RIGHTS-BURMA: Ex-Political Prisoners Seek Justice from Thai Town

By Marwaan Macan-Markar Reprint | | Print |

Marwaan Macan-Markar

MAE SOT, Thailand, Sep 25 2003 (IPS) - Bo Kyi knows how cruel a prison term in Burma can be. He spent seven years behind bars for his political activism, and he was just in his twenties when this ordeal began.
      There are many others living in Mae Sot, a town on the Thai-Burmese border who can identify with Kyi, having suffered a similar fate at the hands of Burma’s military government.

Bo Kyi knows how cruel a prison term in Burma can be. He spent seven years behind bars for his political activism, and he was just in his twenties when this ordeal began.

There are many others living in this town of small, winding streets and dilapidated buildings on the Thai-Burmese border who can identify with Kyi, men like Nay Rein Kyaw and Tate Naing, who have suffered a similar fate at the hands of Burma’s military government.

Rein Kyaw, for instance, was forced behind bars from 1992 through 2000, six of those years spent in Insein, the largest prison in Burma. This sprawling jail in Rangoon has an estimated 9,000 to 10,000 prisoners, including political activists.

But their flight to Mae Sot has meant neither an escape from the past nor an attempt to start anew as free people from Burma. On the contrary, they have chosen to cash in the liberty they currently enjoy – however fragile that is – to bring down the walls of oppression in their country.

The path they have opted for is the one they know best: confronting Rangoon’s junta about the prisons in the country, in general, and the plight of the over 1,600 political prisoners in particular.

”We want the world to know about our experience and to keep reminding the world about the many still in prison who have been isolated or forgotten,” says Kyi, a soft-spoken man, who belongs to a group that is spearheading this effort, the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (AAPP).

Membership to the AAPP requires only one qualification – having served a jail term in Burma as a political prisoner. Currently the association has 49 members, 20 of whom live in Mae Sot.

Thus, they monitor prison conditions, publicise arrests, and help the families of the arrested. They have also built Mae Sot’s only museum – one that seeks to preserve the horror that prevails in the 39 prisons spread across Burma, and its forced labour camps.

This small museum, built in the shape of a large square cell and with a cell door for an entrance, has on its walls a narrative of torment and violence that the junta has unleashed on its civilians, both within and outside prison.

Here, for instance, are shown the positions all the prisoners have to assume when taking a bath – they have to form a line facing each other and can only pour water from a flat container when ordered to do so – or the way they are punished, and the iron bars that keep them shackled.

One wall is covered by the names and the faded photos of the men and women who have been forced into prison for their political views following the 1988 pro-democracy uprising in Burma.

The faces that stare out include the 82 people who have died in prison, the 18 parliamentarians in jail and the 59 Buddhist monks locked up for their politics.

”I still have nightmares after what they (the military government) did to me in prison,” says 33-year-old Rein Kyaw, who chose the contents and designed the museum, located at the back of the AAPP office. ”This is, in a way, my revenge for what they did. To expose their crimes.”

It is an effort that lends weight to the pressure being mounted by human rights groups such as Amnesty International and environmental lobbies like EarthRights International about the plight of the political prisoners and those forced into labour camps.

Kyi, however, is well aware of the risk the AAPP members are taking.

Part of that stems from the conditions under which the former political prisoners, like thousands of other Burmese, live in Thailand. They do not enjoy rights as refugees, since Thailand is not a signatory to the international refugee convention.

As a result, they are dogged by the fear of being hauled up by Thai authorities if and when their political activities against Rangoon touch a raw nerve in Bangkok. ”We are living under a form of self-imposed house arrest,” says Kyi, the slightly built joint secretary of the AAPP. ”We don’t feel secure, we can be arrested.”

Recent actions by Thai government of Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra have exacerbated these worries, after it threatened to crack down on Burmese political activists protesting the May 30 arrest in Burma of pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi.

”The Thai government has only one policy now. It will not tolerate the activism of any Burmese group in the country,” Sunai Phasuk, an analyst at the regional human rights lobby Forum Asia, told IPS.

It is a policy that runs against the reputation Thailand has earned as a country hospitable to dissidents, freedom fighters and victims of war fleeing the nations around it. Cambodians, for instance, were among those who found sanctuary while their country was ravaged by war.

Currently, however, the Burmese are the ones who continue to cross the border, seeking refuge from the iron grip of the junta, which has been in power since 1962.

There are close to 100,000 refugees confined to camps along the Thai-Burmese border, an estimated one million migrant workers, and thousands of political exiles.

But organisations like AAPP have also another reason to feel edgy – the possible presence of Burmese intelligence men monitoring the activities of dissidents in Mae Sot.

”It is a genuine fear, because we are not sure about who the new Burmese in town are,” says Myat Thu, of the Burma Correspondents Club, whose membership includes over 50 Burmese journalists working in the area.

For groups like the AAPP to champion their cause the face of such worries is ”remarkable,” he adds. ”It is difficult and tough work they are doing to help the political prisoners in Burma.”