaddy, which has had 9 million hits in the past week, saw its Web site crash for several days in September in what it believes was an attack by the Myanmar regime.

"Last year they hacked us, sent us viruses and totally blocked our site," said Myint Hlaing, founder New York-based Burma Today.

Web-site operators believe some senior officials carefully read their sites to find out what is happening in their own country and abroad.

In the wake of September's brutal crackdown, some of the diaspora Web sites saw two-thirds of their Burmese volunteers arrested or intimidated. Since then, most of the human networks have been rebuilt, and the Web sites have expressed admiration for these unsung heroes.