‘Censorship Changed

Leading writer and human rights activist Ma Thida recently became the first president of Myanmar’s branch of PEN International, a global association of writers and editors that promotes free expression. Established last autumn, PEN Myanmar aims to revamp the local literary scene, currently dominated by lecture-style book talks.

The 47-year-old Ma Thida, who is also a trained surgeon and former political prisoner, spoke with The Irrawaddy’s Samantha Michaels about her work with PEN Myanmar, while also sharing her thoughts on the country’s opening media sector and explaining how meditation helped her survive prison.

Fiction writers and journalists have more freedom today than they did under the former junta. What are some of the biggest remaining challenges?

For fiction writers, there’s selfcensorship. For nearly five decades, they only thought about how to bypass censorship. And now, even when they get a chance, they forget to touch on current issues, such as land conflicts, in their writing. It’s an intellectual inertia—our thinking has been changed by censorship. For journalists, there’s a lack of training. Some reporters are struggling, even though they are so enthusiastic.

As president of PEN Myanmar, what are your main activities?

We aim to protect free expression, to establish a new literary culture and to promote aesthetic literature in schools. Literary talks here are like one-way lectures, so we are holding interactive writing workshops with local writers and readers. We want the community to participate, so we say, just grab a book and read out loud any part, or a poem or short story or essay, and based on that, we have a discussion. We are also organizing a peace writing contest, calling for poems and short stories in Myanmar language or any ethnic language, to be published into a book. Another project is the conflict sensitive media monitoring project—we are making a report based on our research regarding civil war, ethnic conflicts and hate speech.

Earlier this year you were blocked from speaking at a literary event because you once volunteered for the Muslim Free Hospital in Yangon. Has your association with this hospital ever been a problem for you in the past?

I don’t think so. And I was quite happy with my involvement in the Muslim Free Hospital. Throughout history, a lot of political prisoners and their family members couldn’t go to state-owned hospitals, so they relied on the Muslim Free Hospital. I am not a Muslim, but this was where I could best help the needy and my political prisoner friends and their family members.

As editor of The Myanmar Independent news journal, you focus on politics, civil society issues and ethnic issues. Do you think there’s enough coverage of ethnic minority issues in Myanmar?

It’s under covered. A lot of the reporters and editors lack background knowledge, so they may try to cover it but they are not very effective. I encourage regional papers to run by themselves, but they also lack skills. The language barrier is a problem, and the education in their states is not very good.

The government has proposed a controversial Public Service Media Bill which would turn stateowned newspapers into “public service media” that would, in part, cover ethnic issues. Is this a good idea?

Throughout history we have already been reading their public service newspapers, and I have never seen any brilliant coverage of ethnic issues, or any issue for the matter. As an example, when Minister U Ohn Myint made some very bad speeches to the local people, every independent journal wrote about it. At the time, if I ran the government newspaper, to serve