Dear friends,

I hope my message finds you well. Please see below PEN International’s latest call for rapid action on behalf of imprisoned Egyptian Poet Galal El-Behairy. He has been on hunger strike to protest against his unjust pre-trial detention for 80 days. Earlier in May, PEN International received a message from El-Behairy, in which he announced his plan to escalate his hunger strike on 1 June 2023, refusing fluids and medicines.

Fears are mounting over El-Behairy’s physical and psychological health, which has significantly deteriorated due to torture, inhumane detention conditions, and lack of adequate medical care over five years of imprisonment, and he has reportedly lost considerable weight since he began striking in March 2023. Today, PEN International has launched an extended call for rapid action to raise concerns over his health and reiterate its calls for his release.You can find PEN International’s call for rapid action titled: “Egypt: Poet Galal El-Behairy is at risk after 80 days on hunger strike” on the following link: https://www.pen-international.org/news/galal-el-behairy-is-at-risk-after-80-days-on-hunger-strike.

The link continues all background information on Galal El-Behairy’s case, a translation of his recent message, and links to his translated poems.

PEN International believes that El-Behairy is being targeted for his writings, which are critical of the Egyptian authorities. The organisation believes that El-Behairy’s life is at grave risk, and holds the Egyptian authorities responsible for El-Behairy’s physical and psychological health and well-being, and Egypt’s General Prosecutor Hamada El-Sawy, for his unfair imprisonment. PEN International calls on the authorities to immediately and unconditionally release El-Behairy and drop all charges against him, and to ensure that he receives urgent and adequate medical care, pending his release.

I urge you to take immediate action and call for Galal El-Behairy’s immediate and unconditional release. It would also be great if you could raise his case through your countries’ respective diplomatic channels. Sending letters to the Egyptian ambassador in your country would also help. Please spread the word, write about Galal’s ordeal in your articles and on social media, and share this with your media contacts.

I also invite you to take part in our Twitter storm on Thursday,1 June 2023 – between 12 (noon) and 3 pm Egypt time / 10 am and 1 pm London time.

The details are included in the call for action.

Please, do not hesitate to get back to me if you have any questions or require any further information.

In solidarity,

Mina

Mina Thabet 

Head of The MENA Region

E: Mina.thabet@Pen-international.org

www.pen-international.org | Support PEN’s work

The full story and a link to the letter are available at the P.I. website:

https://www.pen-international.org/?mc_cid=61f62e0b45&mc_eid=88fa958a00

On 21 February 2013, International Mother Language Day, PEN International will mobilize its Centres in support of Belarusian writer, human rights defender, 2022 Nobel Peace Prize winner and PEN Belarus member Ales Bialiatski, detained since 2021 and currently on trial.

Bialiatski is the founder of the Viasna Human Rights Centre (Viasna), an organisation that campaigns for opposition activists who are harassed and persecuted by the Belarusian authorities. His case is emblematic of the type of threats and attacks writers and journalists around the world are often subjected to, for peacefully exercising their right to freedom of expression. It is also emblematic of the type of oppression experienced by writers and journalists who are prevented from expressing themselves in their indigenous or minoritised language.

International Mother Language Day is a stirring reminder of the ongoing need to preserve and protect linguistic and cultural diversity across the globe. It accentuates the crucial need to uplift those, like Ales Bialiatski, who ardently defend their right to speak their mother tongue. We stand in solidarity with Bialiatski in his ceaseless fight for human rights and democratic values in Belarus, despite the government’s persistent endeavours to silence him.  Urtzi Urrutikoetxea, Chair of PEN International’s Translation and Linguistic Rights Committee

Ales Bialiatski (Belarus)

Bialiatski is currently on trial in Minsk. He faces up to 12 years in prison in relation to his human rights work and his writings that are critical of the Belarusian authorities. The verdict against him will be announced on 3 March 2023.

Bialiatski’s trial opened at the Lieninski District Court of Minsk on 9 January 2023. He stands accused of smuggling (Article 228.4 of the Belarusian Criminal Code) and organising and financing actions that grossly violate public order (Article 342.2 of the Belarusian Criminal Code). Throughout the trial, Bialiatski repeatedly asked that the prosecutor and the court conduct the trial in Belarusian, to no avail. According to Viasna, Bialiatski notably said:

‘The situation with the language used in court appears to be extraordinary: the prosecution and the court refused steadfast to speak Belarusian, despite the fact that I, as the accused, am a Belarusian-speaking person in life. I speak, write, and think in Belarusian. I remind you that the Belarusian language is a state language, and you, as state officials, should know two state languages, including Belarusian, and not struggle to say two words. Therefore, you are obliged to speak, accordingly, in Belarusian with Belarusian-speaking citizens. For example, as provided for by the Law ‘On Appeals of Citizens’, if you write in Belarusian, any official department will respond to you in Belarusian. This put me in an unequal position with the prosecution. I was not given the opportunity to explain my position thoroughly and in detail, to dispute the unjust and senseless accusation”.

It is not the first time Bialiatski has been targeted by the Belarusian authorities. On 4 August 2011, he was arrested on spurious charges of tax evasion, for solely using his personal bank accounts in Lithuania and Poland to fund Viasna, as the organisation is not allowed to hold a bank account in Belarus. On 24 November 2011, he was sentenced to four-and-a-half years’ imprisonment in a high security prison colony. PEN members actively campaigned for his release; he was amnestied in June 2014.

PEN International calls on the Belarusian authorities to release Ales Bialiatski immediately and unconditionally, and drop all charges against him, and demands that he is provided with regular communication with his family, lawyers and adequate health care, pending his release. The organisation also calls on the authorities to abide by their international human rights obligations and uphold the rights to freedom of expression, association, and peaceful assembly for all.

Crackdown against the Belarusian language and literature

The stigmatisation and repression of the Belarusian language and literature in Belarus, where the authorities have been seeking to assert the dominance of the Russian language for decades, have worsened since the Russian Federation launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022.  PEN International has long supported PEN Belarus in promoting the Belarusian language, including through a 2019 resolution calling on the Belarusian authorities to:

• Comply with Article 17 of the Constitution of Belarus, which enshrines Belarusian as an official language;
• Respect, protect and fulfil the right of all those who speak Belarusian to express themselves in that language and to have their literature promoted and distributed;
• Ensure that those wishing to study in Belarusian-language classes, including at the higher education level, are provided with such opportunities;
• Take effective measures to promote the wider use of the Belarusian language in all areas of life, including cultural life.

Note to editors:

• For further information, please contact Sabrina Tucci, PEN International Communications and Campaigns Manager, Tucci@pen-international.org

Please consider donating to our Writers-at-Risk Crisis Appeal.

PEN member now serving 54-year prison sentence.

Regressive changes to education policy undermine linguistic rights and exacerbate ethnic divisions

PEN International is concerned by the military junta’s recent amendments to Myanmar’s education system, which seek to promote the use of Burmese at the expense of other languages. In a country riven by conflict, these exclusionary amendments risk exacerbating ethnic divisions by infringing upon the linguistic rights of ethnic minority communities and increasing educational barriers for non-native Burmese speakers.

On 30 October 2022, amendments to Myanmar’s 2014 National Education Law (NEL) were published in the junta-controlled Myanmar Alin Daily, the country’s longest-running newspaper. The amendments, which came into force on 29 October, significantly weaken the linguistic rights of the country’s ethnic minority communities by promoting Burmese as the sole language of instruction in public education. In doing so, these discriminatory amendments will significantly disadvantage ethnic minority students by undermining their ability to learn using their mother tongue.

In response to the military junta’s amendments, Urtzi Urrutikoetxea, Chair of the PEN International’s Translation and Linguistic Rights Committee, said: ‘By undoing efforts to develop an inclusive education system that respects linguistic rights and reflects Myanmar’s rich multilingual heritage, the military junta will only further marginalise the country’s ethnic minority communities, deepening the divisions that have been a key source of the country’s entrenched ethnic conflicts.’

Myanmar is a country of rich linguistic diversity, which is reflected in the over 100 different languages and dialects spoken across the country. Burmese is the official language of Myanmar and is the primary language used by the Bamar, the country’s largest ethnic group. Burmese also serves as a lingua franca for many of the country’s ethnic minority communities.

During previous decades of repressive military rule (1962-2011), the promotion of a majoritarian national identity that elevated Burmese at the expense of other languages resulted in the marginalisation and suppression of the use of ethnic minority languages in public life. The military’s failure to embrace the country’s ethnic diversity has been a central grievance of non-Bamar ethnic communities, exacerbating the divisions that have fuelled the country’s protracted cycle of conflict.

Following the end of formal military rule in 2011, the enactment of the 2014 NEL, and its 2015 amendments, was a significant milestone in the development of a more inclusive national education system that better catered to the needs of Myanmar’s diverse ethnolinguistic groups. The 2014-2015 NEL included provisions which stated that ethnic minority languages could be used alongside Burmese as a classroom language (Article 43[B]) and that regional and state governments could implement the teaching of ethnic minority languages and literatures at the primary level and eventually higher grades (Article 44).

While the development of the NEL proved controversial, resulting in protests from student unions and a violent crackdown by the police, it was the first time that non-dominant ethnic language teaching was formally recognised by law in Myanmar, representing a positive step towards the integration of ethnic minority languages into the national education curriculum.

However, October’s announcement by the military junta undermines this burgeoning progress by imposing amendments that exclude ethnic minority languages from being used as a classroom language at the primary level (Article 43[B]), while also limiting the teaching of ethnic minority languages and literatures to the primary level (Article 44).

PEN International urges the military junta to annul these amendments and to ensure that Myanmar’s education system supports the linguistic rights of non-Burmese speakers and respects the country’s rich linguistic diversity.

We also continue our ongoing call for the release of all those unjustly detained for their peaceful expression. For more on our work on Myanmar, click here.

Stella’s speech at the Free Assange Mr Biden Rally at Sydney’s Hyde Park on 24 May, 2023:

https://www.greenleft.org.au/video/stella-assange-speaks-sydney-free-julian-assange

Stella interview on ABC 7.30:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpEE9TBlKI4

Iran: authorities must end the persecution of Mahvash Sabet and ensure access to adequate medical care pending her release

PEN International and the undersigned PEN Centres are outraged to learn that writer and poet Mahvash Sabet was brutally tortured during her interrogation in August 2022 at Evin prison, resulting in both her kneecaps being broken. PEN International and the undersigned PEN Centres are gravely concerned about Mahvash Sabet’s health and well-being and strongly condemn the persistent and deliberate medical negligence against writers and other prisoners of conscience in Iran.

We urge the Iranian authorities to immediately and unconditionally release Mahvash Sabet on medical furlough and demand that she receives immediate, appropriate, and adequate medical care pending her release. We further call for an independent, transparent, and prompt investigation into her torture. 

PEN International has recieved information from reliable sources that prominent Baha’i poet Mahvash Sabet has been suffering for months from broken kneecaps resulting from torture that she has been subjected to while in detention. The authorities have not provided her with adequate medical care and are subjecting her to deplorable detention conditions. PEN International has also learned that she had been repeatedly interrogated over the content of her unpublished book in which she details her previous prison experiences.

PEN International has previously raised concerns over Sabet’s health and the deliberate medical negligence by the Iranian authorities. We have recieved information that she has difficulties breathing following recurrent Covid-19 infections from which she has not fully recovered.

Further, Iranian authorities have also persecuted her family, forcibly evicting them from their property earlier this week. The Baha’i community are heavily persecuted by the authorities in Iran, with examples including the arrest of Baha’i activists and the seizing and demolishing their homes and properties. PEN International had previously highlighted the persecution of Iran’s Baha’i community and the arrest of Iranian activists Fariba Kamalabadi and Afif Naemi, members of the long-disbanded “Yaran-i-Iran” or “Friends of Iran”, who, along with Sabet, helped to administer Baha’i community’s affairs in Iran until 2008.

Background

Arrested in July 2022, Mahvash Sabet was sentenced to ten years in prison in November 2022 following a grossly unfair trial. She faced trumped-up charges and has been denied access to legal counsel.

Sabet is currently serving a 10-year sentence in Evin Prison in Tehran, Iran; the second decade-long sentence she has been handed by the Iranian authorities in violation of her right to freedom of expression. Since her arrest, Sabet has reportedly been held in solitary confinement and denied contact with her family for prolonged periods.

Mahvash Sabet began her professional career as a teacher and worked as a principal at several schools. She also collaborated with the National Literacy Committee of Iran. Following the Islamic Revolution in 1979, Sabet was fired from her job and blocked from working in public education, like thousands of other Iranian Baha’i educators. She served for 15 years as director of the Baha’i Institute for Higher Education, which provides alternative higher education for Baha’i youth.

She began writing poetry in prison, and a collection of her prison poems was translated into English and published in 2013. Sabet is an honorary member of Austrian PEN and Danish PEN and was awarded English PEN’s 2017 International Writer of Courage. PEN International has campaigned for her release and featured her case in PEN’s 2014 Day of the Imprisoned Writer campaign.

For more details on Mahvash Sabet’s case, please visit our website (here)

The 3^rd edition of the Video Poem Marathon 2023 in Indigenous and Minoritized Languages has been a huge success. We have published 70 videos between February 21 and March 21, 2023.  These are just some of the figures of this 3^rd edition:

– 70 languages, 2/3 of them participating for the first time at the Video Poem Marathon.

– 38 female poets, 32 male poets

– 22 poems from Africa, 14 from Asia, 14 from Europe, 2 from Oceania, 18 from the Americas.

– 25 PEN Centres, nine of them participating for the first time, also good literary friends in Indigenous associations like Ituîka and Colectivo Aj’tzib’

– Poems submitted for the first time from Greenland, Paraguay, Sierra Leone, Australia, Aotearoa (New Zealand), Namibia, USA, Uganda, Faroe Islands, Ghana, Guinea Bissau and Sri Lanka.

The participation from Africa has been simply extraordinary, showing the importance of all these languages even when the former colonial languages continue to be official in their countries. Remarkable as well the number of Maya poets from Guatemala, the brave poets writing in harsh conditions in Hazaragi, Crimean Tatar, Kurdish or Circassian, and the courageous poets from Myanmar, Ukraine or Belarus.

After 3 years, we have gathered poems in more than 110 languages. Indigenous languages, minoritized languages, small languages… more than 110 tongues that are too often neglected. That is why we want to MAKE SILENCED LANGUAGES VISIBLE.

The  PEN-TLRC YouTube channels had 55 people subscribed in early February. Now we have almost 150 subscribers. Important increase in Twitter, too. The Facebook TLRC Group has 375 members. You are more than welcome to join any of these channels, of course.

More importantly, every poet is really happy about their participation in the Marathon, and so are everyone else involved from their linguistic community.

Altogether there have been 3,700 views since we published the first videos on February 21.  We know though, that among so many languages, poets and fantastic videos, some of them do not always get the attention they deserve. Therefore, we want to stress that, even if the Marathon 2023 is finished, the video-poems are there, online, for everyone to watch, enjoy, share and even use them in their own languages. We encourage you to stop for a moment in our YouTube channel, to start watching a couple of poems, from the continent and language you prefer. We are convinced you will love them, and we would appreciate if you could spread the word in your own PEN Centre and literary and cultural colleagues, if you could share the videos you like most by phone and, why not, if you really love some of these voices, we are sure they will love to know that their poem has been translated into your own language.

Thank you, and best regards,

Urtzi Urrutikoetxea

Chair of the Translation and Linguistic Rights Committee of PEN International

Can Arts Stop a Bullet?

by Constantine Pakavakis

PEN Melbourne’s WfPC is collaborating with the peace activist movement and the campaign to free Julian Assange.

At a recent “Call for Peace, Truth Not War” rally, colourful signs, banners and the thumping beat of Richie Haven’s Freedom on the stepped forecourt of Melbourne’s State Library reminded me of how once we stopped a war. Music and art are powerful, they make us feel.

In Can Art Stop a Bullet? by Street and Cantwell, artist William Kelly articulates the thoughts of some of the world’s most influential thinkers and artists about how art can contribute to humanity’s desire for peace.

“The military has their tanks, bombs, battleships, and drones. They have their honour rolls of war, their medals, their ‘heroes’. They have their statues, monuments, and triumphal arches – dedicated to conflict – and they have their weapons. I have a pencil.”

• William Kelly

As the new AUKUS military alliance of the UK, US and Australia prepares for a possible war with China, I believe the scope of Writers for Peace must be broad enough to include every form of writing and art that speaks up for our humanity.

In Melbourne, the home of Julian Assange, a recent collaboration involved a joint venture with Melbourne City Council. They provided us with a site for the exhibition of Anything To Say?, a bronze life size sculpture by artist Davide Dormino of Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden, each standing on a chair, with a fourth ‘Empty Chair’ for the public to ‘have a say’. At the public event, the father of Julian Assange, John Shipton, David McBride, a whistleblower who exposed Australian war crimes in Afghanistan, Councillor Dr. Olivia Ball, and Dean Yates, the former Reuters chief in Iraq at the time of the Collateral Murders, joined PEN Melbourne’s Chris McKenzie and Dr Jo Scicluna in forcefully calling for Julian’s release and the fundamental right of freedom of expression.

Peace education and children’s literature is another area of interest for our WfPC. We must counter the glorification of killing. In Homer’s Iliad, the sirens that lure sailors to their death are not seducing them with heavenly enchantments of peace and tranquility, no, their irresistable lures sing of the glory of war. Militarism is deeply set in a culture of anthems, military songs and music. Movies, books and art idolize militaristic bravery, heroism, and the willingness to kill.

As co-author of an anti-war novel Earthrunner and the War of Water, I have been giving talks in schools about the futility of war and urging students to claim their agency for a peaceful future. In Australia, conscription for a war with China has already been flagged in the media; taxes being used for exorbitantly priced nuclear submarines are depriving urgently needed affordable housing, medical care, and education; and the reality of becoming a nuclear target because of US bases in Australia, must all be known.

Combating climate disaster is an essential part of this work too. PEN Melbourne Writers for Peace has been working within the Independent Peaceful Australia Network to organise peace rallies and to include environmental organisations.  The urgency to reverse climate warming was highlighted by UN Secretary-General António Guterres with a final warning for “climate action on all fronts: everything, everywhere, all at once.” Yet global military conflicts are a real and present danger to climate action. The hidden carbon footprint of the world’s militaries was estimated at 6%, excluding emissions caused by war and the reconstruction required afterwards.

For teachers seeking to incorporate peace into their programs, the Peace Literacy Institute https://www.peaceliteracy.org/ offers free curriculum resources and some online training programs which are worth investigating.

John Lennon’s words “Imagine all the people, livin’ life in peace” continue to challenge us all as writers.