ENGLISH DEYEA NEWS

Burmese bookshop workers arrange newspapers at a market. Burma’s censorship board continues to face new challenges in its never-ending efforts to sanitize the country’s print media. (Photo: AFP/Getty Images)

By WAI MOE | An editor on the privately-run Rangoon magazine Cherry was fired and three censorship board employees were reportedly suspended from duty after the monthly carried a poem that displeased government officials.

The censors of the Press Scrutiny and Registration Division ordered the publishers of Cherry to withdraw the May issue of the magazine in which the offending poem appeared. But the magazine had already sold out.

The censors order Cherry to sack the editor of its poetry section, Htay Aung, Rangoon-based journalists told The Irrawaddy.

Htay Aung’s dismissal was followed by staff changes, but the magazine is still waiting for clearance to continue publishing.

The offending poem, “De Pa Yin Ga”, referred to the events in Depayin town in Sagaing Division in May 2003, when Burma’s democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi and her convoy were ambushed by junta-backed thugs.

The poem relates that throughout Burmese history many heroic figures were lost because of unfaithful people.

It isn’t know what so upset the censors, although they have fallen prey in the past to schemes to outwit them with hidden messages.

Last January, poet Saw Wai was arrested after authorities deciphered a piece of his work in the Rangoon magazine The Love Journal that contained a hidden message criticizing junta leader Than Shwe.

In his poem, titled ‘February the Fourteenth’, the first letters of each line added up to the message: "General Than Shwe is crazy with power."

In an earlier ploy to embarrass the censors, a Danish travel company managed to place an advertisement in the weekly Myanmar Times containing the hidden message "Killer Than Shwe.”