Sometimes prisoners are given an opportunity for early release – if they sign an agreement promising to stop their political activities. Khun Saing was offered such conditions twice. ‘They give us some questions, maybe seven or eight questions. What is your view on the NLD, what is your view of the army, what is your view of Aung San Suu Kyi, what will you do after you’re released? Very simple questions,’ he recalls. If you want to be released, says Khun Saing, you can simply tell the authorities what they want to hear. ‘I had that kind of test twice in seven years, and I failed both times.’ He refused to compromise.
Even when Khun Saing was released, the stigma of being a political prisoner made life for him and his elderly mother a misery. Military intelligence made frequent visits to the tea-shop he ran, and to the medical clinic he managed. ‘I was always under surveillance, so life was not free,’ he said. A turning point came in March 2006, when another former political prisoner, Thet Naing Oo, was beaten to death by the regime’s thugs. Released after serving eight years of a ten-year sentence, Thet Naing Oo was attacked one evening while walking home. Thugs from the pro-regime militia accused him of urinating in public, and set upon him with iron bars, big sticks and machetes. They crushed Thet Naing Oo’s head with a stone, and he died in hospital.50
Thet Naing Oo’s murder shocked Khun Saing’s seventy-four-year-old mother, because she worried that Khun Saing could be next. ‘After two or three days, she said to me: “I can’t sleep very well these days. I always worry about you, and I couldn’t make another prison visit if you were arrested again, because I am now seventy-four years old”,’ Khun Saing recalled. He had spent thirteen years in jail altogether, and his mother had been constantly harassed during that time. What came next, however, was heart-wrenching. As he told his story, for the first time Khun Saing’s eyes filled with tears. ‘My mother said she would prefer it if I left the country. She said then she would be happy and could live in peace,’ he told me. To hear those words from your mother, after so many years of suffering, must have been unimaginably painful, although Khun Saing understood exactly how his mother felt. ‘I did not want to leave, but I knew I gave her trouble a lot of the time. I could be arrested again at any time, particularly as my songs had been published and although my name was not on the CDs many people knew the songs had been composed by me. My friends also warned me, and told me that if I did not want to be arrested again, I should leave. I knew that my mother was so worried because one of my friends had been killed. She wanted to make my life safe. It was a mother’s love.’ In April 2006, he decided to leave Rangoon, and went to the Thailand–Burma border. In order to protect his mother from worry and danger, he did not even tell her he was leaving. He left some money for her as she slept, and with two items of clothing and some money he slipped away to freedom.
It should be clear by now that the regime under General Than Shwe had no regard for human life or dignity whatsoever; only when President Thein Sein took over did it begin to take a softer line. And its disregard for humanity was not limited to its own citizens. In the 1990s and early part of the twenty-first century, it showed little compunction in jailing and ill-treating foreigners who crossed its path. Several Western campaigners staged protests in Burma during these years, and although most were arrested, detained and deported from the country swiftly, British activist Rachel Goldwyn was sentenced to seven years’ hard labour for singing pro-democracy songs, although she was freed after two months. Another British activist, James Mawdsley, was given a seventeen-year sentence for handing out pro-democracy leaflets, and was only released after fourteen months due to intense international pressure. He was blindfolded, handcuffed and beaten. In his book The Heart Must Break: The Fight for Democracy and Truth in Burma, Mawdsley reflects on the experience. ‘How does torture work? It is not all brutality and pain. Half the task of the torturer is to make you feel irrational for holding out. And sure enough, when you are thoroughly exhausted and desperate for food or sleep, it is hard to think clearly,’ he writes.51 However, even though as a foreigner he was treated better than Burmese prisoners, he was physically tortured. On one occasion his interrogators pushed pens between his fingers and then squeezed the knuckles ‘until they nearly broke’.52 Another time guards used catapaults to fire pellets at him,53 and one day fifteen guards and military intelligence officers burst into his cell, five of them armed with clubs. One guard swung his club at him. ‘Before I had a chance to say a word he laid in, swinging the three-foot club with all his power, like a baseball bat, bang! bang! bang!’ Mawdsley writes. ‘The blows were crashing into my arms and legs … It was a savage assault.’54 There was an even worse beating to come, when he continued to protest in jail about prison conditions by banging on the cell door. ‘Within ten seconds the doors were flung open. Again there were about a dozen men … Five of them had clubs and there was to be no holding back this time,’ he describes. One particularly brutal guard known as ‘the Count’ was leading the attack. ‘I remember seeing the Count’s fist, then elbow, smash into my face, and then he grabbed a club off one of his colleagues. As hard as he could he swung it into the back of my head … The next thing I saw, though only for a split second, was the Count swinging it again but this time into my face … Blood was pouring from my face down my neck and front … I had a broken nose, two extremely black eyes, a cheek swollen out abominably, lumps and welts on my head and back.’55
It is important to remember, however, that if Mawdsley had been Burmese the treatment meted out to him would have been even worse. Yet in the eyes of the regime, foreign citizenship offers little protection at all, and none whatsoever if you are ethnically Burmese. In September 2009, a Burmese with American citizenship, Nyi Nyi Aung, was arrested when he arrived at Rangoon airport. He had returned to his birthplace in order to visit his mother who has cancer. He had made four previous visits, and experienced no difficulties, but this one came just a few months after he had delivered a petition to the United Nations calling for the release of political prisoners. This marked him out, and the regime exacted its revenge. ‘I was arrested by two uniformed officers and one undercover agent, after I passed through immigration. “Nyi Nyi Aung, we know everything about you,” one officer said as he handcuffed me,’ Nyi Nyi told me when I met him in Washington, DC eight months later. When his fiancee, Wa Wa Kyaw, heard the news of his arrest, her initial reaction was disbelief. Writing in the Nation, Wa Wa Kyaw recalls: ‘Nyi Nyi is an American citizen, I thought. How could this happen? And then it hit me: I might never see him again.’56
Nyi Nyi Aung was taken to an interrogation centre at first, where he was tortured, denied food for over a week, kicked in his face, beaten and deprived of sleep.57 ‘Sometimes they handcuffed me to a chair, sometimes they beat me, punched my face, twisted my arms.’ Then he was moved to Insein Prison where, like so many other prisoners, he was held in a dog kennel.58 ‘I could hear the dogs barking at night,’ he recalls. He went on hunger strike in protest, and was moved to a cell. ‘At midnight one night, the guards woke me up, put a hood over my head, and put me in a cell.’
The torture Nyi Nyi experienced has caused him long-term back problems. ‘By mid-December, I was in real pain walking, from the time when they twisted my body in the chair, handcuffing me and twisting my arms. My leg went numb and tingling, and then I could not walk at all.’ He asked for medical attention, and eventually a doctor saw him in January. He had an X-ray, and was told that if he did not receive proper treatment, he would end up paralysed. He received injections of painkillers, but no other treatment. When he was released and deported to the United States in March 2010, he required emergency medical attention for his injuries, and when I met him two months after his release he walked with sticks, in excruciating pain.
For the regime, as Bo Kyi concludes, torture is a key instrument. ‘The underlying purpose of torture is to effectively destroy the soul of a human,’ he writes.
It is designed to break down the identity of a strong man or woman, tur
ning a union leader, a politician, a student leader, a journalist or a leader of an ethnic group into a nonentity with no connection to the world outside of their torture chamber. In Burma, the regime uses torture to create a climate of fear, in order to maintain its iron grip on power. Arbitrary arrest, physical and psychological torture, unfair trials, long-term imprisonment and denial of medical care in prison are all intended to crush the human spirit … There is no doubt about it: torture is state policy in Burma.
But, as the testimonies of numerous former political prisoners show, there is another, unintended effect of torture. ‘For those of us who share that experience,’ says Bo Kyi, ‘it creates an unbreakable bond between us … We heard each other’s screams under torture … We will never turn our backs on each other, or our friends and colleagues in prison. As Myo Yan Naung Thein said after his release, “Who will keep fighting if we don’t? We have to carry on.”’59 U Win Tin shares that spirit. ‘My opinion is that when you have to face a military government, you need a little bit of courage, some sort of confrontation, because if you are always timid and afraid and intimidated, they will step on you. Sometimes you have to force yourself to be courageous and outspoken,’ he told the Irrawaddy.60 It is an epic battle of wills.
9
Bloody Spots and Discarded Flip-Flops: The Saffron Revolution
If you believe in the cause of freedom, then proclaim it, live it and protect it, for humanity’s future depends on it.
Henry ‘Scoop’ Jackson
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
Edmund Burke
ALMOST EXACTLY A year to the day after the Buddhist monks launched a nationwide protest in Burma, I found myself in a rickshaw driving down an unlit backstreet behind the bustling shops of Cox’s Bazaar, a remote town in southern Bangladesh close to the border with Burma. By torchlight, my guide took me to a dark, dank apartment covered in mould, where I spent the evening with five Burmese monks. This was their new home, their hiding place, after they had been forced to flee for their lives.
U Pyin Nyar Disa had been responsible for discipline in the All Burma Monks’ Representative Committee. On 17 September 2007 he joined the protests, and two days later helped establish the monks’ committee at Sule Pagoda in Rangoon. Five days after that, he took part in the famous march down University Avenue, past Aung San Suu Kyi’s house. According to one monk who took part and subsequently fled to Thailand, University Avenue was closed off with barbed wire and a police checkpoint. Initially, and unsurprisingly, the soldiers at the roadblock at the end of University Avenue refused to allow the monks to pass, but after no orders came from Naypyidaw the monks persuaded the soldiers to let them through. They promised that they would not do anything violent, they would only chant, and so the checkpoint was opened and they passed through. To the amazement of the monks, and the entire world, Aung San Suu Kyi herself came to the gate of her house upon hearing their chanting. It was the first time she had been seen in public for several years. ‘Some people tried to go to her, but I controlled them,’ the monk told me. ‘She seemed to be healthy, but also looked sad. She did not say anything. The crowd shouted to her: “Don’t worry, we are with you, we have come out for you.”’1 U Pyin Nyar Disa recalled: ‘When Daw Aung San Suu Kyi came out of her house, many monks were crying and she was also crying. But she looked strong. Her expression showed she would never give up. The SPDC can arrest Aung San Suu Kyi physically, but they can never arrest her spirit and her mind.’2
When the regime announced one month before, on 15 August 2007, that it was removing fuel subsidies, causing immediate and dramatic rises in the price of fuel and basic commodities, it probably had little idea what it had unleashed. Fuel and diesel costs doubled, and natural gas prices increased by 500 per cent.3 Bus fares rose to exorbitant levels – some Burmese workers earning 1,000 kyat a day would have to spent 800 kyat just to get to work.4 The people had had enough and, with encouragement from the ’88 Generation student leaders such as Min Ko Naing and Ko Ko Gyi, between 400 and 500 people marched in Rangoon four days later, in protest at the fuel price rises.
Although it is commonly believed that the crackdown did not come until later, in fact the regime arrested the key organisers within a few days of the first protests. On 21 August, Min Ko Naing, Ko Ko Gyi, Min Zeya, Ko Jimmy, Ko Pyone Cho, Ant Bwe Kyaw and Ko Mya Aye were all arrested, and by 25 August more than one hundred people had been detained.5 The junta clearly thought they could nip the movement in the bud by jailing the leaders. They were wrong, and had clearly underestimated the extent of public fury.
The protests continued, and grew in number. Yet although it was still several weeks before the army came out, it is a mistake to assume that the regime allowed the protests to continue unhindered. From almost the very beginning, the junta chose to use its civilian thugs, rather than the military, to try to break up the demonstrations. Its two civilian militia groups, the Union Solidarity Development Association (USDA) and the Swan Arr Shin (‘Masters of Force’) threatened and physically assaulted those taking part. On 28 August, for example, prominent labour activist Su Su Nway led a group of fifty people shouting ‘Lower fuel prices! Lower commodity prices!’6 Militia attempted to grab her and take her away, and a struggle broke out between them and the protestors who sought to protect her. She managed to escape, but at least twenty others were beaten up and arrested.
Protests began to spread to other parts of Burma. According to the monks I met, as early as 28 August a demonstration was held in Sittwe, Arakan State. Khemin Da was one of the organisers that day, leading monks from Myoma Kyaung monastery to a Buddhist statue. In Sittwe, as in many other towns, the numbers grew. On 9 September, 1,000 monks gathered at the stadium and then marched to a pagoda and then to government offices. By 18 September, more than 10,000 people were involved.7 Small protests were also held in late August and early September in Meiktila, Taunggok, Mandalay and in Than Shwe’s hometown of Kyaukse.8
The turning point came in a town called Pakokku, near Mandalay, on 5 September. Until that day, the monks had not come out in force. Small groups of monks were protesting, but the Sangha, the entire community of Buddhist monks, as a whole had not mobilised. That changed on 5 September.
A small group of monks had held up placards denouncing the fuel price rises, and had been cheered on by thousands of local residents. For the first time, the Tatmadaw responded directly, firing a dozen shots over the heads of the monks, and then launching a brutal assault with bamboo sticks. USDA and Swan Arr Shin joined in. It is claimed that one monk was beaten to death, and several monks were tied to a lamp post and publicly beaten.9 One monk who was present confirmed this to me. ‘[The monks] chanted “loving kindness”, and the soldiers arrested the monks and tied them to lamp posts, where they kicked and beat them with guns,’ he recalled.10 News of this incident spread, adding even more fuel to the public anger. Buddhist monks are revered in Burmese society, and the idea that soldiers should beat them caused outrage and revulsion. The fuse had been lit, and the movement grew.
On 6 September, local officials visited the Maha Visutarama monastery in Pakokku, and almost immediately at least 1,000 local civilians and monks surrounded the monastery and prevented the officials from leaving. They demanded the release of monks who had been detained the previous day, and burned four government cars. After six hours, the officials fled through a back entrance.11 Three days later, the All Burma Monks Alliance, a new organisation, issued a statement and an ultimatum to the regime. They demanded that the regime issue an apology to the monks for the way they were treated in Pakokku, immediately reduce fuel, rice, cooking oil and other commodity prices, release all political prisoners including Aung San Suu Kyi, and begin an immediate dialogue with the ‘democratic forces’ to resolve Burma’s crisis. A deadline of 17 September was imposed, one day before the anniversary of the crushing of the 1988 democracy movement and the re-establishment of direct military rule.12 If that deadline
was not met, protests would continue and the monks would launch a religious boycott, refusing to accept alms from SPDC officials – in effect, an excommunication.
The regime made no attempt to respond, and the alms bowls were overturned as a consequence. The giving and receiving of alms in Buddhism is a key religious obligation, providing the giver with necessary ‘merit’ required for life, so the boycott denied regime members and their supporters the ability to advance spiritually, as well as dealing a further blow to the legitimacy claimed by the junta.13 On 17 September the protests resumed in Rangoon, and the next day 300 monks gathered at the Shwedagon pagoda and marched to the Sule Pagoda.14 Hundreds of Rangoon residents gathered in the streets to watch, and as the monks passed, people applauded.
‘The crowds seemed to get bigger every day,’ Jean Roxburgh, a British woman who was in Rangoon at the time recalls.
Burma- a Nation at the Crossroads Page 24