The Human Rights Blog

4 July 2007

Journalist U Win Tin spends 18th year in prison; denied early release for
refusing to renounce political activity

SOURCE: Southeast Asian Press Alliance (SEAPA), Bangkok

On 4 July 2007, Burma's most famous journalist, U Win Tin,
will have spent 18 years in prison for having displeased the Burmese junta.

SEAPA remains gravely concerned at the continued imprisonment of the
77-year-old journalist and poet, and once again calls for his immediate
release.

In March 2007, U Win Tin had reportedly stressed to a prison director that
"it is my right to be free because I have served 18 years of my 20-year
sentence and I qualify for early release."

U Win Tin was eligible for early release in July 2006, but was denied this
right for not having performed hard labour.

Despite his poor health, he has consistently refused to renounce political
activity as a condition of his release.

According to Burma Media Association (BMA), a network of exiled Burmese
journalists, he recently told a friend who was allowed to visit him that
"two prison officers asked me at a special meeting last week whether I
would resume political activities if I were released. I told them that I
will definitely do so, since it is my duty as a citizen to strive for
democracy".

U Win Tin's principal crime, said BMA vice-chairperson Zin Linn, was being
a key adviser to Aung San Suu Kyi, the general-secretary of National League
for Democracy (NLD), whose landslide win of the 1991 general elections was
never recognised by the military regime.

He has been sentenced thrice, each time while incarcerated: first, to three
years with hard labour for instigating civil disobedience against martial
law; then, to 11 years over another case for the same "offence". He is now
serving a seven-year sentence over his testimony to the United Nations on
the military's record of human rights violations against political
prisoners. Promises of his release in 2004 and 2005 were never fulfilled.

Since 2006, the International Committee of the Red Cross has been barred
from visiting him. U Win Tin has had two heart attacks and has suffered
from high blood pressure, diabetes and an inflammatory disease that affects
his spine. His poor health was exacerbated by ill treatment, which has
included torture, lack of medical treatment, solitary confinement without
bedding, and being deprived of food and water for long periods of time.
Even though a prison doctor attends to him twice a month, he is dependent
on medication and food brought by his family and friends.

Denied paper or writing instruments, the resourceful journalist reportedly
formulated his own ink out of powder extracted from the bricks of his cell,
and fashioned a pen from a piece of bamboo mat.

He received the UNESCO/Guillermo Cano World Press Freedom Prize, the World
Association of Newspapers' Golden Pen of Freedom Award and Reporters
Without Borders/Fondation de France Prize for his steadfastness to the
cause of freedom of expression despite facing great adversity.

For further information, contact Roby Alampay, Executive Director, or Chuah
Siew Eng, Alerts Coordinator, at SEAPA, 538/1 Samsen Road, Dusit, Bangkok,
10300 Thailand, tel: +662 243 5579, fax: +662 244 8749, e-mail:
sieweng@seapa.org, seapa@seapabkk.org, Internet: http://www.seapabkk.org

The Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) has received information direct from Rangoon to confirm reports that this morning, 25 September 2007, government vehicles manned by the personnel of township councils, quasi-government officials, government-organised thugs, police and others have since around 10am been patrolling the streets warning that there are to be no further protests or they will be met with violence and legal action.

According to the information, the vehicles have been broadcasting announcements through loudspeakers that neither the monks nor public are to go on to the streets or stand on the side of the roads to support anybody marching on the street. The AHRC has confirmed that the vehicles have been moving around at least three townships: Kyauktada and Pabedan in the centre of town, and nearby Pazundaung. They have advised that protestors will be charged or violently repressed under the colonial-era sections 127-129 of the Criminal Procedure Code, which give authority to "command any unlawful assembly... to disperse" and if it does not to "proceed to disperse such assembly by force", and by military force if required. An unconfirmed report has it that announcements at the front of Yuzana Plaza, a big commercial building, have warned that protestors will be shot. There are also reports of army vehicles on the move in the city. Meanwhile, there are reports of similar announcements in other cities, including Mandalay.

The actions follow television broadcasts and newspaper announcements on the night of September 24 with directives issued by the Maha Sangha Nayaka Committee, the official supreme council of monks established under the auspices of the government, that the regional and local committees "supervise the Buddhist monks and novices so that they are to practice only Pariyatti and Patipatti ", in accordance with three directives that were issued in 1990: the last time that the monks declared a boycott of the military regime. On that occasion, the military surrounded and occupied monasteries around the country, and thousands of monks and novices were arrested. Following the announcement from the committee, the Minister for Religious Affairs, Brigadier General Thura Myint Maung, indicated that "failure to observe or obey... will be met with action".

At last report, a large assembly of monks and ordinary people was already marching in Rangoon, despite the threats.

Bloodshed in Burma is now imminent. Two decades since the atrocities of 1988 the military regime there is indicating that it has in no way changed in its behaviour or outlook: even its rhetoric is virtually identical; there is no reason to think that it will shy away from its threats now.

The Asian Human Rights Commission thus alerts the world community to the looming tragedy in Burma and calls on all parties concerned to do everything at their disposal to prevent it. If the world fails now, unlike in previous years, we will not be able to say that we did not know.

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IFEX - News from the international freedom of expression community
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PRESS RELEASE - BURMA

3 October 2007

As junta cuts off communications, refugees crucial source of information,
says SEAPA

SOURCE: Southeast Asian Press Alliance (SEAPA), Bangkok

**For further information on the current media crackdown, see IFEX alerts
of 1 October, 28, 27, 26, 24 and 14 September 2007, and others**

(SEAPA/IFEX) - The following is a 2 October 2007 SEAPA press release:

Refugees crucial to providing eyewitness accounts as junta cuts off
communications

A looming humanitarian crisis in Burma is being exacerbated by the junta's
determination to cut all news and information flowing out of the country.

At a forum on 1 October 2007 in Bangkok, members of the Foreign
Correspondents Club of Thailand, officers of civil society groups and
diplomats from various governments monitoring the situation in Burma were
equally helpless in updating each other or confirming the meagre news that
anybody could offer. With the Internet cut, foreign journalists and
diplomats refused entry, rebellious local journalists missing or arrested,
and state-controlled media forced to publish government propaganda about
recent bloody protests, refugees escaping to neighbouring countries have
become the only source of information about the unfolding tragedy in the
country. And even the entry of refugees, journalists and Burma advocates
say, has no guarantee of being tolerated by neighbouring governments.

Burma's shared borders with Thailand and India are already hosting some
200,000 Burmese refugees that had fled the country over the past two
decades. Following the recent violence in Burma, the borders have been
relatively quiet, according to the UNHCR on 1 October, but the ongoing
crackdown and deteriorating economic conditions which sparked the biggest
demonstrations in the dictatorship in two decades are anticipated to
trigger a surge of refugees in the weeks and months ahead.

SEAPA joins other civil and aid organisations in urging Burma's
neighbouring governments - particularly that of Thailand - to accommodate
the Burmese refugees. The need for humanitarian intervention is clear. At
the same time, with Burma isolated and cut off from the rest of the world,
the refugees are crucial to providing eyewitness accounts of the latest
atrocities the junta is committing against the unarmed civilians.

On 2 October, for example, a Norwegian journalist quoted a defecting
intelligence officer for Burma's ruling junta as saying he had refused
orders to massacre thousands of protesting monks rounded up following raids
on monasteries. The former intelligence officer also recounted to the
journalist how bodies of hundreds of mass-executed monks have supposedly
been dumped in the jungles. "Many more people have been killed in recent
days than you've heard about. The bodies can be counted in several
thousand," he was quoted as saying.

The same day, British tabloid the "Daily Mail" quoted an unnamed Swedish
diplomat as saying that "one of the largest embassies in Burma" revealed
that 40 monks in the notorious Insein prison "were beaten to death today
and subsequently burned".

Meanwhile, the BBC reports that that sources from a government-sponsored
militia said the 4,000-plus monks detained in Rangoon, the main site of the
protests, will be sent to prisons in the far north of the country. The
monks, disrobed and shackled, are reportedly still protesting by going on a
hunger strike.

No outside news agency could independently confirm any of the accounts, but
that fact only further heightens the desperation to ensure that information
and news can somehow make it out of Burma.

The government claims the death toll from the crackdown is between nine and
15 people. Local journalists said 40 and 50 people have been killed since
26 October. The Assistance Association for Political Prisoners, which keeps
track of political detainees in Burma's 43 prisons, estimates that up to
1,500 people have been detained since the crackdown.

For further information, contact Roby Alampay, Executive Director, or Chuah
Siew Eng, Alerts Coordinator, at SEAPA, 538/1 Samsen Road, Dusit, Bangkok,
10300 Thailand, tel: +662 243 5579, fax: +662 244 8749, e-mail:
sieweng@seapa.org, seapa@seapabkk.org, Internet: http://www.seapabkk.org

The information contained in this press release is the sole responsibility
of SEAPA. In citing this material for broadcast or publication, please
credit SEAPA.
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