Media News - Monday, August 06, 2007

Myanmar bans foreign language ads after ‘hidden’ Danish message

Myanmar has banned ads in foreign languages except English after a newspaper advertisement last week carried a hidden message calling the nation's junta leader a killer, an editor said Thursday. Myanmar's press scrutiny board issued the ban earlier in the week during a meeting with a group of private publishers, said the editor of a weekly journal, who declined to be named. Danish artists ran an ad in the weekly Myanmar Times on July 23 that contained a hidden message calling for freedom in the military-run country and branding Myanmar's top ruler, Senior General Than Shwe, ‘a killer.’ The half-page ad with a sun and a palm tree was purportedly promoting tourism in Myanmar for Scandinavian holidaymakers, and contained a poem extolling the pleasures of travel. But the first letter in each line of the poem spelled the word ‘freedom,’ while the name of the supposed travel agency, Ewhsnahtrellik, is ‘Killer Than Shwe’ spelled backwards. The Danish artists, Pia Bertelsen and Jan Egesborg, form a group called Surrend that has pulled similar tricks in Iran and the former Yugoslavia to prove that even autocrats can be criticised. (AFP via Sawf News)

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