Please click to watch an interview with Aung Zaw, the founder and the editor of the Irawaddy magazine.

In 1998, Aung Zaw was a student activist who joined the massive democracy uprising in Rangoon that year. At the time, he was studying botany at Hlaing Campus, also known as Regional College Number 2. A year earlier, he and a group of other students had set up an underground network to organize general resistance to authoritarian rule, and the economic and social hardships it was inflicting on the country.

He left Burma after the military staged a coup in September 1998. He launched the Irrawaddy news magazine in Bangkok, covering Burma affairs.

I talk to him in his office in Chiang Mai this evening.