Over the years, PEN’s members have included eminent writers around the world, including Joseph Conrad, George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells, Thomas Mann, Nadine Gordimer, Arthur Miller, Margaret Atwood, Thomas Keneally and David Malouf. The Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa has declared: ‘In times of division between countries, PEN is one of the rare institutions to keep a bridge constantly open.’

In 1960 PEN established a Writers in Prison Committee to campaign on behalf of persecuted writers worldwide. The Committee currently monitors the cases of more than 1000 writers each year, lobbying governments to secure their release. The Committee maintains contact with imprisoned writers and their families, while also working through the UN to draw attention both to individual cases and to human rights abuses in specific countries. This year so far, twenty-eight writers have been released.

The Australian centres of International PEN contribute to this effort. In the coming months, Australian PEN Centres will bring you the stories of a few of these writers, beginning with the Burmese writer Aung Myint.

When you read of these writers’ plights, remember that you can make a difference, in the following ways:

• Contact your local PEN centre for further details. Website: www.pen.org.au.
• Write to the appropriate bodies on behalf of imprisoned or persecuted writers.
• Join your local PEN centre. Membership is open to all published writers, editors and translators. Associate membership is open to others.

The former Czech Republic president and writer, Vaclav Havel, once said: ‘If a single writer in a country is in chains, then there are some links of that chain that bind us all.’ The freedom to read, the freedom to write, should belong to us all.

Hsu-Ming Teo

Twenty-one years in jail for writing and distributing a pamphlet. This was the sentence that the Burmese junta’s military court handed down to Aung Myint, a Burmese poet, journalist and member of Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD). Currently in his fifties, Aung Myint (alias Phya Pon Ni Loan Oo) began his career in the 1980s with articles and poems for the newspaper Botahtaung. First arrested in 1997, while assistant editor of Cherry magazine, Aung spent two years in jail, only to become the head of the NLD’s information department upon his release.

In September 2000 Aung Myint was rearrested by the military secret services and charged with violating the military’s draconian emergency laws. His crime: to distribute a press release to media agencies and foreign embassies in Rangoon detailing Aung San Suu Kyi’s arrest by the security forces as she attempted to leave the capital. His assistant in this ‘crime’, Kyaw Sein Oo, is also serving seven years’ imprisonment for violating the state’s press laws.

Surviving in Burma is no easy task for writers. Reporters Sans Frontiers has stated that, for many political dissidents (thirty-eight writers are currently held in Burmese prisons), a jail sentence can be lethal.

The United Nations Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of expression and opinion has emphasised that ‘imprisonment as a punishment for the peaceful expression of an opinion constitutes a serious violation of human rights’. Aung Myint is an Honorary Member of  Sydney, Canadian, English and Perth PEN Centres. International PEN, the organisation that campaigns for the rights of journalists and writers, no matter where they work or live, considers Aung Myint and Kyaw Sein Oo to be detained in violation of Article 19 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and calls for their immediate and unconditional release.

Denise Leith