Secret trials of political prisoners in late 2008
Burma remains one of the most repressive and closed societies in the world. A shadowy clique of generals, who call themselves the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC), have ruled the country in one incarnation or another since 1962.
Imprisoning people for their political beliefs is nothing new. Burma’s most famous dissident and prisoner, Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi , has spent most of the years since 1989 under house arrest in Rangoon.
In May 2009, authorities arrested Aung San Suu Kyi and transferred her to Insein Prison related to the unwanted intrusion by an American man who allegedly swam across a lake to her house. Authorities charged her with breaching conditions of her house arrest order under section 22 of the 1975 State Protection Act. On August 11, 2009, a criminal court inside Insein prison sentenced her to three years of imprisonment, with the sentence reduced to 18 months, to be served under house arrest.
One of Aung San Suu Kyi’s deputies, U Tin Oo, had his house arrest order extended for another year on February 12, 2009. He has been under total house arrest, like Suu Kyi, since 2003, when pro-military thugs tried to kill both of them during an attack in northern Burma. In 2005, activists including Hkun Tun Oo and his colleagues in the Shan Nationalities League for Democracy, a political party, were sentenced to over 96 years in prison, the first time such outrageously long terms have been handed down to opposition political activists.
While the detention of Suu Kyi has rightly been the subject of great interest and concern, far less attention has been given to the whole generation of activists who are paying for their courage with long prison sentences in brutal conditions.
Zargana, one of Burma’s most famous comedians and actors, is a long-time opponent of military rule who has in recent years become a high-profile activist and relief worker, assisting many sick and impoverished Burmese who have been further marginalized by the military’s self-serving development policies.
U Gambira is a young Buddhist monk who played a key role in the 2007 demonstrations, emblematic of widespread discontent among young people over declining living standards and repressive military rule.
Su Su Nway, a woman from Burma’s rural heartland, challenged Burmese authorities in 2005 when she protested being forced to build a road in her town and was thrown in prison for it. She has since become one of the most bold and outspoken labor activists in the country.
Min Ko Naing, one of the leaders of the 1988 student-led demonstrations, spent the years between 1989 to 2004 in prison, mostly in solitary confinement. Upon his release, he and many other long-term activists formed the “88 Generation Students,” a group who has chosen to stay inside Burma and engage in peaceful protest against military rule to initiate dialogue for political, economic, and social reform.
These four prominent people represent diverse strands of defiance to military rule and remain in prison today.
In the past few years, repression inside Burma has increased in step with long-orchestrated moves to entrench military rule through nominal political reforms and creation of a civilian apparatus loyal to the army.
During the September 2007 crackdown, Burmese security forces beat, arbitrarily arrested, detained, and shot monks and other protesters in the streets of Rangoon. Police and plain-clothes paramilitary members arrested thousands of peaceful participants in the protests in nighttime raids on monasteries and their homes. At least 31 were killed. In the following days, hundreds more were beaten, arbitrarily arrested, and detained at makeshift detention facilities, police stations, and jails.
In May 2008, despite Cyclone Nargis, which devastated a large part of the country days earlier, the SPDC went ahead with a constitutional referendum widely denounced by the international community as a sham. Human Rights Watch reported on the government’s tightening of already far-reaching restrictions on freedom of assembly, association, and the media in the run-up to the referendum.
The referendum was a further step in the military government’s process of “disciplined democracy,” underway since multiparty elections in 1990 delivered a resounding defeat to the military and its favored party. Since then, the SPDC has carefully orchestrated its so-called democratic process to ensure that political activists and human rights defenders will be excluded; either by imprisoning them, intimidating them, or forcing them into exile. The process aims to convince the international community that real change is taking place, when all the military is planning is continued repressive rule with a tightly controlled civilian façade.
In September 2008, the SPDC released over 9,000 prisoners from Burma’s jails to divert attention from the one-year anniversary of the 2007 crackdown. But of the 9,000, only eight were political prisoners, and one of them was rearrested the next day and detained again for another two months. One of the eight was Burma’s oldest political prisoner and one of its longest serving, 78-year-old U Win Tin, a journalist and political activist, imprisoned at notorious Insein prison in Rangoon from July 1989 until September 2008.
In February 2009, the SPDC released more than 6,000 prisoners to demonstrate their cooperation with the visiting United Nations special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Myanmar, Tomas Ojea Quintana. Only an estimated 31 of them were political activists, many of whom had been in prison before the 2007 demonstrations.
From early October 2008, the military government started punishing a broad cross-section of Burmese dissidents and civil society actors. The SPDC stepped up secret trials of hundreds of activists, Buddhist clergy, and human rights defenders in prisons, in closed court proceedings across the country. The rule of law has been grossly disfigured by military manipulation.
Trials are manifestly unfair in Burma for those who oppose the military government. There is no judicial independence: judges in Burma serve at the whim of the SPDC and must follow the directives of the military. Defense lawyers of political activists are provided little or no time or opportunity to present a defense. Frequently they are not permitted to examine government evidence, and at times evidence used against political detainees is fabricated. Defense lawyers have tightly controlled access to their clients, and have been jailed for requesting that trials meet basic standards of fairness and justice.
Families of prisoners are often not permitted to attend trials. Even if they do find out where their family members are being tried and can travel there, officials have been barring members of the public from entering the courtrooms.
The military government uses vaguely worded archaic laws that criminalize free expression, peaceful demonstration, and forming organizations. Burma’s colonial-era penal code has not fundamentally changed since 1861, nor have many other old, repressive laws from Burma’s past.
Before the trial starts, the client and defense lawyer meet to discuss the case so that the client can instruct his or her lawyer. These meetings usually happen at police custody centers, where political prisoners are transferred when they are due to appear in court. Police officers and members of Special Branch are present and watch these meetings, so there is no privacy for the client and the lawyer to discuss the case. Once the trial starts, the judge, the prosecution lawyers, the prosecuting officers, and prosecution witnesses follow SPDC instructions.
—Saw Kyaw Kyaw Min, lawyer representing political activists, was charged with contempt of court and fled Burma in December 2008.
Many activists have been charged under section 505(b) of the Penal Code which prohibits making, publishing, or circulating “any statement, rumor, or report...likely to cause fear or alarm to the public or to any section of the public whereby any person may be induced to commit an offense against the State or against public tranquility.” Other commonly used charges include damaging or defiling a place of worship with intent to insult the religion, libel against foreign powers, statements causing public mischief, unlawful association, and holding foreign currency without permission.
The government has charged numerous activists, journalists, monks, and students with being “terrorists” and accused them of stockpiling explosives and weapons in monasteries.
For a current list of political prisoners and charges please see: http://www.aappb.org/prisoners1.html.
Harsh prison conditions
Since early 2006, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has suspended its independent and confidential visits to Burma’s prisons. The military government insisted that government officials be in attendance during interviews with prisoners in direct contravention of the ICRC’s operating procedures. Since then, there have been only two visits to prominent political activists by international officials. The former UN special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Myanmar, Paulo Pinheiro, visited Insein prison in November 2007 and had brief access to several high profile prisoners such as Su Su Nway. Pinheiro’s successor, Tomas Ojeo Quintana, also briefly visited Insein prison in August 2008 and met Win Tin, U Gambira, and two other prisoners. During his second visit to the prison in February 2009, Quintana could only meet five lesser known and government-screened political prisoners.
Conditions in Burmese jails are dreadful. For political prisoners, ill-treatment and torture are commonplace. Punishments include being put into stress positions, beatings, and isolation in cramped and dark cells, otherwise known as “dog cells.” Food and medical treatment are often poor or nonexistent, and in many cases prisoners have to pay for it themselves.
Some of those sentenced in late 2008 have been transferred to isolated prisons in rugged inhospitable areas. Activists are transferred to rural facilities to make it more difficult for families to visit, for lawyers to represent them, and for information on their welfare to get out to the international community.
Getting detailed information out of Burma’s prisons is extremely difficult and dangerous. In late December 2008, a court sentenced Zaw Naing Htwe, the brother of imprisoned ‘88 Generation Students (a prominent dissident group) leader Kyaw Kyaw Htwe, to nine years in prison for receiving a letter from his brother smuggled out of Insein prison weeks earlier. Three prison guards were also arrested and charged.
For political activists, time in prison does not only represent physical and mental punishment and estrangement from their loved ones. It comes with the knowledge that through long jail terms the military is trying to make them, their friends, and their peaceful movement for democracy and human rights irrelevant to Burma and forgotten by the outside world.
Zargana
Zargana (also known as Zarganar, whose real name is Maung Thura) is Burma’s most famous social satirist and activist. A former dentist (hence his stage name Zargana, “pliers” in Burmese), he became famous in the late 1980s as a stage and TV comedian, especially for his “Beggar” stage shows in which he and his comedic troupe poked fun at the corruption of Burmese military leaders, deteriorating living standards, and the lack of basic freedoms in Burma.
Many of these shows used Burmese wordplay, the art of double entendre for which the tonal Burmese language is ripe. Zargana calls these calibrated jokes, in Burmese ha tha, “under the table” and “behind the curtain” humor, a uniquely Burmese blend of humor part Jon Stewart, part Benny Hill, fueled by irreverent anti-government sentiment.
One of Zargana’s most popular jokes centered on the efficiency of the generals in the late 1980s: “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 40 years with no brains!” Playing on Burmese tones, Zargana would shi-kho, the respectful gesture of putting ones hands together and gently bowing, and say the names of Burmese military leaders but twist the pronunciation of kho, which in another tone means ‘stealing’.
During the 1988 uprising, Burmese authorities arrested Zargana for leading other artists in support of the anti-government demonstrations. He was tortured in jail. Following his release in 1989, he spoke out again while campaigning for his mother, who was running for parliament in the lead-up to the 1990 elections. For this he was thrown back in prison for four years. In 1991, during this period of incarceration, he won a Human Rights Watch/Hellman-Hammett grant for persecuted writers.
While in prison the authorities banned Zargana from writing, but he still managed to record his jokes and poems secretly, one of which was collected in the 1996 PEN Anthology of Imprisoned Writers volume “This Prison where I Live”:
I send my thoughts beyond these walls
Day in, day out, from dawn to night
I dream the endless daydream
Dream the endless journey
Through the night, fretting
Champing at the bit
The one I call for does not come
The one I wait for never appears
Ah, if only I could stop the
Thinking, seeing, hearing, dreaming
I wouldn’t feel a thing.
After his release in 1993, Zargana continued to act in plays and some films and was a vocal advocate supporting people living with HIV/AIDS. But his outspoken criticism of military rule meant that he was often blacklisted from appearing in public.
He made several films in the past decade. His 2006 film “Running Out of Patience” was banned, possibly because he made public criticisms of tightening government restrictions on the annual Thingyan water festival. Authorities criticized his public talks as “inciting public unrest and violence.”
After the lavish 2006 wedding video of President Than Shwe’s daughter was leaked to the general public, sparking widespread resentment, Zargana quipped about what everyone else in the country suspected: that the wedding was arranged because the president’s daughter, Thandar Shwe, was already near giving birth, having been made pregnant by a man other than the army officer, favored by her father, whom she married. “In other countries, instant noodles and instant coffee are popular. Only in Burma are there instant babies,” Zargana joked.
Zargana became one of the most prominent artists to raise private donations and organize social relief programs around health issues for Rangoon’s poor. He was often joined by the actor Kyaw Thu who runs the popular non-profit Free Funeral Service Society, which provides funerals to those in the community who cannot afford it. Zargana refused caution from family and friends to tone down his statements and avoid arrest, saying, “How can I run? I have a big bald head; the police can find me anytime!”
During the 2007 demonstrations, Zargana and other artists publicly supported the monks, handing out alms (food and water) to monks before a major demonstration. The publicity around this act, and his frequent interviews with the foreign media, got Zargana arrested again in September 2007. For a month, the SPDC moved him between several detention and interrogation facilities. Conditions in detention were dire. Yet, on his release, with characteristic sardonic humor, he told Human Rights Watch what happened to him in prison:
I was held in the dog cells in solitary confinement for eight days and was not allowed to bathe for three days. I had to relieve myself on a tray. When it became full, I tried to urinate under the door but the dogs tried to bite me.
—Zargana, describing his time served in a “Military Dog Cell” to Human Rights Watch, October 2007.
Following his October 2007 release, Zargana continued to be politically active. After the cyclone struck Burma in May 2008, he mobilized a network of more than 400 supporters to drive supplies down to affected areas daily and to raise money for urgently needed food, water, and shelter.
Despite Zargana’s heroic relief efforts, his outspoken criticism of the military government’s ineffectual response landed him in jail again. Days before his arrest on June 4, 2008, he gave interviews to foreign news outlets in which he reminded the international community about the continuing desperate state of cyclone-affected communities and the poor government response. He told the exile Irrawaddy magazine:
I want to save my own people. That’s why we go with any donations we can get. But the government doesn't like our work. It is not interested in helping people. It just wants to tell the world and the rest of the country that everything is under control and that it has already saved its people.
—Zargana, two days before his arrest in Rangoon, June 2008.
Zargana’s trial began in August 2008 in closed proceedings at Insein prison. The charges included “insulting... either [through] spoken or written [means]... another religion” (section 295(a) of the Penal Code) making statements causing public mischief (section 505(b)) and sections 32(b) and 36 of the Television and Video Law, sections 22(a) and 38 of the Electronic Transactions Law, and section 17(2) of the Unlawful Associations Act. These provisions criminalize what should be protected forms of expression and association, including giving interviews to members of the foreign media and possessing video footage or photographs of government abuses.
Among items seized from his house in the police raid and used as evidence against him were copies of the movie Rambo 4, which is set in Burma, and video and still images of the cyclone-affected areas and of the 2007 demonstrations.
On November 21, 2008, the prison court sentenced him to 59 years in prison. His sentence was reduced by 24 years in February 2009, to 35 years.
Following his trial, Zargana was transferred to a prison in Myitkyina, Kachin State, in northern Burma, known for its bitterly cold winter. Members of his family made the long trip north to visit him in December, where they reported he was in fine spirits and “enjoying the cold.” His mother, the prominent writer and political activist Daw Kyi Oo, died on March 20, 2009.
I feel the same way as other mothers whose sons also face the same fate. Now I am numb. What my son did was for the sake of the country. I don't mind how many cases they charged my son with.
—Writer Kyi Oo, Zargana's mother, August 18, 2008.
U Gambira
Perhaps the most emblematic of the monks is 28-year-old U Gambira (real name U Sandawbartha). U Gambira is one of the main leaders of the All Burma Monks Alliance, which instituted the patta nikkujjana kamma (overturning the bowls) in September 2007, a gesture effectively signaling that members of the military had been excommunicated by the Buddhist clergy. He is one of the most visible and outspoken young monks who led the demonstrations and a key organizer, switching his time between Rangoon and Mandalay to avoid the authorities. Following the crackdown, he went underground.
After more than a month in hiding, U Gambira was arrested in Mandalay on November 4, 2007. The authorities had arrested his brother Aung Kyaw Kyaw a few weeks earlier to force U Gambira to surrender, a form of collective punishment. They then arrested his father for the same purpose on the day U Gambira was caught. Authorities held his father for one month in Mandalay prison before releasing him.
The regime’s use of mass arrests, murder, torture, and imprisonment has failed to extinguish our desire for the freedom that was stolen from us. We have taken their best punch. Now it is the generals who must fear the consequences of their actions. We adhere to nonviolence, but our spine is made of steel. There is no turning back. It matters little if my life or the lives of colleagues should be sacrificed on this journey. Others will fill our sandals, and more will join and follow.
—U Gambira, writing in the Washington Post on the day of his arrest, November 4, 2007.
The young monk was charged with ten offenses for his role in leading the monk’s alliance, including violations of section 6 of the Law Relating to the Forming of Organizations, and sections of the Penal Code on unlawful assembly (section 145), rioting (section 147), insulting another religion (section 295(a)), and making statements that intend to cause military officials to mutiny or disregard their duties (Section 505(a)).
In November 2008, a court sentenced U Gambira to 68 years in prison, 12 of them with hard labor. His brother Aung Ko Ko Lwin received 20 years in prison for hiding him and was sent to Kyaukpyu prison in Arakan state, and his brother-in-law Moe Htet Hlyan was also jailed for helping him while on the run, and is now in Moulmein prison in Mon state.
While he was detained at Hkamti prison in Sagaing Division in western Burma, his mother Daw Yay made an uncomfortable three day journey by boat to visit him. She told Radio Free Asia: “The trip from Mandalay to [Hkamti] prison was like being sent to hell alive. My life, and my family’s life, is just clockwork now. We eat and sleep like robots. There is no life in our bodies. The ordeal we are going through—it’s a punishment for our entire family.”
In May 2009, U Gambira was transferred to an even more remote facility at Kale in Sagaing Division. He is said to be in deteriorating health. The authorities have refused family members permission to visit him. His 68-year sentence was reduced by five years in June 2009.
Ma Su Su Nway
One of the most stalwart activists working to end forced labor in Burma is 35-year-old Ma Su Su Nway. In 2005, she won an historic victory against local officials in her village in Thanlyin township near Rangoon who had forced her and other villagers to build a road. The local officials responsible went to prison for eight months, but Su Su Nway herself was also sentenced to 18 months in Insein prison—for allegedly defaming the village chairman.
Following international pressure, notably from the International Labour Organization (ILO), the authorities released her in June 2006. Su Su Nway has since continued to challenge the government and has been frequently arrested. In 2007, the ILO and the SPDC agreed on a mechanism to end the practice of punishing people like Su Su Nway who merely complain about forced labor, a clear indication of how deplorable the human rights situation is in Burma.
On August 28, 2007, Su Su Nway staged a dramatic small protest in downtown Rangoon where she yelled out: “Lower fuel prices! Lower commodity prices!” Thugs from the government-backed Union Solidarity and Development Association and Swan Arr Shin, directed by members of the Special Branch of the Burmese police, attacked her even as some of her supporters linked their arms around her to protect her. The thugs struck Su Su Nway, knocking her down, but she managed to escape. In hiding she gave many interviews to the press. In one interview she articulated why she continued to challenge the military government:
Because we are in hiding does not mean that we are in retreat, but we worry that there will be nobody left to stand up for the people and to speak out if we all go to jail. We know we are water in their [the regime's] hands, and we cannot escape for long, but before we get arrested we want to say what we should say during the time we are in hiding.
We held the demonstrations not only for us, but for all people, including those who beat us and tried to arrest us, including the police. Those abusing us are also facing difficult daily lives. They have been used by the military regime because their lives are under military rule.
—Ma Su Su Nway, interviewed in hiding, October 2007.
Su Su Nway stayed in hiding until November, 2007, when she travelled with colleague Bo Bo Wing Hlaing to the hotel where the visiting UN special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Myanmar, Paulo Pinheiro, was staying. She raised a banner criticizing the SPDC, using language that mockingly echoed the SPDC’s own crude propaganda slogans, the sign read: “Oppose those relying on China, acting as thieves, holding murderous views.” Authorities immediately arrested her.
In November 2008 a special court inside Insein prison sentenced Ma Su Su Nway to 12-and-a-half years in prison on charges including sedition (section 124(a)) and making statements that cause fear or alarm to the public or induce others to commit offenses against the state or public tranquility (section 505(b)). This sentence was later reduced to eight-and-a-half years.
Ma Su Su Nway has significant health concerns, including a serious heart condition and hypertension. According to the AAPPB, prison authorities have not provided her with adequate medical care, and she has difficulty walking. In November 2008, authorities transferred her to Oo-Bo prison in Mandalay, and soon after to Kale prison in Sagaing Division.
Min Ko Naing
Min Ko Naing (whose name literally means “conqueror of kings”) is a 46-year-old activist who has spent 17 of the past 20 years in prison for his political beliefs, most of it in solitary confinement. On his release in late 2004, he vowed to stay inside Burma and continue his struggle for basic freedoms. As the 88 Generation Students increased their activities of peaceful defiance against military rule, Min Ko Naing articulated his approach for peaceful change in an interview with the exiled media:
Our door remains open for reconciliation. While we are the oppressed who have been struggling against injustice in the country, we continue to open our door because we usually find the answer to a problem is based on the principle of national reconciliation. The issue is the status of the government’s door. We will continue to knock so that we can give them the message that we need to work together in making a nation instead of annihilating each other.
—Min Ko Naing prior to the demonstrations, April 2007.
In mid-2008, authorities charged Min Ko Naing and other leaders of the 88 Generation Students—Ko Ko Gyi, Htay Kywe, Pyone Cho, Min Zaya, and others—with 22 offenses for their involvement in the demonstrations.
We initiated these peaceful marches not only to protest against the hike in fuel prices, but to bring attention to the immense suffering of the people of Burma. Our goal has always been, and will remain, peaceful transition to a democratic society and national reconciliation.
—Htay Kywe, in a letter sent to the United Nations Security Council while in hiding, September 2007.
Min Ko Naing and Ko Ko Gyi are currently being held in Kengtung prison in Burma’s northeastern Shan State. According to family members, Min Ko Naing’s eyesight is failing, he has a serious heart condition, and he has not received any medical care from the authorities. When family members managed to see him in late December 2008, while the weather in Burma’s far northeast is cold, he said that being held in solitary confinement was “like living in a refrigerator.”