The International Writing Program (IWP) condemns in the strongest terms the brute force reaction of the military junta (also known as Tatmadaw) in Myanmar/Burma to the peaceful protests being staged to restore the country’s democratically elected government. In addition to widespread detentions and house-to-house searches for protesters now in hiding, the regime has resorted to employing water cannons, tear gas, stun guns, rubber bullets, and snipers firing live ammunition. Every night brings news of additional deaths.

The IWP calls on writers around the world to show support for the Civil Disobedience Movement (CDM) and to protest the crackdown through whatever channels are available. We encourage you, especially, to pressure your elected representatives to formally acknowledge and engage with this worsening situation.

While mourning the peaceful protesters already killed, we cannot lose sight of the real nature of these mass detentions. The military junta is waging a ferocious attack on basic freedoms. To pick one example from the circle of IWP’s alumni, the poet Maung Yu Py (IWP ’15) was detained after participating in peaceful protests, is said to have been severely beaten, and now faces politically motivated charges such as “making statements that promote public mischief, disobeying orders from a public servant, and unlawful assembly.” His trial is scheduled to take place in less than two weeks’ time; if he is convicted, he is likely to receive a prison sentence of two years.

The IWP has been committed to freedom in Myanmar/Burma⁠ since the coup of 1988. More than 25 Myanma and Burmese writers have participated in IWP’s Fall Residency, shared in our community, and helped us to understand their country’s passionate struggle for democratic reform. Some of you may have received the call for solidarity we circulated on February 3, on behalf of 125 independent Myanma writers. We continue to stand with them in demanding the immediate and unconditional release of all detainees.

Here is a list of poets detained or killed by the junta as of March 10, 2021:

အဖမ်းဆီးခံရတဲ့ကဗျာဆရာတွေ
ယောနသံ (မန္တလေးမှာအဖမ်းခံရ)
မောင်ယုပိုင် (မြိတ်မှာအဖမ်းခံရ)
ဆူးခက်ရင့် (ရန်ကုန်မှာအဖမ်းခံရ)
ဏေဝင်း (မိတ္ထီလာမှာအဖမ်းခံရ)
အားဆွေး (မုံရွာမှာ အဖမ်းခံရ)
ဖြူဆု(ရန်ကုန်မှာအဖမ်းခံရ)
အိန်မြူညိဏ်း (ရန်ကုန်မှာအဖမ်းခံရ)
ပေသိုး(ရန်ကုန်မှာအဖမ်းခံရ)
ဆစ်နိုင်(ရန်ကုန်မှာအဖမ်းခံရ)
Te (ရန်ကုန်မှာအဖမ်းခံရ)
ကျဆုံးသူ ကဗျာဆရာတွေ
ကေဇဝင်း (မုံရွာမှာ ပစ်ခတ်ခံရ)
ကြည်လင်အေး (မုံရွာမှာ ပစ်ခတ်ခံရ)
ကျန်သေးရင်ပြောကြပါ

Poets who were detained:

1. Yaw Na Than (in Mandalay)
2. Maungg Yu Py (in Myeik)
3. Suu Khet Yint (in Yangon)
4. Nay Win (in Meikhteela)
5. Arr Sway (in Monywa)
6. Phyu Suu (in Yangon)
7. Eain Myu Nyein (in Yangon)
8. Pay Thoe (in Yangon)
9. Sitt Naing (in Yangon)
10. Te (in Yangon)

Poets who were shot to death:

1. K Za Win (in Monywa)
2. Kyi Lin Aye (in Monywa)

We urge the military junta led by General Hlaing to respect its peoples’ rights to freedom of expression, assembly, and access to information.⁠

Signed,

Christopher Merrill

Director, International Writing Program