Burma’s Information Minister, Brig-Gen Kyaw Hsan, has accused Western media of “jeopardizing” his country’s stability by fabricating news. Attending a conference of information ministers from non-aligned countries in Malaysia, he said his government hoped to find ways “to rebuff the unfair and baseless news produced by the Western media.”

He told the Malaysian national news agency Bernama on Monday:
“We are suffering from interference [by Western media] in our country’s internal affairs.”

Kyaw Hsan and other information ministers and officials from more than 80 nations in Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America are attending a two-day conference in Malaysia aimed at establishing an internet-based network to supply news on domestic events to each other, beginning next year.

Malaysian Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, who currently chairs the Nonaligned Movement, said in a speech delivered by his deputy, Najib Razak, that the plan was necessary because “the nature and flow of information is increasingly dominated and influenced by a handful of media players in developed countries, at the expense of smaller organizations in developing countries.”

The Nonaligned Movement is a community of 114 nations, grouping thriving economies like Malaysia and Singapore alongside poor countries such as Afghanistan and Somalia, and international pariahs like Iran, Burma and North Korea.

Kyaw Hsan told Bernama that his government believed in providing “true information” through the electronic and printed media to the Burmese people and those in Asean and other neighboring countries. But he acknowledged that Burma’s 43 million inhabitants mostly lacked access to the latest technologies.

Most Burmese rely for independent news on foreign radios such as the BBC, the Democratic Voice of Burma, the Voice of America and Radio Free Asia. According to a poll carried out in 2003, about 30 per cent of radio listeners tune in to the BBC and VOA.