Anger Myanmar's rulers, and lose all

http://www.heraldtribune.com/article/20090118/article/901180366&tc=yahoo

By THOMAS FULLER THE NEW YORK TIMES


Published: Sunday, January 18, 2009 at 1:00 a.m.
Last Modified: Sunday, January 18, 2009 at 8:21 a.m.
MAE SOT, Thailand - By the time he contracted tuberculosis, U Htay Aung, a dissident jailed for seven years in Myanmar, was incapable of telling prison guards about his condition. He had already lost his voice from years of exposure to the cold concrete floor that prisoners slept on.


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INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE / THOMAS FULLER U Kyaw Kyaw Min, a lawyer for dissidents, fled to Thailand last year under the threat of prosecution by Myanmar's government. So Htay Aung decided to announce his illness in a more graphic form. He coughed up enough blood to fill a small cup. "When the guard came around, I showed him," said Htay Aung, who has now recuperated but whose voice remains raspy. "They transferred me to the leprosy ward."

Htay Aung recently told the story to a reporter and a handful of former political prisoners who have settled in this small Thai city on the border with Myanmar, formerly known as Burma. Many of them work at the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners, a group that tracks the plights of the more than 2,100 jailed dissidents in Myanmar and organizes aid for them and their families.




Founded nine years ago, the association has never been busier.

Last year, the Burmese military government sentenced 410 dissidents to prison terms ranging from a few years to six decades or more. The association lists details of the convictions in its online database, which is widely consulted by diplomats, U.N. officials and human rights workers. U Bo Kyi, the co-founder of the association, says that an additional 600 dissidents are in detention and have yet to be tried.

Among those convicted last year was an 80-year-old Buddhist nun, Daw Ponnami, who was given four years of hard labor for her involvement in street demonstrations led by Buddhist monks in September 2007. She has been spared the hard labor, the association says, but in what may be the final humiliation of her twilight years, her conviction was for insulting Buddhism.

A well-known comedian known as Zarganar was sentenced to 59 years in prison after criticizing the government for neglecting the victims of the cyclone that swept through lower Myanmar in May, killing more than 130,000 people.

U Gambira, a monk who helped lead the 2007 protests, was sentenced to 68 years.

Other political prisoners are listed in the database as farmers, a blogger, an ice cream seller, a bus conductor and a hip-hop singer in a band called Acid. All angered the government in one way or another.

In U.N. reports and diplomatic cables, Burmese political prisoners are often just a statistic, a measurement of the many human rights abuses carried out by Myanmar's generals.

But to members of the association, the prisoners are part of a fraternity of fellow dissidents who have many needs. The association helps family members smuggle medicine, reading materials, blankets, clothing and food to the prisoners.

Occasionally guards are sympathetic, Bo Kyi said. Often they help just because they are poor and need the small bribes that prisoners and family members pay them.

Even the most basic necessities can require payment.

"If you want to get more water for a shower you have to pay money," Bo Kyi said.

Some prisons are so crowded that prisoners can sleep only on their sides. But guards reserve "VIP" corners where prisoners can lie flat on their backs -- for a fee.

The association's annual budget of $200,000 is financed by the U.S. government's National Endowment for Democracy, the Dutch government and private donors.

The budget also helps pay to whisk out of the country dissidents in danger of arrest.

Two years ago the association sent $100 to U Aung Kyaw Oo, a former student activist who spent 14 years in prison, to help him escape Myanmar. He made it to Thailand.

"It feels better than inside," he said. "They can't arrest me here."

Myanmar's most famous political prisoner, the Nobel laureate and pro-democracy leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, is barred by the military government from leaving her lakeside house in a plush neighborhood of Yangon, the commercial capital, formerly known as Rangoon. Her cause is championed by a wide variety of people across the globe, including foreign leaders and college students in the United States.

But most political prisoners in Myanmar live much more anonymously and in much more rudimentary conditions.

To be a political prisoner in Myanmar, Bo Kyi said, is to truly experience darkness. Prisoners are often let out of their cells only 20 minutes a day, he said.

"We gave up our best years," Bo Kyi said, as he scanned the wall of photographs. But he does not want revenge on the government, he said. "What we want is very simple," he said. "Just freedom of speech."