The suffering inflicted on the families of political prisoners in Burma is unimaginable. In addition to the emotional trauma caused by separation, families face severe financial hardship. Sometimes this is because the main breadwinner for the family has been imprisoned, but often it is compounded by serious discrimination against family members in the workplace. Employers regard relatives of political prisoners with suspicion and fear, concerned about the consequences for their business if they have people associated with activism in their workforce. Relatives of political prisoners who run their own businesses often find customers are intimidated into boycotting them, or are forced to sign statements disowning the political prisoners and disassociating themselves from their views. In a further, deliberate act of cruelty, many prisoners were jailed in locations hundreds of miles from their families, making it extremely difficult and expensive to make visits.
Despite the release of several hundred political prisoners, hundreds more still remain in jail. The conditions in which political prisoners are held are unimaginable. Burma has forty-four prisons and at least fifty labour camps, according to the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (AAPP). Until 2011, there were an estimated 2,000 political prisoners, a figure which is now closer to 1,000.
Some political prisoners were sentenced for extraordinarily long terms, and until a new dawn appeared to break in 2011, they faced the prospect of spending the rest of their lives in jail. Bo Min Yu Ko, a member of the All Burma Federation of Student Unions (ABFSU), was sentenced on 3 January 2009 to 104 years. He was denied access to a lawyer, and his family were not permitted to attend the trial.4 Khun Htun Oo, chairman of the Shan Nationalities League for Democracy (SNLD), a party which won twenty-three seats in the 1990 elections, was sentenced in 2005 to ninety-three years. According to a message from him in 2009, smuggled out of prison, he reminded the world that ‘we didn’t commit any crime. We reaffirm our aim to empower our people to bring peace, justice and equality to the people.’5 Both were released in January 2012.
Why are activists jailed? For the very simple reason that they speak their minds, or they enable others to speak theirs – nothing more. Some are very prominent, such as Min Ko Naing, or the comedian Zarganar, jailed for fifty-nine years (later reduced to thirty-five) for criticising the regime’s slow response to Cyclone Nargis in 2008. Zarganar, released in October 2011 as part of the regime’s efforts to signal reform, had been jailed after organising a relief effort for victims of the cyclone, and was a known democracy activist who had been imprisoned several times before.6 One of his most famous jokes was this: ‘Every country has a success story to tell. Some like to boast about a citizen with no hands who can still write, or another with no legs who can still run. But there is no other country like Burma. Here we have generals able to rule a country for forty years with no brains!’7 One can understand why the regime did not really like him.
Zarganar has an extraordinary memory for people, facts and jokes, says Htein Lin, an artist who is a close friend of his and who himself spent several years in prison. Zarganar’s jokes came to him naturally and were not, it seems, simply restricted to his performances. Most were directed at the regime, and sailed very close to the wind. Htein Lin recalls: ‘One day on the phone he said to me, “Htein Lin, do you know instant baby?” I said, “Oh my God, what is instant baby?” He replied: “Oh you’re stupid. Don’t you understand instant coffee and instant noodle? You just open the packet and pour boiling water. Well, two months ago Senior General Than Shwe’s daughter got married, and within just two months she has a baby: instant baby.”’ On another occasion, when Min Ko Naing and other dissidents had launched a campaign in which everyone wore white, Zarganar told Htein Lin: ‘While we have this white campaign, the regime has invented white Internet – you just open the computer and you can see nothing but white!’ Even the tapping of his phone is turned into a joke. ‘I am very lucky,’ Zarganar told Htein Lin. ‘If I want to tell anything to the government, I can just pick up the phone and talk to anyone. I have a special way to contact the government.’
Su Su Nway was the first Burmese to sue the regime successfully for using forced labour – and was jailed for her efforts. After two years in jail, she was released, only to be returned to prison a year later for her role in the Saffron Revolution. She was sentenced to twelve and a half years, but was freed in 2011.
Nilar Thein is another prominent prisoner. A campaigner in both the 1988 protests and the Saffron Revolution, she is married to Ko Jimmy. They had a baby in 2007, but when their daughter, Nay Kyi or ‘Sunshine’, was just five months old Nilar Thein was forced to go into hiding. She took Sunshine with her at first, but the baby’s cries risked giving Nilar Thein away, and so Ko Jimmy’s elderly mother looked after her. The BBC’s Andrew Harding reported in September 2007:
Their apartment is now guarded by plain-clothed policemen. Two at the door. Two outside. Two across the road. They are waiting to see if Nilar will come back for something rather precious – her five-month-old daughter … One night recently, Nilar sneaked back close enough to hear her baby crying through an open window. ‘They are using her as bait,’ she said. ‘I should be breastfeeding her. But I cannot give in.’ She is, a friend told me admiringly, a stubborn woman.8
At the time, Nilar Thein said, with defiance mixed with natural human emotion any mother would feel: ‘I [was] so choked up with feeling when I had to leave my daughter with my mother-in-law. It [would] not be wrong to say it was the worst day of my life … [yet] I don’t regret it at all. I don’t because just like my daughter I see many faces of children in my country who lack a future. With that I encourage myself to continue this journey.’9 Almost a year later, Nilar Thein was arrested,10 and a few months later was sentenced to sixty-five years in jail along with her husband, Ko Jimmy. They were held in different prisons and didn’t see each other for over four years. When they were released in January 2012, they had an emotional reunion at Rangoon airport. Two weeks later, I had the privilege of meeting Ko Jimmy. I didn’t have the heart to subject him to a detailed political interview; instead, I simply asked him how his wife and child were doing. He smiled, and said they were well.
Other female political prisoners can relate to Nilar Thein’s experience. Nita May discovered she was pregnant two months after she had been jailed in 1990. She had been sentenced to three years hard labour, and was held in solitary confinement. Despite being pregnant, she was required to carry out tasks around the jail. ‘I was forced to scrub the floors, water the plants, clear the moss from the prison gardens,’ she recalls. When she was arrested, at least twenty military intelligence and police officers came to her house, in the middle of the night. ‘Arresting one woman with nothing to defend herself – not even a pin! I felt for the first time what the term “helpless” means. You are on your own, nobody can help you.’ Even though she worked for the British embassy, not even the ambassador could help her while she was in jail. Despite this, during this time in prison, and her previous detention in 1989, she never betrayed her contacts. ‘I didn’t name anyone. Nobody was taken in because of me. I sealed my lips, and thought “You can do anything to me, but I won’t name any of my associates.”’
Another female activist, Mie Mie, a zoology graduate and mother of two children, was arrested on 14 October 2007 after her leading role in the Saffron Revolution. She is alleged to have yelled ‘We will never be frightened!’ at the judges when she was sentenced to sixty-five years in prison. She had already endured five years in jail for her involvement in the protests in 1996.11
Yee Yee Htun was sentenced to fourteen years in prison for her involvement in the 1996 protests. When she was arrested, she was blindfolded, handcuffed and taken to an interrogation centre. Denied a bath for ten days, she was in Insein Prison for eleven months, and then transferred to Tharawaddy Prison. In perhaps one of the worst forms of torment, poisonous snakes regularly came into her cell. ‘When snakes came into my cell I shouted for help, but the prison
staff did not come. It was a form of torture,’ she says. ‘I had a fear of snakes and rats, and they both came into my cell often.’ She also discovered that the shower room had a peephole. ‘Prison guards secretly watched us as we washed.’ Along with Nilar Thein, Yee Yee complained to the prison authorities, wrote to the Interior Ministry and informed the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). Three months later, after an ICRC visit, the peephole was covered up.
One of the youngest female political prisoners was Su Mon Aye, sent to Insein Prison in 2000 at the age of just nineteen. As a student she had participated in the 1996 protests, after which the universities were closed for four years. Not able to continue her studies at university, she engaged in political activity, joined the NLD youth wing, and attended discussion groups led by Aung San Suu Kyi to enable young people to continue their education. On the night of her arrest, twenty soldiers, police and township authorities raided her home. ‘I was nineteen years old, and very small and skinny. They were more than forty years old – but they look at me as an “enemy”,’ she recalls. Despite her youth, Su Mon Aye showed remarkable courage and intelligence. ‘I asked if they had a warrant to search my room, and the soldier said “Oh, you are very clever!” I told them that if they wanted to enter my room they should show the warrant.’ Ignoring her, the soldiers and police pushed past, and gathered everything they could find, including NLD photographs and documents, and an award that Aung San Suu Kyi had presented to her for a poetry competition.
During her interrogation, Su Mon Aye was repeatedly asked to sign a document renouncing her political activities. ‘I told them I would not sign because it would be a lie. I could not promise not to be involved,’ she says. She also reminded them why she had become involved. ‘If the universities had stayed open and we had stayed studying, I would not be here.’ Hooded and beaten, she was kept in a cell on death row, and repeatedly told that if she signed a paper promising not to engage in more political activity, she could be released. For four months her parents did not know where she was. Sleeping on a cold concrete floor with no clean clothes and no medical assistance during her period, she sank into depression. But she never gave in.
When physical cruelty failed, the authorities tried ‘good cop’ tactics. Knowing that Su Mon Aye was struggling with prison conditions, they tried to tempt her with good food. ‘The prison food was really horrible, and I told them that not even dogs would eat it. So one day they took me into a beautiful dining room, with a sofa and many dishes on the table. I had never seen such delicious curry before,’ she describes. ‘When I saw the food, I could not stand it – I really wanted to eat it. But they told me that I had to give them two things first: sign the document renouncing my political involvement, and give information about my colleagues. I would have to betray my people.’ In such circumstances, faced with a choice of grim prison conditions or delicious food and the prospect of release, the temptation must have been immense. Remarkably, she stayed firm. ‘I told them I wanted to eat this kind of food, but I had no information to give them. I told them I wanted to go back to my cell. I could not betray my people. Back in my cell, I started trying to eat the prison food.’ Five months after her arrest universities reopened, and again the authorities tried to tempt her to sign a promise not to participate in politics. ‘I smiled, and asked: “Can you promise the university will not close again?” That made them really angry, they told me I was a stupid girl and that they could not promise that. So I told them that I could not promise not to be involved in politics. “If the university closes again, where should I go? I will protest again and be imprisoned again. It’s like a cycle.”’ Upon her release a year later, Su Mon Aye became a reporter in Burma, and then went to work for Radio Free Asia in Bangkok.
The longest-serving political prisoner in Burma until his release in 2008 was U Win Tin. One of the most senior leaders of the NLD, a close associate of Aung San Suu Kyi and a writer, U Win Tin was arrested in 1989. When he was released at the age of seventy-nine he had served nineteen years and three months in solitary confinement. For much of that time he was kept in a cell that had originally been a dog kennel, and was refused bedding. ‘The first three or so years were horrid, like hell,’ he told Andrew Buncombe of the Independent. ‘I was tortured, I was interrogated … On one occasion they questioned me for five days and five nights non-stop. I was not allowed to sleep or eat.’ He witnessed fellow prisoners die. ‘Many, many of my friends are dead. I saw them die,’ he said. Yet remarkably, like others, he kept his mind focused, writing poems and stories for other prisoners, and even saw his original sentence increase in 1996 when he wrote to the United Nations revealing prison conditions. ‘I don’t know how I kept my sanity, but I knew I had to work.’12
British photographer and activist James Mackay met U Win Tin a year after his release, and photographed him for a global campaign for political prisoners called ‘Even Though I’m free, I am not’. Mackay photographed hundreds of former political prisoners, many of them in Burma, each with the name of a current prisoner written on the palm of their hand. His iconic picture of U Win Tin, with Aung San Suu Kyi’s name written in black marker pen on his raised palm, made international headlines. But it was U Win Tin’s personality that made the opportunity so special for Mackay. ‘When U Win Tin arrived at our meeting place, he had this beautiful, broad, beaming smile. Even though he was in quite poor health, he was really vibrant. He realised the power of the picture, and wanted the whole message conveyed to the outside world,’ recalls Mackay. The encounter involved careful planning, confidentiality and considerable risk for all involved, particularly U Win Tin, who could easily have been put back in jail for meeting a foreign photographer at that time. ‘At any moment he could be hauled away to jail, but that’s not going to stop him,’ says Mackay. ‘He spent nineteen years in prison, his teeth were bashed out, he was in solitary confinement, and yet he sat in front of me saying “I don’t mind going back.” He refuses to change his opinions. He had this aura of complete invincibility, amazing strength of character, and it rubs off on you, giving you a strength as well.’ He is followed everywhere, and in one comic scene during their meeting at the top of a high-rise building, a man appeared at the window. ‘We were twenty-four floors up, it was pouring with rain outside, and suddenly this man appears, pretending to clean the windows. It was not even subtle – he was staring straight at us. We looked at each other and decided that was a sign to move.’
Less well-known political prisoners include an Internet blogger, Nay Myo Kyaw, who wrote articles online using the pseudonym Nay Phone Latt. He owned three Internet cafes, and according to The Times his blog simply described day-to-day difficulties in Rangoon, and was not explicitly political. He was jailed for twenty years. Saw Wai, who wrote a poem that was a veiled critique of Than Shwe, was given a two year sentence. Even their defence lawyer, Aung Thein, was jailed for four months.13 In 2009, six months after filming a shocking documentary about the fate of children orphaned in Cyclone Nargis, a cameraman was arrested and charged with a new offence of filming without permission – carrying a minimum jail term of ten years.14 And when a group of villagers in Natmauk, central Burma, filed a complaint that the Tatmadaw had occupied their land, eight of the villagers were arrested, and although some were released, one man, Zaw Htay, was charged under the Official Secrets Act for approaching a prohibited area and making a record that might be useful to an enemy.15 On 31 December 2009 an undercover reporter for the exiled Democratic Voice of Burma, Hla Hla Win, was sentenced to twenty years in prison for breaching the Electronic Act. She had already received a seven-year sentence a few months previously, which she was serving when the twenty-year term was added. According to the Burma Media Association, at least fourteen undercover reporters were arrested in Burma in 2009.16
With the help of a Burmese interpreter, I spoke by phone to relatives of some of these prisoners in 2010. All of them were jailed in remote prisons far from their families, and most are suffering serious
medical conditions. Pyone Cho, otherwise known as Htay Win Aung, whom I subsequently met after his release in 2012, was in an eight foot by twelve foot cell in Kawthaung Prison, in the southernmost part of Burma, near the Thai border. It is one-and-a-half days’ journey from Rangoon, but because there is no train or bus, it can only be reached by plane, which is prohibitively expensive. Before his release concerns were growing about his health: he was suffering high blood pressure and gastric problems, but was receiving no medical treatment and was denied exercise. He was reliant on the medicines his wife brought when she visited, but she was only allowed to visit once a month for half an hour. The guards watched them closely during each visit.
When Pyone Cho’s wife travelled to Kawthaung, she was only permitted to stay for a maximum of four days at a time. She tried to stay longer with the families of NLD activists, but the authorities were afraid that she would establish contact with democracy groups based on the Thai border, and ordered her to return to Rangoon. The couple had only been married four months before Pyone Cho was jailed.
Min Ko Naing was also in bad health and his relatives expressed their concern about him in our telephone conversation. Held in Kengtung Prison, Shan State, more than 1,000 miles from Rangoon, he also suffered from high blood pressure, as well as gout and a serious eye ailment, and was denied medical treatment or exercise. Food parcels sent by relatives were destroyed in the post, and they were only permitted a twenty-minute visit, once a month. Min Ko Naing previously spent fourteen years in prison. When I met him two weeks after his release in January 2012, he appeared in remarkable form considering what he had been through, but it was clear that he was not in good health.
Burma- a Nation at the Crossroads Page 22