N E W S

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
For further information, contact:
Nan Graham, (212) 632-4930, nan.graham@simonandschuster.com
Larry Siems,(212) 334-1660 ext. 105, lsiems@pen.org


Indonesian Publisher to Receive 2004 Jeri Laber International Freedom to Publish Award
Presented by the Association of American Publishers

New York, New York, March 25, 2004: Joesoef Isak, a courageous Indonesian publisher, has been selected as the 2004 recipient of the Jeri Laber International Freedom to Publish Award. Mr. Isak, who was imprisoned from 1967 to 1977, is the director of the Indonesian publishing house Hasta Mitra. He is being recognized for his long commitment to world literature in the face of great political obstacles-and personal peril-over the past twenty-five years. The annual award, given for the second year by the International Freedom to Publish Committee (IFTPC) of the Association of American Publishers, will be officially presented on April 20 at the PEN Annual Gala at the Pierre Hotel in New York City.

"We American publishers are full of admiration for Joesoef's lifetime of courageous publishing," said Nan Graham, chair of the International Freedom to Publish Committee. "Released after ten years in prison without charges or trial, he immediately resumed publishing important, controversial works in his country, some of which have been published in the United States and around the world."

Joesoef Isak was born in Kampung Ketapang, Jakarta, in 1928. His father was employed by a British telegraph office, and Joeseof attended Catholic schools, learning Dutch and English. In 1945, at the end of the war and Japanese occupation, Joesoef was a working journalist and a rising intellectual and advocate of President Soekarno's radical Indonesian nationalism. In the chaos that followed an attempted 1965 coup d'etat, Soeharto took control of the country, instigating one of the bloodiest mass killings in modern history. Soon after, as followers of Soekarno and intellectuals in general were targeted by Soeharto's forces, Joesoef was detained, interrogated, and released a number of times between 1965 and 1967. In 1967 he was sent to Salemba Prison, where he remained for the next ten years without charge or trial.

In April 1980, Joesoef launched Hasta Mitra. His partners were also former political prisoners - Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Indonesia's most renowned living author, and the late Hasjim Rahman, a newspaper publisher. Their first book was volume one of Pramoedya's Buru Quartet, an epic fictional account of the rise of Indonesian nationalism.

Within two weeks of release, 10,000 copies of the first volume had been sold, and the second volume was soon issued. On May 29, 1981, the government placed an official ban on both books. Joesoef was detained and interrogated, and his son, Verdi, was expelled from university.

Despite enormous fiscal and political burdens, Hasta Mitra kept producing more books by Pramoedya and others. Almost all those books were quickly banned by the Indonesian government while garnering attention and acclaim from the rest of the world.

With the fall of Soeharto's regime in 1998, Hasta Mitra republished Pramoedya's Buru Quartet, followed by other works by Pramoedya and other writers. In 2000, Hasta Mitra published the first book to offer eyewitness testimony to the aborted 1965 coup, and the first in Indonesia to link Soeharto to the movement that attempted to unseat Soekarno.

In 2003, when the U.S. State Department released documents on the 1965 coup, they were published by Hasta Mitra in a book titled CIA Documents: The Effort to Overthrow Soekarno. The documents included State Department, American Embassy in Jakarta, and Pentagon cables, as well as numerous memoranda from the Oval Office.

Since the death of Hasjim Rahman in 1999, Joesoef has directed Hasta Mitra on his own. He continues to uphold the highest standards of excellence, despite the instability of the Indonesian economy.

The International Freedom to Publish Award recognizes a book publisher outside the United States who has demonstrated courage and fortitude in the face of political persecution and restrictions on freedom of expression. The award is named in honor of Jeri Laber, one of the founding members of the IFTPC and the committee's professional advisor for more than twenty-five years. She was a founder of Helsinki Watch (which ultimately became Human Rights Watch), and was its executive director from 1979 to 1995. Her memoir, The Courage of Strangers: Coming of Age with the Human Rights Movement, was published in 2002 by Public Affairs Books.

The IFTPC was founded in 1975 by the Association of American Publishers (AAP). It was one of the first groups in the world formed specifically to defend and broaden the freedom of the written word and to protect and promote the rights of book publishers and authors around the world. Among its activities, the committee monitors and publicizes free-expression issues around the world, sends fact-finding missions to countries where free expression is under siege, lobbies both at home and overseas on behalf of persecuted book publishers, and offers moral support and practical assistance to threatened publishers abroad.

The AAP is the national trade association of the U.S. book publishing industry. The AAP's approximately three hundred members include most of the major commercial book publishers in the United States, as well as smaller and nonprofit publishers, university presses, and scholarly societies. The defense of intellectual freedom at home and freedom of expression worldwide, the protection of intellectual property rights in all media, and the promotion of reading and literacy are among the association's primary concerns.

PEN American Center and the AAP are partners in ongoing efforts to protect the freedoms to write, publish, and read in the United States and to expand these freedoms internationally. Presented at the PEN Gala in New York, The Jeri Laber International Freedom to Publish Award, the PEN/Barbara Goldsmith Freedom to Write Awards and the PEN/Newman's Own First Amendment Award all serve to draw attention to women and men who have fought, often at great personal cost, for these essential freedoms.

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