How the Regime Punishes Political Prisoners’ Families

http://www.irrawaddy.org/highlight.php?art_id=14811

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By SAW YAN NAING Wednesday, December 17, 2008

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The wife of imprisoned activist Pyone Cho spent about 90,000 kyat (US $75) on a 10-day journey to visit him in jail in Kawthaung, southern Burma. The sister of another political prisoner, the prominent labor rights activist Su Su Nway, spent only slightly less on a six-day journey to visit her in Kale Prison in Sagaing Division, central Burma.

Family members spoke to The Irrawaddy about the huge difficulties they faced as a result of the regime’s decision to consign activists condemned in the recent series of trials to prisons in various remote parts of Burma.


Mandalay prison. (Photo: Nic Dunlop/The Irrawaddy)
The decision is being described by human rights organizations as a form of torture, imposed not only on the abused prisoners themselves but also on their families.

More than 100 of the estimated 215 activists sentenced in the November trials to terms of imprisonment of up to 68 years have been consigned to at least 20 isolated prisons in various parts of Burma, according to the Thailand-based Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (Burma), known as the AAPP.


AAPP Joint-Secretary Bo Kyi said it was international practice elsewhere in the world to confine condemned people in prisons close to where family members lived. “Here [Burma] they were moved to prisons far from their relatives.”

Bo Kyi accused the regime of intentionally creating problems for prisoners and their families, causing mental and physical pain.

Many of the political prisoners were being held under inhumane conditions and were being tortured, Bo Kyi said. Some prisons had no doctors or facilities for treating inmates.

“Some political prisoners are not allowed to walk outside their compounds,” Bo Kyi said. “They even can’t see the sun. It is very dangerous for the health of those detained in cold locations over the next few months.”

Several political prisoners, including Zarganar, Burma’s best-known comedian, are in Myitkyina Prison, Kachin State, where temperatures drop below zero in winter.

One Rangoon source said a youth member of the opposition National League for Democracy, Aung Kyaw Oo, serving a 19-year sentence in Pegu Prison, had been savagely beaten and denied medical treatment.

When Aung Kyaw Oo’s wife visited the prison on December 3 she was denied permission to see him and had to wait until December 13. A prison source said Aung Kyaw Oo had told his wife about the beatings.

A defense lawyer, Saw Kyaw Kyaw Min, who recently fled to Thailand, said one of his clients, Myint Aye, founder of the group called Human Rights Defenders and Promoters, had also been tortured while in prison.

“Prison authorities questioned him continuously for five days. They didn’t let him sit down and sleep. He finally collapsed.”

Myint Aye was convicted of involvement in a bomb attack on an office run by the junta-backed Union Solidarity and Development Association in Rangoon’s Shwepyithar Township on July 1.

The New York-based international rights group Human Rights Watch has also deplored the regime’s decision to send political detainees to remote prisons.

In a statement issued on Tuesday, Elaine Pearson, the group’s deputy Asia director, accused the regime of using the country's legal mechanisms to threaten political prisoners and deny them access to justice.

The statement also urged Asean Secretary-General Surin Pitsuwan to assign an independent legal assessment team to closely watch the treatment of political prisoners in Burmese courts and in Burmese prisons.

It said Asean should address Burma's lack of respect for the rule of law when it holds its rescheduled summit meeting in early 2009.

Pearson said: “The government locks up peaceful activists, sends them to remote prisons, and then intimidates or imprisons the lawyers who try to represent them. This abuse of the legal system shows the sorry state of the rule of law in Burma.”


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