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 |  Subject: Group helps political prisoners in Myanmar  Mon Jan 19, 2009 12:09 am | |
| MAE SOT, Thailand: By the time he had contracted tuberculosis, 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 the years of exposure to the cold concrete floor that prisoners slept on.
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 small group of former political prisoners who have settled in this small Thai city on the border with Myanmar. Many of them work at the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners, a group that tracks the plight of the more than 2,100 jailed dissidents inside Myanmar and organizes aid for them and their families.
Founded nine years ago, the association has never been busier.
Last year, Myanmar's military government sentenced 410 dissidents to prison terms ranging from a few years to five decades or more. The association lists details of the convictions in its online database, which is widely consulted by diplomats, UN officials and human rights workers. Bo Kyi, the co-founder of the association, says that another 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' hard labor for her involvement in the 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 insult of her twilight years, Daw Ponnami's conviction was for insulting Buddhism.
Zarganar, a well-known comedian, received 59 years' imprisonment 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, Myanmar's 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 here, the prisoners are part of a fraternity of dissidents with many needs. The association helps family members smuggle in medicine, reading materials, blankets, clothing or food to them.
Occasionally guards are sympathetic, says Bo Kyi. But often they just help because they are poor and they need 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 jails are so crowded that prisoners can only sleep on their sides. But prison guards reserve "VIP" corners where prisoners can lie flat on their backs - for a fee.
The association's budget of $200,000 is financed by the U.S. government's National Endowment for Democracy, the Dutch government and other private donors.
The budget also helps pay to whisk dissidents in danger of arrest out of the country.
Two years ago, the association sent $100 to Aung Kyaw Oo, a former student activist who spent 14 years in prison, to help with his successful escape from Myanmar.
Aung Kyaw Oo says he will remain in Thailand. "It feels better than inside," he said. "They can't arrest me here."
Myanmar's most famous political prisoner, Aung San Suu Kyi, the leader of the pro-democracy movement, is barred by the military government from leaving her lakeside house in a plush neighborhood of Yangon, the commercial capital. Her cause is championed by a wide variety of people around 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, says Bo Kyi, is to truly experience darkness. Prisoners are often only let out of their cells 20 minutes a day, he said. They are lorded over by the criminal prisoners. And they're routinely transferred to remote areas hundreds of miles from their families, to smaller prisons that have no health clinics or medical staff.
As punishment, guards make prisoners crawl through a room where the floor is made of bricks with sharp edges. They also require male inmates to answer them using the vocabulary in the Burmese language that is usually reserved for women.
Bo Kyi and his colleagues say they want to shine a light on the plight of the lesser known prisoners. The logo of the association shows a beam of light shining into a prison cell.
As a former political prisoner himself, Bo Kyi is fluent in the notion of deprivation and cruelty - the crowded cells, the inadequate food and the stinking bucket that his cellmates had to use 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.
"When I got that information I felt very sad," said Bo Kyi, speaking in English, a language he learned from a fellow inmate who, to pass the time, had memorized the Burmese-English dictionary. The association sent the dissident's wife 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 been successful 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. The Red Cross has been barred from visiting prisoners for the past three years and a UN 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 Bo Kyi and the association have won the respect of diplomats and human rights workers because of its just-the-facts approach.
"They are keeping their efforts very disciplined and very directed," Mathieson said. "In terms of the Burmese opposition in exile it's the most effective."
In September, Human Rights Watch awarded Bo Kyi a "Human Rights Defender Award."
The association works out of a small house, shaded by a coconut tree and located in the backyard of a Thai family's residence. Bo Kyi, who shuffles around in cheap plastic sandals, is paid 8,000 baht a month, about $235.
The staff 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," Bo Kyi said, as he scanned the wall of photographs. He doesn't want revenge on the government, he said. "What we want is very simple," he said. "Just freedom of speech."
http://www.iht.com/articles/2009/01/18/news/prisoner.1-405536.php
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