Writers in China, Iran and Peru are being increasingly threatened and put in prison for their work, the International PEN writers’ association has warned at the Frankfurt Book Fair.
”In comparison with the first six months of 2001, the number of writers in prison observed by our association for the same period this year increased by a quarter,” says the vice-president of PEN Germany, Karin Clark.
”This was certainly due to increased censorship after the September 11 attacks in the United States,” Clark said. ”We in the West forget too easily that freedom is a dream for most people rather than a reality,” adds Johano Strasser, who heads the German branch.
Founded in London in 1921, PEN — poets, playwrights, editors, essayists, novelists — works regularly with the United Nations. According to the group, 126 writers and journalists were persecuted or imprisoned for their ideas around the world in the first half of this year.
It says 16 died, 15 disappeared and 167 were jailed for a short time. Six Chinese writers or journalists are on PEN’s priority list. One of its chief concerns is Yuchun Kang who was jailed for 19 years in 1992 for ”counter-revolutionary propaganda” and
”organising meetings against the regime.” No one knows where he is being held, PEN says.
”In Iran, the situation for intellectuals is also very dangerous,” it says. Cinema critic Siamak Pourzand was sentenced to 11 years in prison in 2002 for ”endangering state security by his links to monarchist and counter revolutionary forces.” Pourzand is aged 72 and has a heart ailment but he is being refused medication and visits, PEN claims.
In Peru, meanwhile, the sociologist Hermes Rivera Guerrero was jailed for 20 years for allegedly being a member of the Shining Path guerrilla movement. To help writers under threat, particularly after they have been charged or have finished their sentences, PEN offers funds so that they can continue their work in Germany.
The Iranian Faraj Sarkohi, Claudia Anthony from Sierra Leone and the Russian Sergei Solovkin have all benefited from this kind of assistance.
Other initiatives come from publishing houses that want to get involved. The director of Atlantik, Juergen Heiser, presented a book in German of the most recent writings of American journalist and Black Panther member Mumia Abu-Jamal, who was controversially sentenced to death for murder 20 years ago.
The book, loosely translated as ”The Empire Knows No Laws”, will be released here in November and contains writings by Abu-Jamal for the American press. ”This work is proof that Mumia Abu-Jamal succeeded in continuing his work despite the deteriorating conditions of his imprisonment on death row,” says Heiser, who visited him in his Pennsylvania jail.
Abu-Jamal’s writings are distributed to the press and foreign editors by family members who visit him. – Sapa-AFP