🦋 Notes on the Burmese freedom event
Just a few things that caught my attention. Tonight marks the first anniversary of the September 24th demonstration in Rangoon and the regime's ongoing brutal response. Part of the program was a film of that day's events -- the scene that remains in my head is of a wounded protester lying on the pavement crying, "Don't retreat! Let them wash their feet with our blood!" Joseph Lelyveld spoke about the difficulty of printing news in Burma and the actions of the censorship board -- with visual aids of a newspaper laid out for printing, with six out of nine stories struck through by the censor's pen. He told us about author Saw Wei, imprisoned this spring for a Valentine's Day poem containing the acrostic statement that "General Than Shwe is crazy with power." (The poem references acrostic poet Walter Arensberg.) Paulo Sérgio Pinheiro spoke about his meeting with U Win Tin, who at 79 is the oldest political prisoner held by the Burmese regime. Earlier today Win Tin had been released, ostensibly as part of an amnesty of political prisoners by the regime. He is refusing (if I understand correctly) to be considered as part of a larger amnesty and says, "I will keep fighting until the emergence of democracy in this country." Pamuk and Kiran Desai conducted a readers' theater in which Desai read first-person accounts from victims of Cyclone Nargis, and Pamuk read state-sanctioned reporting of the same events. The articles from the state press were just unbelievable -- total disregard for the truth, totally condescending toward the subjects of the reporting -- one piece was a column about the trees being back in leaf, noting that the trees had not needed any tarpaulins or bottled water or chocolate bars distributed by international relief agencies.
 Pictures of the event at MediaBistro and at Tricycle.
posted evening of Tuesday, September 23rd, 2008
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