“When the music is out of time, the rhythm is destroyed. When the timing isn’t right, the flavor of the curry is destroyed. In politics, when the timing is wrong, the image of the whole country is destroyed. The timing in politics is to do the right thing at the right time.”

 My friend Win Maw, a musician and video journalist, said this to his daughter Khin Suu Kyi. On January 5th she quoted him in an open letter to Thein Sein, the president of Burma, asking for his release from prison.

In 1981 Win Maw entered the music industry as the lead guitar player and band leader of Shwe Thansin (Golden Melody). When Golden Melody was banned from the airwaves he became the leader of the band A-Lin-Kar. On November 18, 1996, during a touristic campaign that the government called “Visit Myanmar Year,” Win Maw was arrested by the military government. He was sentenced to six years in prison for writing songs in support of Burma’s pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi.

                                         Illustrated by Than Htay Maung

အရိုးထိေအာင္ေအးေသာညဥ့္ေလထုဒါဏ္ကိုပခံုးႀကံဳ႕ေကြးရင္းလက္သီးတင္းတင္းဆုတ္ရင္းႏွင့္သူတို႔က ျမစ္ဟုေခၚေသာေရစီးေၾကာင္းတခုေဘးတြင္ က်မမိုက္မိုက္ ကမ္းကမ္းႏွင့္မတုန္မလႈပ္ထိုင္ေနမိသည္။ တဆတ္ဆတ္ ရိုက္ေနေသာသြားမ်ားကို လည္းၿငိမ္သက္ေအာင္ အံကိုတင္းတင္း ႀကိတ္ကာကြယ္ရ 
ေသးသည္။

က်မထိုင္ေနေသာ ေက်ာက္သားခံုျဖဴကေလးသည္ခပ္ေနာက္ေနာက္ေရခဲတံုးတတံုးလိုျဖဴေဖြးေအးစက္ 
ေနသည္။ ျမစ္ကိုတိုက္ခတ္လာေသာေလကအကာအကြယ္မဲ့ေသာမ်က္ႏွာႏွင့္လည္ပင္းမ်ားကို တိုးေ၀ွ႔ လာေသာအခါ ၾကက္သည္းေတြျဖန္းျဖန္းထရသည္။

က်မေရွ႕တည့္တည့္ရွိေရစီးျငင္သာေသာအိုင္အို၀ါျမစ္သည္ က်မငယ္ငယ္ကေနထိုင္ ႀကီးျပင္းခဲ့ေသာ ေက်းလက္ေျခတံရွည္အိမ္ကေလး၏ေနာက္ေဖးရွိေခ်ာင္းႏွင့္အရြယ္တူေလာက္ရွိသည္။ က်ီေလာင္ေလာင္ ျမစ္ေရကေတာ့ ေခ်ာင္းကေလးထဲမွာေႏြရာသီစီး ဆင္းေသာအင္းေရႏွင့္တူသည္။ ေခ်ာင္းနံေဘးမွာ လယ္ကြင္းေတြ၊ငရုတ္ခင္းေတြ၊ ေနၾကာ ခင္းေတြရွိသည္။ အဲဒီစိုက္ ခင္းေတြထဲမွာအလုပ္လုပ္ေနၾကသူ 
ေတြက က်မ၏ သူငယ္ခ်င္းေတြ။ ေႏြရာသီေက်ာင္းပိတ္ရက္ဆို က်မတို႔ညီအမလည္းငရုတ္သီးခူး ထြက္ရသည္။

Khet Mar (translated from the Burmese by Ko Ko Thett)

Below is the author’s personal account of a student book club in Rangoon, where she taught student union leaders who would later be imprisoned for their political views. Her account also details their January 13 release from prison under a general amnesty and a reunion with of some of the club’s members via telephone.

This past January 12 put me on edge. My restlessness had nothing to do with my birthday, or its falling on Friday the 13th. Instead it had everything to do with the fate of my friends in Burma. That evening the Burmese diaspora had been stirred up by some news: Thein Sein’s government had just declared an amnesty regarding the release of 651 prisoners under the Criminal Procedure Act, effective January 13. It was the new Burmese government’s fourth large-scale clemency in eight months.
As Rangoon is twelve hours ahead of Pittsburgh, I decided to wait for the unbolting of Burma’s prison doors at my desk, starting at 7 p.m. It was a tense wait. How many prisoners of conscience would be released this time? Who would they be? Burmese social networking pages were awash with predictions and rumors. Our status messages reflected the mood of the day. The little green lights on my address book said the whole Burmese community I know in the West was online and sleepless that night—like myself.

၁၉၉၅ ခုႏွစ္တုန္းက ဆရာမင္းသု၀ဏ္ၿခံထဲကထမနဲပြဲမွာ ဆရာဒဂုန္တာရာ၊ ဆရာေမာင္စြမ္းရည္၊ ဘဘဦးမိုးသူ၊ ဦးလိႈင္(သုခမိန္လိႈင္) ဆရာဒဂုန္တာရာ့ေျမးေဒ၀ီကေလးနဲ႔က်မ အမွတ္တရ

စက္တင္ဘာလထဲမွာ မာမားဆီကအီးေမးလ္တစ္ေစာင္ရပါတယ္။ ‘သားငယ္နဲ႔ဖုန္းေျပာရတယ္။ ဦးရဲ႕ အဆူမခံရတာၾကာၿပီ။ အဆူခံခ်င္ေသးတယ္လို႔ သားငယ္ကို ခက္မာကေျပာတယ္လို႔ျပန္ေျပာျပတယ္။ ဦးကလည္းေျပာတယ္။ 'သူ႔ကို ငါကစိတ္ပူလို႔ဆူေနရတာတဲ့’။ အဲဒီေမးလ္ေလးကိုဖတ္ၿပီးက်မမ်က္ရည္ လည္ခဲ့ရပါ တယ္။ အီးေမးလ္စာမ်က္ႏွာကိုဖြင့္ၿပီးစာျပန္ဖို႔လုပ္ရင္း ဘယ္လိုျပန္ရင္ေကာင္းမလဲ စဥ္းစားရာကေန အေတြးေတြကအတိတ္ကိုေရာက္သြားေတာ့ ညလည္ေခါင္ႀကီးမွာ တေယာက္ထဲ ရယ္လိုက္၊ မ်က္ရည္က်လိုက္နဲ႔တမ္းတရင္းရွင္သန္ရတဲ့ လူလတ္ပိုင္း ကာလရဲ႕ အရသာကို အျပည့္အ၀ ခံစားလိုက္တာစာေတာင္မျပန္ျဖစ္ေတာ့ပါဘူး။ ဒါနဲ႔ေနာက္ေန႔မွေအးေအးေဆးေဆးေဆြးေဆြးေျမ့ေျမ့နဲ႔ စာရွည္ရွည္ျပန္ေရးေတာ့မယ္ ဆိုၿပီးေတးထားလိုက္ပါတယ္။