My contribution to the 26:50 project went up earlier this week.
In case you missed the previous posts, Dawit Isaak is an Eritrean-born Swedish citizen imprisoned 3,125 days ago by the Eritrean government for his work as a journalist on the country's first independent newspaper. You can sign a petition for his release here. (And thanks to those who already have.)
I've written more about the background to the fifty words on Free The Blog.
There's been some rare news today about the condition of Dawit Isaak, the imprisoned writer whom I'll be writing about as part of the 26:50 project. (My 50-word contribution should come out in the next few days – see this previous post for more background.)
Dawit is an Eritrean-born Swedish citizen arrested eight years ago in Eritrea for his work as a journalist on the country's first independent newspaper. Since then, he has been held without charge and there have been no reliable reports of his condition. Today's leaked information from a former guard is at least confirmation that he is alive, but there the good news ends.
For the past 3,119 days, Dawit has been held in solitary confinement, handcuffed almost around the clock, in a windowless cell measuring three metres by four metres. The sanitary conditions are grim and the food barely enough to sustain a life. Around 15 of the 35 fellow inmates arrested at the same time as Dawit have already died.
Writing 50 words in this situation feels like striking a match on a dark night in a force-ten gale. But writing two words, your first and second name, on this petition is an effective way to keep the pressure up. You can also use the Free Dawit website to send messages to the Eritrean government.
I'm soon going to be taking part in 26:50, a collaboration between 26 and International PEN, marking the fiftieth anniversary of PEN's Writers in Prison Committee.
26 has paired fifty of its members with fifty writers whose causes have been championed by International PEN over the years. The idea is to find out as much as you can about your writer and then write (exactly) fifty words as a response.
The results are being posted up daily, in the run up to International PEN's Free The Word festival in April. They make for fascinating reading, not just as pieces in themselves, but as little windows into the much bigger stories that lie behind.
My writer is Dawit Isaak, an Eritrean-born Swedish citizen imprisoned by the Eritrean government for his work as a journalist on the country's first independent newspaper. He has been held without trial for 3,099 days, in prisons notorious for their inhuman conditions and use of torture. His family and friends (he has many) have no way of checking on his well-being.
There's an excellent website where you can find out more about his plight (click on the English language option at the top right of the page). One simple way to help is to sign the petition on the home page, which has over 18,000 signatures, mainly from Sweden. It would be a nice side-effect of this project if some more British names appeared.
I'll write in more detail when my contribution comes out in the next few weeks.
