BURMA: Free Political Prisoners Campaign Picks Up

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Campaign Poster
Credit:FBPPN

By Marwaan Macan-Markar


BANGKOK, Mar 16 (IPS) - It is a photograph from happier times. Nilar Thein and her husband Kyaw Min Yu look relaxed and free. They both sport warm smiles. Kyaw Min Yu, or ‘Jimmy’, is carrying the couple’s baby daughter.

But it was a brief spark of happiness for the Burmese couple. They are paying a hevy price for being in the vanguard of the country’s pro-democracy struggle, challenging the oppressive grip of the ruling military regime.

The baby was born in May 2007. Three months later, on Aug. 21, Jimmy was arrested with other leading pro-democracy activists for staging street protests against the rise in the prices of oil and commodities in the already impoverished South-east Asian nation.

Nilar Thein’s luck ran out after being on the run for over a year. She was arrested in September 2008. It was not for the first time that she, like her husband, had been jailed for being a political activist. After all, they had met in prison, when they were serving long sentences previously.




But the sentences that the 37-year-old Nilar Thein and the 40-year-old Jimmy received in November 2008 pointed to a sinister plan by the junta, to crush any hint of opposition ahead of the planned general elections in 2010. Nilar Thein and Jimmy, who had served nine-year and 15-year terms respectively, were each slapped with 65-year prison sentences.

Their story – and the picture of the once free couple - is expected to traverse across the globe as part of the largest international signature campaign launched by 150 Burmese groups to secure the release of all political prisoners in Burma, or Myanmar.

The organisers of the Free Burma’s Political Prisoners Now! (FBPPN) campaign hope to collect nearly one million signatures before May 24, the day pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi is to be released after six years of house arrest, if the junta abides by the law.

Such a high number of endorsements during the 11-week campaign are expected to turn the heat on U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, target of the global signature campaign. The FBPPN wants the world body’s top diplomat to ‘’make it his personal priority to secure the release of all political prisoners in Burma, as the essential first step towards democracy in the country.’’

‘’The freedom for all the political prisoners in Burma has become an international benchmark to judge the state of democracy in the country,’’ Soe Aung, spokesperson for the FBPPN campaign, told IPS. ‘’The campaign hopes to reach to a larger group of people concerned about the repression in Burma.’’

‘’As long as political prisoners stay in the jails, there will not be peace and development in Burma,’’ says Su Mon Aye, who became the youngest female political prisoner in the country when she was arrested in April 2000. She was 19 years at the time and an undergraduate student of chemistry.

‘’Those who are released never give up their political activity. They refuse to sign statements promising to stay away from politics,’’ added Su Mon Aye during the Bangkok launch of the global campaign. ‘’We have to fight the government to get our freedoms.’’

Other activists who also served prison terms for their political beliefs are as adamant. ‘’It is high time for the Burmese authorities to release all political prisoners,’’ says Moe Zaw Oo, who was jailed in Rangoon’s notorious Insein prison for nine years following his 1990 arrest for being a political activist. ‘’They are not criminals.’’

Currently, Burmese jails hold over 2,100 political prisoners, up from the 1,200 activists in jails in mid-2007. This jump follows the wave of arrests that followed the peaceful, pro-democracy street protests led by Buddhist monks in September 2007, which was harshly suppressed.

Nilar Thein and Jimmy are among the 23 leaders of the 88 Generation Students group of pro-democracy activists who have received 65-year prison sentences each. The group gets its name from giving leadership as students during the August 1988 pro-democracy uprising, which was brutally crushed by the military - resulting in close to 3,000 deaths.

Burma’s jails hold 220 monks and six nuns, all of whom ‘’have been forcibly stripped of their robes by the authorities and many of them have been tortured,’’ says the FBPPN in a campaign note.

The other political prisoners include 456 members of the National League for Democracy (NLD), the opposition party led by Suu Kyi, 186 female prisoners, and 20 men and women who were volunteers assisting victims of the devastating cyclone that crashed through Burma’s Irrawaddy delta in May last year, killing tens of thousands of people.

The move by the FBPPN to turn to the Internet to secure the nearly million signatures by calling for sympathisers to endorse the on-line petition also places this drive in a new league. It marks a steady shift away from the traditional form such campaigns took – writing letters that were sent in the mail.

‘’The campaign is taking advantage of a medium that has become a powerful tool to get information out of Burma,’’ says David Scott Mathieson, Burma consultant for the global rights lobby Human Rights Watch (HRW). ‘’It is a smart move.’’

‘’Ban Ki-moon will have to redouble the U.N.’s efforts since this campaign will mean a million people will be aware of Burma’s political prisoners,’’ Mathieson told IPS. ‘’This is one the biggest campaigns that aims to show the world just how serious the problem is.’’

The campaign could unnerve the military which has held the country in its grip since a 1962 coup. ‘’Burma’s military leaders could not ignore this unified call,’’ says Aung Zaw, editor of ‘The Irrawaddy,’ a current affairs magazine published by Burmese journalists living in exile. ‘’They are afraid of it, we have heard from our sources.’’

(END/2009)