Burma's ruling military junta, which presides over one of the most heavily censored countries in the world, is set to receive an unlikely invitation - helping to choose winners in a major Asian writing competition.
The SeaWrite Awards, based in Bangkok in Thailand, promotes writers from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). In the face of heavy protests from Europe and the United States, Burma joined the economic forum last week, along with Laos.
According to SeaWrite organisers, that means it is now "almost inevitable" that the junta's embassy officials in Bangkok will be asked to help find a winning Burmese writer for next year's competition.
SeaWrite is Southeast Asia's biggest writing award and is structured so that each ASEAN country chooses its own winner. The writers are gathered together every autumn for a glittering award ceremony presided over by a member of Thailand's royal family at Bangkok's Oriental Hotel.
The Oriental, consistently voted one of the best hotels in the world, is SeaWrite's largest sponsor and has contributed to the aura of prestige that surrounds the event in Thailand.
But the new-look ASEAN will almost certainly mean that SeaWrite can expect a share of the international media and human rights spotlight that is permanently fixed on Burma, where the Oriental's parent company, the Mandarin group, already has business interests.
Burma's censorship system is among the most draconian in the world. There is no independent press or television, and books, magazines and videos have to go through rigorous checks by the government's Press Scrutiny Board.
The list of banned topics for writers includes the bloody prodemocracy uprising in 1988, the Nobel Peace Prize (won by opposition leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, in 1990), prostitution, and criticism of the ruling State Law and Order Restoration Council (Slorc) or of the army.
Between 1988 and 1993, dozens of writers and artists were detained and sentenced to between three and 20 years' imprisonment. Many have since been released, but remain blacklisted and their works banned or censored.
The worldwide writers' group, PEN International, is currently campaigning on behalf of a number of jailed writers. Novelist and pro-democracy activist, Ma Thida, who received a 20-year sentence in 1993, won a PEN Freedom to Write award last year. San San Nweh, another inmate of Rangoon's Insein Jail, has been made an honorary PEN member.
Moustache Par Par Lay, one of Burma's most famous comedians, is serving seven years' hard labour at a prison camp after performing at Aung San Suu Kyi's home.
What the Bangkok SeaWrite organising committee will make of its controversial new entrant remains to be seen, but it is highly unlikely to decide against inviting Burma to join, a member said - a decision that perhaps mirrors Thailand's official policy of "constructive engagement" with the regime.
Burma's likely entry puts the spotlight on a wider issue for the region's biggest writing award. By operating through ASEAN embassy officials, SeaWrite has quietly avoided the issue of censorship throughout the region in its near 20-year history.
Burma is an extreme example in a region in which censorship - in places like Brunei, Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and the other new ASEAN member, Laos - is the norm, to varying degrees. Thailand and the Philippines are the only countries in which writers who are outspoken on tricky domestic political issues stand a chance of a SeaWrite win.
In Slorc's Burma, those kinds of outspoken writers are in jail or blacklisted. Two novels by Wendy Law-Yone, including Irrawaddy Tango, a biting, barely-veiled attack on Burma's military rulers, are banned.
But outsiders might be surprised to know that Slorc, ironically, likes to be seen to support writers. Editorials in the state-run New Light of Myanmar newspaper regularly extol the benefits of "literary workers". One editorial exhorted writers to "attract the readers' attention by describing cultural traditions and national pride of the people".
SeaWrite's problem will be how to avoid coming in for some of the avalanche of European and American criticism focused on Burma. If US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's fiery attacks in Kuala Lumpur last week on what she called "the most repressive region in this region [Southeast Asia], and probably in the world", are anything to go by, those criticisms won't be easing up
