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Pencilo

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Pencilo
‹See Tfd›ပန်ဆယ်လို
Personal details
Born
Eaint Poe Ou

(1990-04-15) 15 April 1990 (age 34)
Myaungmya, Myanmar
Political partyNational League for Democracy
Alma materDagon University
OccupationWriter, pro-democracy activist

Pencilo (Burmese: ပန်ဆယ်လို; born Eaint Poe Ou (Burmese: အိမ့်ပိုးဥ), on 14 April 1990) is a Burmese writer and pro-democracy activist. She is best known for criticizing the Tatmadaw and taking up politically sensitive cases against the Burmese military junta and generals.[1]

Early life and education

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Pencilo was born on 14 April 1990 in Myaungmya, Ayeyarwady Region, Myanmar. She graduated with B.Sc. in Industrial Chemistry from Dagon University in 2011.[2]

Career and activism

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Pencilo has written posts criticizing the military and the former military-backed government of President Thein Sein, which have occasionally come under fire.[2] A core supporter of the National League for Democracy, she participated in the election campaign in November 2015.[3]

She began her literary career in 2016, publishing a book titled Under The Mask (မျက်နှာဖုံးတွေရဲ့အောက်). The book became one of the best-selling books of 2016.[4]

She joined the campaign supporting Aung San Suu Kyi's defense of Myanmar against genocide charges related to the Rohingya crisis at the UN's top court in The Hague in December 2019.[5]

Lawsuit

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In 2017, she was sued for writing posts on her Facebook account critical of Myanmar military commander-in-chief Senior General Min Aung Hlaing and rabble-rousing Buddhist monk Wirathu, and about an attack on Buddhist Abbot Ein Daka at a restaurant in Yangon. She was charged under Section 66 (d) of the telecommunications law, which outlaws online defamation and carries a maximum two-year jail sentence.[6][7] On 12 September 2020, the Tamwe Township Court ruled that Pencilo was not guilty of violating Section 66 (d) of the telecommunications law. Khin Maung Myint, a legal consultant, said about Pancilo's lawsuit case to Radio Free Asia:[1]

"The ruling in Pencilo's case is the flicker of hope for all people and cases charged under Section 66(d)."

2021 Myanmar coup d'état

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On 1 February 2021, the military attempted to arrest Pencilo during the coup, but was unsuccessful.[8]

On 13 February 2021, in the aftermath of the 2021 Myanmar coup d'état, Pencilo, along with six other high-profile individuals,[9] Min Ko Naing, Kyaw Min Yu, Mg Mg Aye, Insein Aung Soe, and Lynn Lynn were charged and issued arrest warrants under Section 505 (b) of the Myanmar Penal Code by the State Administration Council[10] for inciting unrest against the state and threatening "public tranquility" through their social media posts.[11][12][13][14][15]

Pencilo became one of the main targets of the military junta.[16] She escaped Yangon to Thailand afterwards, and eventually fled to the United States as a political refugee.[17] As a result of fleeing Myanmar, Pencilo has consistently kept a record of everything she has done since fleeing, and she described those 100 days of refuge as "a nightmare". While running away from military arrest, Pencilo led campaigns on social media to mobilize pro-democracy demonstrations.

Her first translation work into Korean, "Burma Spring Revolution" was published in February 2022, and recounts her escape, the democratic uprising, and the resistance of the Myanmar people.[18] The book became a bestseller in South Korea.[19][20]

On 17 February 2022, her homes and business property were confiscated by the military council.[21][22] On 4 March, the military council announced that her citizenship had been terminated.[23] On 25 December 2022, she received the Kim Geun Tae Foundation Democracy Award. This is the first time the Kim Geun Tae Foundation has given the Democracy Award to a non-Korean.[24] She donated the 10 million won (US$7,800) prize money to support democracy movements in Myanmar.[25]

Former South Korean President Moon Jae-in showed support for Myanmar's democracy by posing with Pancilo's book "Burma Spring Revolution", as recommended by a Burmese student in South Korea.[26]

Pencilo plays a crucial role as a key fundraiser for NUG and PDF. In March 2022, she spearheaded the major fundraising campaign called "Project Dragonfly", aimed at countering military aircraft. In March 2023, she launched Rangoon Grocery Market in Sacramento, U.S., drawing both criticism from Burmese people and military backers. Accusations surfaced, linking the opening of the mini market to the alleged misuse of funds from "Project Dragonfly".[27][28]

In January 2024, she faced severe criticism from the Myanmar political community for purchasing a substantial residence at 6369 Garland Way, Roseville, California, valued at one million dollars, just two years after resettling in the United States. Many accused her of misusing political funding obtained through donations. However, she denied all accusations and clarified that the purchase was facilitated through a credit loan.[29]

Works

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  • မျက်နှာဖုံးတွေရဲ့အောက် (June 2016)
  • အဇ္စျတ္တကောက်ကြောင်း (Feb 2017)
  • ရေသောက်မြစ်ကို တူးဖော်ခြင်း (July 2017)[30]
  • ကြယ်ဝင်ရိုးစွန်းပေါ်ကလူ (March 2018)
  • Burma Spring Revolution (2022)

References

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  1. ^ a b "'Flicker of Hope' Seen After Acquittal of Myanmar Writer Under Defamation Law". Radio Free Asia. 16 October 2020.
  2. ^ a b "အချိန်ကျပြီလို့ ယူဆတဲ့အတွက် ထွက်လာတာပါ "ပန်ဆယ်လို"". Mizzima (in Burmese). 23 June 2017. [...] who wrote posts criticizing the government on social media, has been paying attention to her writings.
  3. ^ "ပန်ဆယ်လိုအကောင့်ပိုင်ရှင်အား အမှုဖွင့်ရခြင်းကိစ္စ". The Myanmar Times (in Burmese). 17 December 2017.
  4. ^ "လိုအပ်လာရင်တော့ လူလုံးပြဖြစ်မှာပါလို့ပြောတဲ့ စာရေးဆရာမ ပန်ဆယ်လို". Kumudra (in Burmese). 17 June 2016. [TRANSLATED] has become one of the top selling books.
  5. ^ "Suu Kyi fans join VIP tours for genocide trial". The ASEAN Post. 29 December 2016.
  6. ^ "၆၆ (ဃ)နဲ့ တရားစွဲခံရတဲ့ ပန်ဆယ်လို ရဲစခန်းမှာ ထွက်ဆိုချက်ပေး". Radio Free Asia (in Burmese). 13 January 2018.
  7. ^ ""ကိုယ့်အရေးအသားကို ယုံကြည်မှုအပြည့်ရှိလို့ တရားရင်ဆိုင်ခဲ့တယ်" ဆိုသည့် ပန်ဆယ်လို". Mizzima (in Burmese). 17 July 2018.
  8. ^ "Veteran Student Leaders, Rocker, Social Influencers on Myanmar Military's Arrest Warrant". The Irrawaddy. 13 February 2021.
  9. ^ "Tatmadaw charges activists, public figures for crimes against the state". The Myanmar Times. 14 February 2021.
  10. ^ "Junta issues arrest warrants for Min Ko Naing and other prominent activists". Myanmar NOW. 14 February 2021.
  11. ^ "ကိုမင်းကိုနိုင်၊ ကိုဂျင်မီ၊ အဆိုတော်လင်းလင်း ၊ အင်းစိန်အောင်စိုး၊ ကိုမျိုးရန်နောင်သိမ်း၊ ပန်ဆယ်လို နှင့် မောင်မောင်အေး တို့အား ရာဇသတ်ကြီး ပုဒ်မ ၅၀၅(ခ)ဖြင့် တရားစွဲထားပြီး ဖမ်းဝရမ်းထုတ်ထားကြောင်း တပ်မတော် ကြေညာ". Eleven Media Group (in Burmese). 13 February 2021.
  12. ^ "ကိုမင်းကိုနိုင်အပါအဝင် နာမည်ကြီး လူပုဂ္ဂိလ် (၇)ဦးကို ဖမ်းဝရမ်းထုတ် [Issued an arrest warrant for seven famous people, including Min Ko Naing]". The Voice Weekly (in Burmese). 13 February 2021.
  13. ^ "ကိုမင်းကိုနိုင်အပါအဝင် ခုနစ်ဦးကို စစ်အစိုးရ ဖမ်းဝရမ်းထုတ်". Radio Free Asia (in Burmese). 13 February 2021.
  14. ^ "ကိုမင်းကိုနိုင်၊ ကိုဂျင်မီ၊ အဆိုတော်လင်းလင်းတို့ အပါအဝင် (၇) ဦးကို ဖမ်းဝရမ်းထုတ်". Duwun (in Burmese). 13 February 2021.
  15. ^ "မင်းကိုနိုင်၊ ဂျင်မီနှင့် လင်းလင်း အပါအဝင် ၇ ဦးကို တရားစွဲဆို". The Myanmar Times (in Burmese). 13 February 2021.
  16. ^ "In Myanmar, Anonymous Attacks Have Junta's Families Living in Fear". The Irrawaddy. 2021-06-12.
  17. ^ "Local Event: An Evening about Burma Spring with Pencilo". Fremont, CA Patch. 15 September 2021.
  18. ^ "Myanmarese author's harrowing chronicle of protest published in Korea". The Korea Times. 7 February 2022.
  19. ^ "ပန်ဆယ်လို ရေးသည့် နွေဦးတော်လှန်ရေးအကြောင်းစာအုပ် ကိုရီးယားတွင် ရောင်းအားကောင်း". DVB. 2022-11-24. Retrieved 2022-12-30.
  20. ^ Kumar, Sanjay (2022-03-01). "'This struggle must be won': Burmese writer talks about her book 'Spring Revolution'". The Korea Herald. Retrieved 2022-12-30.
  21. ^ "ရန်ကုန်ရှိ ပန်ဆယ်လို၏ နေအိမ်ကို စစ်ကောင်စီ ချိပ်ပိတ်". Mizzima Myanmar News and Insight. Retrieved 2022-12-30.
  22. ^ Irrawaddy, The (2022-02-18). "လင်းလင်း၊ ချစ်သုဝေ အပါအဝင် လူသိများသူအချို့ နေအိမ်များ ချိပ်ပိတ်ခံရ". The Irrawaddy. Retrieved 2022-12-30.
  23. ^ "နိုင်ငံသားအဖြစ်မှ ရပ်စဲကြောင်း ကြေညာခံရသည့်အပေါ် တုံ့ပြန်ချက်များ". DVB. 2022-03-05. Retrieved 2022-12-30.
  24. ^ "Pencilo wins South Korea's Kim Geun Tae Foundation Democracy Award". DVB. Retrieved 2022-12-30.
  25. ^ "ကင်မ်ဂျွန်းထယ်ဒီမိုကရေစီဆုရငွေ မြန်မာပြည်အတွက်လှူဒါန်းမယ်လို့ မပန်ဆယ်လိုပြော". Radio Free Asia (in Burmese). Retrieved 2022-12-30.
  26. ^ 한 미얀마 유학생이 평산책방을 찾아왔습니다.
  27. ^ "စစ်လေယာဉ်ပစ်ချရေး Project Dragonfly ရန်ပုံငွေဖြင့် စတင်တာဝန်ထမ်းဆောင်နေဟု NUG ကြေညာ". DVB. August 10, 2022.
  28. ^ "နွေဦးတော်လှန်ရေးအကြောင်းပြ ကြီးပွားနေတဲ့ ပန်ဆယ်လို". PCT News. 29 January 2024.
  29. ^ "ပန်ဆယ်လိုရဲ့ ဒေါ်လာ ၁ သန်းကျော်တန် အိမ်ဂယက်". Ko Thet News. 23 January 2024.
  30. ^ "၂၀၁ရ ခုနှစ်အတွက် အမျိုးသားစာပေဆုရွေးချယ်နိုင်ရေး ဖတ်ရှုစိစစ်ရမည့် စာအုပ်များ လက်ခံလျက်ရှိရာ ၂၀၁၈ ခုနှစ် ဇန်နဝါရီလ (၂၄) ရက် တွင် စာအုပ် (၁၀၀) အုပ် ထပ်မံရရှိ". MOI Web Portal (in Burmese). 24 January 2018.
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