Journalists risk their lives to bring us the truths of conflicts the West has forgotten

“You are filthy pretty much the whole time and it’s raining and it’s hot and there’s a lot of mosquitoes and rats and we had a python in the camp one night,” says the Sky News correspondent Stuart Ramsay of his latest assignment.

This might sound like standard fare for audiences now familiar with the endurance tests of jungle-based reality shows, but Ramsay’s task was both highly dangerous and critically important.

For 31 days in the “proper hardcore jungle” of Myanmar, he and his team filmed a hidden civil war that has claimed thousands of lives and left thousands more displaced. It is a human catastrophe that is almost entirely ignored by news media in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Geography is the main reason why a European war dominates attention, says Ramsay, but the absence of reporting on Myanmar is also because “getting in there is so difficult and just being there is incredibly dangerous”. The Sky team spent their entire time in Myanmar evading the armed forces of the country’s ruling junta, which has been fighting an uprising for two years.

“I certainly under-estimated the scale of the fighting, I will be honest,” he says.

Hunted by the drones and jets of the Myanmar armed forces, Ramsay, a hardened conflict reporter and the Royal Television Society’s TV Journalist of the Year, had never before felt scared for so long. Retiring to a city hotel to edit film and recuperate would have risked arrest and jail.

“It is the longest period I have been on where I never felt anything but unsafe. Every time a plane went over you hid, every time you turned the corner of a road you wondered what was on the other side, every time you went to bed you were no more than 2km from the Myanmar army who are regularly firing artillery shells at you.”

Myanmar’s junta arrested former UK ambassador, Vicky Bowman, and “so a journo is going to have a pretty bad time,” Ramsay points out. “[When reporting from] Syria I was on a wanted list for consorting with terrorists, and I am sure the Myanmar government would come up with a similar charge. Getting caught was not an option.”

Let us hope that the resulting programme, Inside Myanmar: The Hidden War, pricks the conscience of the international community, which has largely turned its back on the crisis since Myanmar soldiers opened fire on unarmed civilians to suppress street protests in February 2021.

That Ramsay, his producer Dominique Van Heerden and cameraman Richie Mockler had the courage to take on this undercover story is remarkable, given what happened to the trio in Ukraine last year. Covering Russia’s advance on the outskirts of Kyiv, their car was ambushed and shot to pieces. Ramsay was hit in the lower back, while Mockler was only saved by body armour.

The three have “residual concerns about danger because of what happened in Ukraine”, says Ramsay, but all have returned to cover that conflict several times. Ramsay recently reported on the breakdown of civil society in Haiti, and the Fentanyl labs of Mexican drug cartels. Now he has realised an ambition to cover the conflict in Myanmar, where independent media is quashed.

During its time in the jungle, Ramsay’s crew, which used solar panels and local generators to generate power, found evidence of a concerted army plan to attack hospitals, churches and schools. “The idea is to break down society but particularly the areas of education, medical facilities and places of worship.”

They reported from a hidden hospital built by rebel forces into hillside beneath the jungle canopy. Surgeons working there were among many who left their civilian lives to join the resistance. One rebel commander is a former organic farmer. Another worked for an NGO. “What is changing the face of this civil war is the city boys and girls who have quit their normal lives,” says Ramsay. “One guy I was with has lost 50 kilos. He was a gamer who ate pizzas all day and now he is a fighting soldier, a fantastic guy.”

The Myanmar regime failed to appreciate the strength of resolve of these resistance fighters, Ramsay believes. But rebels told him they felt abandoned by a world focused on Ukraine and said that they must “keep fighting to the end”.

The Ukraine conflict could define the future world order, but wars in Myanmar, Yemen, Sudan and Congo must not be forgotten.

A Sky News team was allowed into Myanmar last year but could only report the war from afar, under tight government restrictions. After his secret mission to the jungle, Ramsay is unlikely to get an invitation from the junta. “We made that decision that we had to go and see it for ourselves,” he says.