Index on Censorship welcomes welcomes the release of Burmese comic Zarganar along with thousands of other prisoners.
Htein Lin, close friend of Zarganar and member of the Free Zarganar Campaign along with Index on Censorship and other supporters, said he was delighted at the news of the popular comedian’s release.
“It’s great news, we really appreciate it and it is a very positive sign. Hopefully the new government will release more political prisoners very soon. Zarganar came out with jokes making everybody laugh and very happy.”
Zarganar was imprisoned for speaking out against the military junta in its handling of the Cyclone Nargis crisis in May 2008. The 6000 prisoners who will be released today include some journalists and monks, but there are many political activists still detained.
Zarganar is reported as saying “I am not happy because so many of my friends are still in prison.”
As part of our continued work with artists in Burmese diasapora, Index on Censorship co-hosted the first festival of Burmese Art, featuring a preview of ‘The Prison Where I Live” a film about Zarganar.
A profile of Zargana is featured in Beyond Bars, a 2010 issue of Index on Censorship magazine. Click here to subscribe
On 14 July, 87-year-old Burmese author Nan Nyunt Swe died — but his son Zarganar, one of the country’s most popular comedians, was unable to attend his funeral, and may not even have been informed of his death. Zarganar is currently serving a 35-year prison sentence for criticising the government¹s handling of the aftermath of Cyclone Nargis. Not only that, but since 2008 he has been held in a prison so far from his home that it effectively cut him off from contact with his family. Just last month the authorities felt it necessary to forbid his family from travelling the 1500 km to visit him. (more…)
Supported by Index on Censorship, campaigners from across the UK and abroad are to converge on London’s Trafalgar Square on 3 May in support of Zarganar, Burma’s most famous comedian turned prisoner of conscience. (more…)
A inspiring evening at the British Museum on 14 October, hosted by writers’ charity English PEN, where the poet, playwright and classicist Tony Harrison was presented with the inaugural PEN/Pinter Prize.
Established by English PEN in memory of the Nobel-winning playwright Harold Pinter, it is to be awarded annually to a British writer or writer resident in Britain who, in the words of Pinter’s Nobel speech, casts an ‘unflinching, unswerving’ gaze upon the world, and shows a ‘fierce intellectual determination … to define the real truth of our lives and our societies’.
The PEN/Pinter Prize is also intended to be shared with an imprisoned writer of courage, selected by the winner in consultation with English PEN’s Writers in Prison Committee.
Harrison chose the Burmese poet, performer and comedian Zargana, recently condemned to thirty-five years in prison for the ‘crime’ of independently organising aid for victims of Cyclone Nargis.
“When he was in solitary confinement he had to scratch his poems with a pot fragment on the floor of his cell, then commit them to memory,” Harrison told the audience at the award, closing his lecture to commemorate their joint award.
“May all those poets I have summoned up today make him at this moment the centre of their gaze and honour the prisoner-poet for his still defiant poetic gift.”
Burmese Theatre Workshop presents: Let Me Out of Hell at the Free Word Centre at 12.00 on 28th October 2009: A scratch performance of a new play about about Burma after cyclone Nargis, devised by Burmese Theatre Workshop and directed by Andrew Mclay. Details from the Free Word Centre, e-mail [email protected] or phone 020 7324 2570.
