In 2010, the Writers in Prison Committee of International PEN celebrates 50 years of defending freedom of expression around the world with a year-long campaign - Because Writers Speak their Minds. In Frankfurt in June, Sara Whyatt of the WiPC spoke to the 5th General Assembly of ICORN, reflecting on the history of the committee, and the present situation for writers who dare speak up. Shahrazad - stories for life congratulates the WiPC, and now presents Sara Whyatt's speech to our audience. To learn more about WiPC's campaign, go here .
Because Writers speak Their Minds: 50 years of writers and exile
This year we are celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Writers in Prison Committee, set up in July 1960. As the anniversary neared, I found myself asking why was it that although PEN itself had already been in existence since 1921, did it take 39 years for the organisation to set up a formal committee, dedicated to gathering information on attacks on writers, and to galvanise and coordinate other writers world wide in their defence?
Sifting through PEN's archives, particularly the minutes of the congresses around the war years and up to the creation of the WiPC, I think I found the answer.
In 1947 PEN's congress in Zurich was the first to be held since the outbreak of World War II. Photos taken by Time Life of those gathered in Zurich show writers who had not seen each other for years beaming, chatting, hugging each other. Friends re-united, relieved. There is even one of the poet Stephen Spender high up in the air on a seesaw, legs flying outwards. No doubt there were dark moments too not captured by the cameras. Many friends had died, many more had suffered, others were still living under repression. The talk would have been of exile. Many of those in the meeting would have lived as refugees, others would be wondering if they could ever return home. And there were those, such as David Carver and Storm Jameson, founder members of the WiPC, who could talk of their own efforts to help refugees find places of safety during the war years. But all will have been looking towards the future with hope. A year later, UN member states gathered to form the UN Declaration of Human Rights. All were looking towards "never again".
By 1959, twelve years later, the tone of optimism had gone. There was fear and despondency. Writers were still in exile - from Czechoslovakia, Albania, Romania - states that had been liberated from war into new forms of brutality - the extremes of fascism and communism. These exiles spoke of missing friends, of "lists" of disappeared and arrested writers. It became apparent to PEN, an organisation whose members had done so much during the war to assist refugees, that it needed to react. David Carver, then International Secretary of PEN, asked several exiled writers to research cases of imprisonment in their own countries, and to come back to the Congress, in Rio in July 1960, with lists of cases on which PEN would take action. And thus the WiPC was born. Exiled writers from Czechoslovakia, Albania, Romania, and Hungary arrived with 54 names - seven writers imprisoned in Albania, 25 in Czechoslovakia, 13 in Hungary, and nine in Romania. There were even two cases of Algerian writers held in France.
Today, the list of cases remains at the core of PEN's work, with around 900 in total in countries from all regions, and covering all types of attack - from harassment to trial, torture to killings.
Looking back at the past 50 years, refuge and exile - whether it is the cases for which PEN has advocated, or the role exiled writers have played in PEN - is prominent. To mark the anniversary, we have selected 50 people, one for each year of our existence, each emblematic of the struggle, sometimes fatal, of their era. We have collected their stories on our website, which you can visit on www.internationalpen.org.uk as part of our campaign "Because Writers Speak Their Minds" - a reference to David Carver's own speech in inaugurating the WiPC.
But the campaign is not just looking back, but also looking at today. There are emblematic cases in countries where there remain problems. Indeed some of them are still in prison or under attack.
Take Iran. In 1974 while Iran was still ruled under the Shah, writer Shahrnoush Parsipour was arrested and held for almost two months for protesting the executions of journalists and poets. She left for France, but returned to Iran in 1980, a year after the revolution, but again was arrested for her outspokenness. This time she spent four and half years in jail. Her book published in 1989 - Women without Men - led to her imprisonment, yet again - and she finally left for the USA in the early 90s where she remains today. (Coincidentally, a film of her book was released last year, directed by Iranian exiled film maker Shirin Neshat). Faraj Sarkoohi is another Iranian writer featured on our campaign. He too has spent terms of imprisonment under both the Shah and the revolutionary guard through the 1960s to the 1980s. However his most critical moment came in the mid 1990s when he lead a signature collection campaign that gathered the names of over 130 writers calling for free expression. The action itself led to deeper repression, arrests, and even the murders of several writers. Faraj Sarkoohi fled for Germany in 1997.
Today in Iran the situation for writers remains as critical as it was when Parsipour and Sarkoohi struggled to keep the right to write alive. Mass arrests of dissidents have included leading writers, artists and film makers. Today PEN has on its case list scores of cases. Iranian writers form a large sector of applicants to ICORN.
Russia, and at the moment more specifically the Caucasus, is another region where we get numerous applications from writers in trouble. Russia - or rather the Soviet Union - was the region where PEN's focus was at its highest from the birth of the WiPC in the 1960s until the fall of the Iron Curtain in the 1990s, and, now, sadly it continues.
To illustrate those times, we have chosen three emblematic cases, Andrei Sinyavski and Yuli Daniel, and Josef Brodsky. Sinyavski and Daniel, credited with being the founders of Samizdat were jointly arrested and tried in 1966 on charges of anti Soviet activity for their satirical writings published underground. Sinyavski was sentenced to 7 years of hard labour and Daniel to five years. Sinyavski went into exile soon after his release and continued to write and edit a literary magazine until his death in Paris in 1997. Daniel's literary career was more curtailed. He remained in Russia, was re-habilitated by the Gorbachev government when he was able to publish some of his poetry. He died in 1989.
Josef Brodsky is one of the best known of the 50 emblematic cases. Arrested in 1963 for his "anti-Soviet and pornographic" poems, he was officially charged with "parasitism" and sentenced to five years hard labour. He was released after 18 months following international protests. He continued to struggle to write, but increasing harassment forced him into exile and he settled in the USA, eventually winning the Nobel Prize for Literature. He died in New York in 1996.
Today, although judicial harassment is common, there are no writers in prison in Russia, and indeed, with the exception of Central Asia, in any of the former Soviet bloc states. But there has been an alarming and sinister turn. Almost as soon as the Iron Curtain fell, the prisons were emptied of political dissidents, but for some, life became even more dangerous. From the early 1990s on murder became the tool through which unwelcome critical voices were silenced. Since 1992, according to CPJ, 52 writers, journalists, TV and radio broadcasters have been killed. What makes this especially difficult for NGOs such as PEN is that whereas in the past it was government actions that led to imprisonments, these killings are carried out by the "unidentified" gunman. The victims have, on the whole, been exploring official corruption or looking into police and army human rights abuses, alongside the fact that only in a tiny percentage of the murders are properly investigated and even fewer brought to justice, suggesting a collusion if not at the highest ministerial level, then at the least mid level government, revealing a society that is deeply corroded.
PEN has chosen the case of the eminent, brave journalist Anna Politkovskaya, to illustrate these deaths. Well known to PEN for her publications and presentations that disclosed the horrors of torture and abuses by Russian forces in Chechnya, she was also exposing killings and abuses attributed to Russia's powerful oligarchy. In 2006 she was shot dead at her home. A trial is under way - marred by farce, stopping and starting - at which three pro-Russian Chechens are accused. And the killings continue. Anna's great friend, Natalia Estemirova, equally dogged and courageous, was last year dragged into a car outside her home in Grozny, beaten, shot dead and her body left in a wood in neighbouring Ingushetia - a warning to all other human rights defenders who dare to challenge Kadirov's regime. Today ICORN is handling a number of cases of writers from the Caucasus and elsewhere in Russia whose lives are at real risk.
No region is without its repressive regimes, and Africa not least. The WiPC 50th anniversary features nine African writers: Nigerian Nobel Prize Winner, Wole Soyinka, who spent terms in and out of prison in the 60s and subsequently periods in exile, Rajat Neogy, the Ugandan editor of the renowned African literary magazine Transitions that published all of Africa's most noted writers, Soyinka included, spent time in prison in the mid-1960s, South African Breyten Breytenbach, detained in the 1970s for his anti-apartheid activism. In Kenya Ngugi wa Thiongo, playwright and author was imprisoned in the late 1970s, going into exile in 1980s, returning briefly in 2000 only to return to the USA after suffering a horrific criminal attack. Malawian poet, Jack Mapanje, spent three years in prison from 1987 for his poetry seen as critical of then President Banda. He too went into exile in the UK from where he continues to write poetry and runs an innovative prison writings course. The lack of publishing houses is one of the reasons there are relatively few African writers working from their own countries, and journalists form the bulk of PEN cases in Africa today. Cameroonian journalist Pius Njawe is typical of the daily struggle they face. For almost 20 years - from when he as a new reporter aged 19 in 1979 until the late 1990s, he was constantly under harassment and imprisonment for articles in his independent newspaper. Today he is still editor of Messager and the harassment has stopped. That cannot be said for many other journalists in Africa whose lives are constantly dogged by arrests and trials.
Today the Horn of Africa is of special concern to PEN and from where there have recently been a number of applications to ICORN. Ethiopian journalist, Martha Kumsa, spent 9 years in prison from 1980-1989 for promoting Oromo women's rights. She then fled to Canada where she continues to work. Some years later in 2002, Eritrean journalist Dawit Isaac was imprisoned without charge or trial. Nine years later he remains in prison with several others. Four arrested with him have died in jail.
Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the situation for writers in the Americas was acute. The mass disappearances and arrests across the region inevitably scooped up writers. Alicia Partnoy was among the estimated 30,000 people disappeared in Argentina in the 1970s. She lived to tell her story in the heart wrenching Little School. She now lives in the USA. Nothing has been heard of Guatemalan writer, feminist and radio broadcaster Alaide de Solorzano since she disappeared in 1980, among 50,000 never to be seen again and an appalling 200,000 killed during the armed conflict. Mercifully, today such wide scale abuses no longer occur. However, similarly to the former Soviet Union, obvious government repression has been replaced by murders by faceless assassins. The numbers of killings in some countries is horrifically high such as in Mexico where several are murdered each year.
Each one of the 50 emblematic cases is a story that not only is of an individual writer's plight but that of whole countries and indeed eras. I don't have the space to talk about all of them. And they too are only representative of many, many thousands who have suffered in the past 50 years. As PEN's caselist testifies, today hundreds are living under similar pressures in countries across the globe.
A common thread that runs through the past cases is exile. Nearly all of those on the list of 50 have gone into exile for short periods or for ever. They had been welcomed by other countries, although often not without struggle. PEN members and other writers have taken them in, provided them with aid and enabled them to continue their professions abroad. For many, all that was needed was a brief period of respite - to escape tyranny and to write freely without harassment and to return revitalised and refreshed.
The collaboration between PEN and ICORN since the network was set up five years ago is a continuation of more than 50 years of support and solidarity that is no less needed today than it was when PEN members first set up networks for writers under attack during World War two and the subsequent cold war.
