“Just before the 2010 election in Burma I proposed the idea to make a segment on our TV program where our audience could talk about their problems directly.” Video journalist Than Win Htut recounts the rocky start of TV program Talk2DVB.
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Khet Mar reflects on her friend Win Maw, a renowned musician and video journalist, who spent years in prison for his support of Aung San Suu Kyi and his involvement in documenting the Saffron Revolution in 2007. He was released in January, 2012.
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Aung San Suu Kyi’s landslide electoral victory in April and other press freedom achievements showed the world that Burma is inching toward democratic reform. But there are just as many signs that indicate this move is more rhetoric than reality.
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Despite the historic victory of Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) party in the parliamentary elections, Burmese poet Ko Ko Thett argues that this should not be cause for over-jubilation as there is still a long road ahead for democracy to take a foothold.
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In this interview, Hnin Pan Ein details her life as a daughter and wife of political prisoners, explains the difficulties of being a writer under censorship, and gives her opinion on the condition of free speech in Burma.
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In this interview Khet Mar describes her childhood in a fishing village, the inspiration to become a writer, the political uprising and her life in prison, how she was released, her subsequent disaster relief work, and the risks she took in reporting.
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The 7th annual Jazz Poetry Concert featured writers Sonia Sanchez, Israel Centeno, Khet Mar, Hind Shoufani, Alexandra Petrova, and Tommi Parkko, accompanied by jazz musician Oliver Lake and the jazz trio Tarbaby.
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On January 13, 2012 the Burmese government released scores of prisoners, including prisoners of conscience from the ’88 Generation Students. Khet Mar, the poet and former political prisoner, wrote this personal account of the amnesty and the friends who were now finally free.
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January 13 was the third wholesale amnesty and commutation of sentences under the new government yet an estimated one thousand prisoners of conscience remain in Burmese jails.
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