Friday, 29 July 2022

A tribute to Kyaw Min Yu and Phyo Zayar Thaw, two remarkable men

Index was shocked to hear of the executions of Kyaw Min Yu and Phyo Zayar Thaw, two activists from Myanmar whose only crime was speaking truth to power. Min was a 53-year-old veteran of the 88 Generation Students Group formed during the 1988 uprising, which opposed the country’s military regime, while Zayar was a rapper turned politician who used his voice and platform to advocate for greater rights. Read more about these two men here, alongside thoughts and a poem from the award-winning Burmese poet and literary translator Ko Ko Thett here.
Photo: Maung Sun

Sri Lanka's new president already has a bad track record. Just ask the nation's poets

Much of the commentary on Gotabaya Rajapaksa - Sri Lanka's former president who fled the country earlier this month - focused on his family, full of corrupt strongmen who were to blame for the island’s many failures. If the nepotistic, violent Rajapaksas were everything that was wrong about Sri Lanka, it seems as if deposing them should improve matters. But Sri Lankan writer Vajra Chandrasekera argues the new president could be just as bad. Read his analysis here.
Photo: World Economic Forum/Mattias Nutt/Flickr

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The summer 2022 issue of Index on Censorship has just been released. In the issue artists, dissidents and journalists write about the corrosive effect of the war in Ukraine on freedoms across Europe. Read incisive articles by Viktoria Sedult, a journalist in Hungary, about Europe’s most right-wing leader, Viktor Orbán; Hanna Komar, an activist from Belarus, on how she is desperately trying to challenge her parents on the lies they see on their TV; Andrey Kurkov on how today, as in the past, Russia is trying to erase Ukraine’s culture; and a discussion with the poet Lyuba Yumichuk on children in Donbas being fed an alternative history.

Take out an online subscription today and get a 30% discount from Exact Editions using the promo code Battle4Ukraine. Offer ends 15 August.

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