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Yahoo! My Yahoo! Mail More Yahoo! Services Account Options New User? Sign Up Sign In Help Yahoo! Search web search Home Singapore Asia Pacific World Business Entertainment Sports Technology Weekend Edition Australia China India Indonesia Japan Malaysia Philippines Thailand Vietnam FEATURE: The comic who can't be cowed ANN - Wednesday, February 9 Send IM Story Print Bangkok (The Nation-Thailand/ANN) - A lucky Burmese man manages to get a passport and travels to India, where he visits a dentist. The dentist asks, "Don't you have dentists in Burma?" "Yes, we do," the man replies, "but we're not allowed to open our mouths." Burmese comedian Zarganar used to tell that joke, but it's more than a joke. In a way it sums up his life. The word zarganar means "pliers" or "tweezers", and it's the stage name of U Thura, youngest son of well-known writers Daw Kyi Oo and U Nan Nyunt Swe. He adopted it while pursuing his degree in dental surgery at Rangoon University in the mid-1980s, though he never actually became a dentist. As chronicled in the new documentary "This Prison Where I Live", Zarganar was a comedian, leader of the performing troupe Mya Ponnama Anyeint, which appeared regularly on television and was famous for ridiculing the government of General Ne Win. Then, during the 1988 uprising, he was arrested and tortured and tossed into notorious Insein Prison for months. Two years later he was nabbed again for criticising the regime while helping his mother campaign for office as an independent. He got five years at hard labour. Released early, in 1993, Zarganar returned to show business and spent the next decade directing and producing movies. That lasted until 2006, when he was interviewed by the BBC and ended up banned from performing. He kept making speeches, though. Rex Bloomstein arranged to meet Burma's top comedian while taping footage there for a documentary he was making about freedom of expression around the world. "The very mention of his name was totally forbidden," says the British filmmaker. "We secretly filmed this extraordinary man for two days - at great risk to him." Within months Zarganar was arrested yet again, this time for giving food and water to protesting monks during abortive "Saffron Revolution". He'd been urging citizens to support the monks in interviews with radio stations based outside Burma. He spent three weeks in prison - actually a pen for about 30 of the dogs used by the military. He slept on a cement floor that was chilly enough to give him pneumonia. In May 2008, on the eve of a constitutional referendum designed to further entrench the junta's power, Cyclone Nargis raged through the Irrawaddy Delta, killing an estimated 130,000 people. It must have seemed like the gods were angry, but the referendum went ahead anyway, ignoring one of the country's worst-ever disasters. Zarganar was heavily involved in the relief work, organising hundreds of showbiz volunteers to deliver aid to rural areas. In interviews with foreign news media, including the BBC, he expressed his outrage at the junta's indifference to the people's suffering. The Special Branch Police swiftly descended, piling on charges including incitement and breaking media laws, and in November he was jailed for a staggering 59 years. There were two separate rulings, evidently aimed at silencing him forever. At least the first - the 59-year sentence - was so absurd that he was still able to joke about it. The second ruling, however, punished his family by transferring him to Myitkyina Jail in Kachin State, in the far north. Zarganar's term was later reduced to 35 years, but meanwhile there have been serious concerns about his health. Bloomstein, wary of worsening the comedian's delicate circumstances, hadn't used the Burma footage in his documentary, but on hearing that he'd been thrown away for 59 years, the Briton vowed to follow through. "I was determined to make a film that would reveal this wonderful comic personality, that would share his thoughts and feelings, his stories of arrest and torture, how he had survived five years of solitary confinement," Bloomstein says. "I also wanted people to hear his response to the years of persecution he had suffered at their hands, when he turned to me on camera and said, 'My enemy must be my friend'." Accompanied by his executive producer, German comedian Michael Mittelmeier, Bloomstein returned to Burma. The result is a movie called "This Prison Where I Live". "We wanted to get as near to Zarganar as we possibly could and show the world the prison he was in," Bloomstein says. "But it was also important to reveal the problems we encountered, the questions we had to ask ourselves about what we were doing, and why, and what harm might befall both us and the people who were helping us. It was they who had to live and survive day by day in a dictatorship. "It's all there in the film, along with excerpts from Zarganar's movies and television appearances that we managed to smuggle out of the country." Mittelmeier, who'd earlier visited Burma as a tourist, only to take up charity efforts to build schools and orphanages there, laments that Burma is "a forgotten country". Zarganar, he says, "not only tirelessly exposes the cruelty of the military with his humour and satire, but also inspires the people to speak up for themselves, something they rarely did before". Most importantly, Mittelmeier adds, Zarganar rails against the authorities "without any hatred". "His credo that 'the enemy must be your friend' shows his true greatness." Bloomstein says his specific aim is to win Zarganar's release. "There can be no excuse for the sentence that Zarganar has been given. It is a travesty of justice. It's why I've made this film - to galvanise support for his release. "Let me end with Michael's words from the final part of our film: 'They can crush a body, but they cannot crush a spirit and they cannot crush a heart and they cannot crush a mind. That's what they fear.' "It is indeed." 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