Casting Light on Plight of Burmese Dissidents

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/18/world/asia/18prisoner.html?pagewanted=2

By THOMAS FULLER
Published: January 17, 2009
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.


Thomas Fuller/The International Herald Tribune
U Kyaw Kyaw Min, a lawyer for dissidents, fled to Thailand last year under the threat of prosecution. Myanmar’s government recently cracked down on lawyers defending political prisoners.


Thomas Fuller/The International Herald Tribune
U Htay Aung caught TB amid the harsh conditions of a seven-year imprisonment.
So Mr. 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 Mr. Htay Aung, who has now recuperated but whose voice remains raspy. “They transferred me to the leprosy ward.”

Mr. 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, United Nations 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 United Nations 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 ruling generals.

But to members of the association here, 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, Mr. 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,” Mr. Bo Kyi said.

Some prisons are so crowded that prisoners can sleep only on their sides. But guards reserve “V.I.P.” corners where prisoners can lie flat on their backs — for a fee.

The association’s annual budget of $200,000 is financed by the United States 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, and he said he would remain here. “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, Mr. Bo Kyi said, is to truly experience darkness. Prisoners are often let out of their cells only 20 minutes a day, he said. They are lorded over by the criminal prisoners, who are encouraged by the guards to discipline and intimidate them. And they are routinely transferred hundreds of miles from their families to remote prisons that have no clinics or medical staff.

As punishment, guards sometimes make prisoners crawl through an interrogation room where the floor is made of bricks with sharp edges. During interrogation they require male inmates to answer them using words in the Burmese language that are usually reserved for women.

Mr. Bo Kyi and his colleagues say they want to cast light on the plights of the lesser-known prisoners. His group’s logo shows a beam of light shining into a prison cell.

As a former political prisoner himself, Mr. Bo Kyi is fluent in the notion of deprivation and cruelty: the crowded cells, the inadequate food and the stinking bucket that inmates shared as a toilet.

But 10 years after his release he says he now also sees more clearly the pain that lingers outside prison walls, among the extended families who are ostracized and harassed by Myanmar’s authorities. In October, he heard about the wife of an imprisoned dissident who, desperate for cash, cut her long hair, a treasured symbol of beauty in Myanmar, and sold it for the equivalent of $20.



Thomas Fuller/The International Herald Tribune
U Bo Kyi co-founded an association that tracks and helps Myanmar’s political prisoners.
“When I got that information I felt very sad,” Mr. Bo Kyi said in English, which he learned from a fellow inmate who had memorized the Burmese-English dictionary to pass the time. The association sent the woman cash to help her start a small grocery store.

The association tracks prisoners through its networks of sympathetic, or bribed, prison guards, former political prisoners and family members.

Perhaps more than any other organization, the group has succeeded in cutting through the extreme secrecy of Myanmar’s military government. Recent trials have taken place inside a prison in Yangon without lawyers or family members present. The government recently cracked down on lawyers who tried to defend political prisoners, sentencing at least two to jail terms for contempt of court. One lawyer threatened with prosecution, U Kyaw Kyaw Min, 29, fled to Thailand and is now being helped by the association.

The Red Cross has been barred from visiting prisoners for the past three years, and a United Nations envoy for human rights is given a highly circumscribed tour of prisons during now-and-again visits.

David Mathieson, Myanmar consultant for Human Rights Watch, the New York-based advocacy group, said Mr. Bo Kyi and the association had won the respect of diplomats and human rights workers because of their just-the-facts approach.

“They are keeping their efforts very disciplined and very directed,” Mr. Mathieson said. “In terms of the Burmese opposition in exile, it’s the most effective.”

In September, Human Rights Watch awarded Mr. Bo Kyi a Human Rights Defender Award.

The association for prisoners works out of a small house, shaded by a coconut tree and located in the backyard of a Thai family’s home. Mr. Bo Kyi, who shuffles around in cheap plastic sandals, is paid 8,000 baht a month, about $232.

The staff members surround themselves with reminders of their years in prison. There are authentic leg irons smuggled out by an escaped prisoner, a scale model of Insein prison outside Yangon and a wall with hundreds of photographs of political prisoners.

“We gave up our best years,” Mr. 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.”