When his body was returned to Japan 10 days later with some of his possessions, the camera was not among them. There is no sign of his camera, which he was still gripping as he went down. Soldiers are then seen carrying the journalist's body away. Then the soldiers marched into the crowd and started beating them. I heard the first shots, which were fired into the air. "At that point I saw Kenji Nagai filming the security forces from close up. "The police and soldiers formed three lines on the Sule Pagoda side of the road," recalls Myint Yee, a young Burmese journalist who was also filming from the bridge. Then a single shot rings out, and Nagai is thrown to the ground. A volley of tear gas and shots sends protesters running for their lives. Other journalists, filming from the pedestrian footbridges above Sule Pagoda road, captured what happened next. Yet more people are still gathering in front of the pagoda." Speaking to his camera, he says: "The army has just arrived, and they are heavily armed. In the video he took that day, seen now for the first time, Nagai records the moment trucks full of soldiers appear at Sule Pagoda. He was a pioneer of one-person videography - today we would call him a news vlogger - using small, hand-held cameras to film himself and what he saw around him. And Nagai - in shorts and flip-flops - was milling among them holding up a video camera. On 27 September, a large crowd gathered near the historic Sule Pagoda in central Yangon, Myanmar's commercial hub. It had caught the government off-guard, but by late September the army was already using force extensively to crush the movement, raiding monasteries and beating dissident monks. They had escalated in early September when monks across the country, reacting to the assault of monks by soldiers in the town of Pakkoku, had turned their bowls upside down and refused to take alms from military personnel - a powerful act of defiance. I would prefer people to remember him as a journalist who was willing to keep fighting."Ī warning - this story contains the Pulitzer-winning photograph of Kenji Nagai moments after he was shot.īy the time Nagai, who was on assignment for the AFP, arrived in Myanmar the protests had been going on for six weeks, the first significant challenge to military rule for nearly 20 years. "I don't think of him as a hero even though he lost his life. "I think my brother threw himself right into the turmoil of the Saffron Revolution, convinced he could help Myanmar by letting the world know what was happening," his sister Noriko says. His camera, missing for 16 years, has now resurfaced, bringing some closure to his family who flew to Bangkok this week to receive it. He was killed on 27 September 2007, at the height of the so-called Saffron Revolution, mass protests led by Buddhist monks in several cities in Myanmar against a military regime which had ruled for 45 years and run the economy into the ground. The man was Kenji Nagai, a veteran Japanese video journalist. A Reuters photographer would later win a Pulitzer prize for capturing that moment. He rolls onto his back, fatally wounded, still holding his camera up in one hand. It is an image etched in Myanmar's collective memory of repression and loss: a middle-aged man holding a camera, lifted off his feet by a shot fired by a soldier at point-blank range as protesters flee in panic.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |