Cruel vengeance of dark regime

Myanmar activists hold placards of Senior General Than Shwe during a protest in Bangkok. Photo / AP.

The people of Myanmar go to the polls this weekend for the first time in 20 years, an event which should be a monumental step forward for one of Asia's most impoverished nations.

Yet the call by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon for Myanmar to release all political prisoners the general election highlights the increasing disbelief in the wider international community that the country's military rulers desire for democracy is anything but a sham.

"It is not too late, even now, that by releasing the political detainees, they can make this election more inclusive and participatory," he told reporters last week in Bangkok.

This seems nothing more than wishful thinking on the part of Ban, especially when the ruling junta refuses to acknowledge any of its political opponents are behind bars.

"There are no political prisoners in Myanmar and no individual has been incarcerated simply for his or her political beliefs," Myanmar's UN ambassador Thant Kyaw declared last month.

Statements like this by the regime seem almost comical in the face of overwhelming evidence of decades of systematic arrest and detention of its political opponents.

Figures released by the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners, a human rights group working on the Thai-Myanmar border, show the number of political prisoners had doubled in three years to 2203 people.

Of these political prisoners 412 are members of the opposition party, the National League for Democracy, the most notable being Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, who has spent 15 years under house arrest.

Another group widely targeted by the regime is politically active young people.

Burmese refugee and Wellington resident Naing Ko Ko was a student union leader and activist in Rangoon in the late 80s and participated in the pro-democracy demonstrations of 1988. His outspoken criticism of the regime finally caught up with him and he was suddenly arrested in 1992 at Myeik Airport. "I entered the arrival room and three unknown guys came up to me and started punching me in the head," he said.

"I was handcuffed, a hood was put over my head, my body was thrown into a military truck and I was driven to an unknown destination."

For the next 10 days Naing Ko Ko was kept shackled and blindfolded in a tiny cell. He was both physically and mentally tortured by members of the Military Intelligence Service.

"From 6 to 16 December 1992, I was given only one teaspoon of water per day and no food at all."

In January the following year, Naing Ko Ko was sentenced to 10 years imprisonment with hard labour for unlawful association.

He served seven years of the sentence, including more than a year in the notorious Insein Prison near Rangoon.

It was there, in violation of the rules for political prisoners, that Naing Ko Ko obtained an English dictionary and began to teach himself to read and write in English.

When the guards discovered the dictionary, he was put in the "dog cell" for seven months where he was forced to literally behave like a dog.

"Whenever the warden came to count the prisoners twice a day, I had to bark and sit like a dog."

He also had to eat from a bowl on the floor like a dog. During this time he was only allowed out for five minutes per day for a caning. "Living in a dog cell was pretty similar to living in hell and nothing is worse than that."

Soon after being released from prison in 1998, Naing Ko Ko escaped to Thailand and was accepted as a political refugee in New Zealand in 2006. "I miss my homeland almost every day although NZ is one of the most beautiful countries in the world," he said.

The torture of political activists by Myanmar's military regime is not limited to adults; children as young as 12 have been imprisoned.

Soe Lwin was 12 years old when he was first arrested in 1994, for distributing flyers that were critical of the regime. He was arrested a second time just after his 13th birthday, and this time the consequences were more severe.

He was taken to an interrogation centre in Tavoy in southern Myanmar and held there for about 20 days. "I was tortured constantly and sometimes they burnt plastic and dropped the hot liquid on my calves and legs," he said.

Soe Lwin's time in the interrogation centre left him maimed: with disfigured fingers and toes, two broken ribs, a deaf ear and broken teeth.

His 13-year-old body was so damaged by torture the prison authorities at first would not accept him, in case he died on their watch. He spent a month in hospital.

Soe Lwin was finally sentenced to 24 years and three months imprisonment for two counts of distributing leaflets.

He ended up serving 15 years and was released from prison just over a year ago on September 19, 2009.

Major General Sitt Maung made the following comment about the lengthy sentence Soe Lwin, and a number of other children tried around the same time, received: "If they were children, they did not behave like it. They should be sentenced to a long prison term to make an example of them and to make people afraid to be involved in politics in the future."

Yet despite claims by Myanmar's ruling general Than Shwe that he is ushering in a new era of participatory, parliamentary politics, there seems little hope for change on the ground in a country where even the slightest act of political dissent has hideous consequences.

Plain and simply Burma's generals have taken one of South-East Asia's most culturally and resource rich countries and created a "Land of Fear" - a land far away from the place democracy comes from.