Blacklisted, hunted, shot: The Australian who escaped a brutal regime

Singapore: It is only in the past few weeks that Steve Tickner has been able to sleep through the night again.

In hiding for the previous year in military-ruled Myanmar, the Australian photojournalist had spent many an evening in the last 12 months wide awake, listening for the dreaded rumbling of security forces’ trucks outside.

Holed up in a monastery and then in a more secure location in an effort to avoid capture and imprisonment, the 67-year-old was being treated all the while for colon cancer, for which he underwent emergency surgery.

Steve Tickner pictured in Myanmar’s south-eastern Mon State, covering conflict between the military and the Democratic Karen Benevolent Army.

Eventually, in December, he completed a narrow escape to neighbouring Thailand, evading the clutches of the brutal regime.

But as he recounts his ordeal to The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, the terror that has been inflicted on the Burmese people remains on his mind.

‘I got shot in the back of the head’

Almost two years have passed since Myanmar’s senior generals seized control from Aung San Suu Kyi’s democratically elected government on February 1, 2021.

The armed forces have since killed more than 2800 people and detained more than 17,000 others, including Suu Kyi herself, while carrying out airstrikes, extrajudicial killings and burning villages in to stamp out a youth-led resistance and civil disobedience movement.

Protesters await a police assault with water buckets and wet blankets in Yangon in March 2021.Credit:Steve Tickner

Tickner, who had lived in the main city of Yangon since 2012, documented the protests that followed the military takeover for his employer Frontier Magazine.

“In the first few weeks of the coup, the atmosphere was quite amazing. People poured into the streets in their tens and hundreds of thousands every day, day after day. It was like a street party … it was amazing to experience it,” he says.

“I remember my editor [and I] we were discussing this and I said, ‘Look, everything seems great on the streets’. But the military, I think, was a bit caught flat-footed by the response and [I told him] it was going to take them a few weeks to build up resources in Yangon, militarily and the police. And in the end, the hammer was going to come down. And that’s what happened.”

Police seek out anti-government demonstrators following the coup.Credit:Steve Tickner

The junta’s forces were soon gunning down protesters in the street and hauling others away to be tortured. On Myanmar’s Armed Forces Day, on March 27 that year, up to 163 anti-government protesters – including children – were slaughtered in a single, bloody day.

Tickner was no stranger to conflict zones. A former photographer with the Newcastle Herald and Gold Coast Bulletin, he worked in Afghanistan. In East Timor, he was the last foreign photographer as pro-Indonesian militia embarked on a murderous rampage following the vote for independence from Jakarta in 1999.

Later, Tickner was at a temple in Bangkok where six “Red Shirt” anti-government demonstrators were fatally shot by the Thai military in 2010, and in 2013 he was a Walkley award finalist for his pictures of the Myanmar military’s attack on the Kachin Independence Army, which controls large areas in the country’s north, near the border with China.

When the crackdown turned deadly in Yangon, however, it began a ruthless, barbaric campaign to cling to power.

Tickner covering a political rally for Aung San Suu Kyi in 2015.

One day, after helping an older man who had fallen over in the street as protesters were fired upon, Tickner realised events had taken a frightening turn.

“We were then running back again towards where the students and the activists were … and I got shot in the back of the head,” he says.

“Not, fortunately, by a live round. I still have no idea what it was. But I do know it bled quite a bit and I got quite a large size-of-an-egg lump in the back of my head. It could have been a catapult, it could have been one of those bean[bag] rounds, something like that. After that it became quite difficult. We all had to be on our toes.”

‘I was somebody they wanted to get their hands on’

Members of the media came under increased risk of arrest in the aftermath of the coup as the junta tried – in vain in the internet and social media age – to prevent news of their savagery reaching the world.

Dozens of mostly Burmese journalists have been detained, but foreigners have also been locked up. Tickner’s American editor Danny Fenster spent almost six months in jail, while Japanese documentary maker Toru Kubota was behind bars for 3½ months until he was freed in November in an amnesty which also included the release of Australian economist Sean Turnell.

An injured demonstrator is carried away amid the initial protests against the military takeover.Credit:Steve Tickner

Tickner faced additional scrutiny because he had already been blacklisted by Suu Kyi’s government in 2020 for “visiting forbidden places”, a reference to border areas he had travelled to for work that were considered out of bounds. He couldn’t simply just go to the airport.

Operating without a visa from then on and desperate to avoid being sent to the city’s notorious Insein Prison, he carefully avoided spot checks on the street and slipped away from police on three occasions after being chased.

One day last June a senior officer noticed him at the hotel where he had been quietly living, raising an eyebrow at seeing a Western face. Tickner was able to wander off without trouble but discovered later that the officer had asked the hotel for his passport.

At the same time, an inflamed stomach had been causing him grief and three days after that run-in with the policeman his health deteriorated.

Fortunately, as it turned out, it was after collapsing and being rushed to hospital that authorities closed in.

“When I was about two days into recovery in Yangon hospital after the emergency surgery, the hotel was raided by senior police and senior immigration [officers] looking for me,” he said. “Obviously, when they got my passport … they realised I was somebody they really wanted to get their hands on. So in a way by passing out and ending up in hospital, I dodged a bullet. They didn’t know where I was.”

Having watched two people in the beds around him die, he was then kicked out of the hospital after 10 days – its limit for patients – unable to foot the steep bill and barely able to walk.

It was only after a group of foreign journalists in Thailand heard of his predicament and started a fund for him that he could pay for the tumour-removing operation he had undergone and, with the assistance of “unexpected friends”, take shelter in a monastery.

Tickner would spend months there and at another secret location in Yangon before eventually getting out last month.

He won’t divulge the mode and details of his departure, which he said was carried out with “considerable subterfuge and planning”. His concern is that if he did reveal how he left Myanmar it could give up weaknesses in the system to the military regime and expose those who assisted him.

Tickner had lived and worked in Myanmar since 2012.

“They were people who were almost strangers who came in and stepped in and helped me,” he says. “I was really quite touched by that. These were Burmese people. They knew they were putting themselves at extreme risk by associating with me.

“There were foreign journalists in Thailand … and the IFJ [International Federation of Journalists]. A lot of these people, I don’t even know who they were.”

‘I feel really sorry for the Burmese people’

While Tickner is safe now, his health problems are not over. He may still require further surgery. But his mind is still very much on the people of Myanmar, whose plight he was committed to ensuring was not overlooked.

“I really feel sorry for the Burmese population. They’re going through such an awful experience,” he says. “And you can’t sleep at night because if the military turn up, you want to be wide awake. It has taken me a month to get back to not sleeping in the daytime and being able to sleep at night.

“This is not just me. This was all of my Burmese friends. A lot of people were just suffering insomnia. The sound you didn’t want to hear at 12 o’clock at night was military trucks in the street or the local dogs barking, because that meant they were going to raid. That was their favourite time to raid houses.”

While Tickner obviously won’t be heading back to Myanmar anytime soon, his deep care for the country’s future is such that he has compiled a strategic document based on his on-the-ground knowledge and sent it to Foreign Minister Penny Wong.

But as the latest period of military leadership enters its third year, junta leader Min Aung Hlaing shows no sign of being brought to heel.

“The Burmese military … they swear an oath to protect Myanmar and its citizens. But the reality is that in their entire history, they have never fought an external conflict,” Tickner says. “The only people they have killed, for decades, [are] Burmese citizens. They are bombing and strafing villages, they’re blowing up schools, churches, they’re burning down people’s houses.

“This is how the Burmese people live now. They know at any time they could be raided. They could have their house destroyed, they could have their children arrested, their grandparents could be arrested. They live with this on a daily basis. And that was my experience, too. It was a shared experience. And I’m kind of grateful that I went through that.

“I really feel sorry for what they have to deal with and the way they are living there. But in spite of all of that, there’s such strong support for the young people who are fighting back.”

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