News

Military Coup in Myanmar

A demonstrator holds up three fingers, a gesture borrowed from the Hunger Games film that has come to symbolise solidarity and popular resistance across the region, in Yangon, Myanmar. 4 February 2021 © Panos Pictures

Panos photographers have been documenting the developing situation in Myanmar where the country’s military seized power in a coup on 1 February, deposing the democratically elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi and her National League for Democracy (NLD). Since then, tens of thousands of people have demonstrated across the nation that only emerged from half a century of dictatorship in 2011. You can see more images here.

Stories

Brave New Burma

by Nic Dunlop

Propaganda posters published by Myanmar’s military junta and displayed on billboards around the country.

Panos photographer Nic Dunlop spent 20 years photographing Myanmar (formerly known as Burma) under military rule. His book Brave New Burma is an intimate portrait in words and pictures of a country emerging from decades of dictatorship, isolation and fear. Often having to work undercover, Nic exposed the abuses of a regime at war with its own people and now sadly back in power once again.

Islam, à la marocaine

by Pascal Maitre

Students at the Mohammed VI Institute for the Training of Imams. Rabat, Morocco, 2020. © Pascal Maitre/Panos Pictures

Despite a number of terrorist attacks over the past two decades, Morocco has managed to evade the worst crises and wars brought on by the Arab Spring and the spread of extremist Islamism. Its 52,000 mosques are closely monitored and overseen by the Ministry of Islamic Affairs and colleges like the Mohamed VI Institute for the Training of Imams train both women and men to perpetuate ‘wasatiyya’ (or ‘golden mean’), a particularly Moroccan take on modern Islam.

Pascal Maitre visited the Institute and met local religious leaders and former Islamists rehabilitated after stints in prison.

Covo Angels

by Andrew Esiebo

Mariam Abdullahi, a scientist at the Centre for Human and Zoonotic Virology at the College of Medicine, University of Lagos. Lagos, Nigeria, 2020. © Andrew Esiebo/Panos Pictures

Having caught Covid-19 himself early on in the global pandemic, Andrew Esiebo saw the challenges faced by Nigeria’s health service and its countless health workers first-hand – as a patient and as a photographer.

Working with the Nigeria Center for Disease Control he photographed so called ‘Covo Angels’ (‘Covo’ is colloquial for Covid-19 in Nigeria) both in and out of their elaborate personal protective equipment. Photographing them against a wall with a coloured ‘halo’, he wanted to reflect their sacred role and personal sacrifice in facing up to the deadly virus.

Fighting for Every Life

by Nora Lorek

Students attend a lecture during a midwifery program at Dhaka Nursing College. Bangladesh. © Nora Lorek/Panos Pictures

Every year, thousands of mothers and babies still die during childbirth and pregnancy in Bangladesh. Over the past decade, however, the country has made great strides in training professional midwives and bringing down the maternal mortality ratio while providing better postnatal care.

Until 2010 there were no facilities to train professional midwives in Bangladesh. With the help of development partners, around 1,500 were being trained every year by 2018 and today, some 6,500 midwives work across the country.

Visiting a number of maternity hospitals and Dhaka’s Nursing College, Nora Lorek met some of the aspiring midwives who are completing their training.

Tearsheets

‘Japanese Wives’ in Stern magazine (Germany)

Noriko Hayashi‘s extraordinary reportage about some of the approximately 1,800 Japanese women who followed their husbands back to Korea and ended up in communist North Korea, unable to visit their homeland, has been published in German Stern Magazine. 

To view the full story and read the women’s testimonies, please click here. 

‘Brazil’s Covid Agony’ in Newsweek magazine (Japan)

Lalo de Almeida has documented the devastating effect of the Covid-19 pandemic on his native Brazil, a country already reeling from economic woes and facing the second recession in five years.

A large and ethnically diverse country of 200 million people, Brazil is also one of the most unequal societies in the world and Covid-19 has hit the poor by far the hardest. By February 2021, the virus had killed an estimated 228,000 people, second only to the United States. Click here for the full story. 

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