Daw Suu's Letter from Burma #39

[carol@xxxxxxx]

Mainichi Daily News, Monday, September 2, 1996

PRISON MAY BREAK THE BODY, BUT NOT THE SPIRIT

"Death in custody (3)"

Letter from Burma (No. 39) by Aung San Suu Kyi

	Hsaya Maung Thaw Ka was arrested in 1989 and sentenced by a martial law
court to 20 years' imprisonment in October of that year.  The SLORC had
accused him of seeking to cause an insurrection within the armed forces. At
the time he entered Insein Jail, Hsaya Maung Thaw Ka was already suffering
from a chronic disease that was laying his muscles to waste.  His movements
were stiff and jerky, and everyday matters, such as bathing, dressing or
eating, involved for him a series of difficult maneuvers which could barely
be completed without assistance.  For a man with his health problems, life
in solitary confinement was a continuous struggle to cope.  And Hsaya Maung
Thaw Ka struggled manfully.  But his already much-eroded physical system was
unable to withstand the inhuman conditions of Insein Jail for long.  In June
1991, Hsaya Maung Thaw Ka, navy officer and humorist, poet and political
activist, died in custody at the age of 65.
	Even during his darkest days in prison, Hsaya Maung Thaw Ka's muse did not
desert him.  In secret he composed poems about the gross injustices
committed under military dictatorship with a biting anger entirely removed
from his delicate rendering of old English sonnets.  "Twenty years, they say
 ... in accordance with that (legal) section of all things that is unclean
and despicable," he wrote with contempt of the sentence which, for him,
turned out to be one of death.
	October and November of 1990 were months when the SLORC carried out a major
crackdown against the movement for democracy.  It was in these months that
numbers of National League for Democracy members of Parliament were brought
into Insein Jail.  Among these men, elected by the people of Burma to form a
democratic government but condemned by the military regime to imprisonment,
was U Tin Maung Win of Khayan.  He had been a prominent student leader in
the late 1950s and early 1960s.  In 1962, when students protested against
the high-handed actions of the military government that had newly come into
power, he was the chairman of the Committee for the Protection of Student's
Rights.  The next year, as the leader of the Rangoon University Students'
Union, he was placed under arrest.
	U Tin Maung was kept in prison for seven years.  But neither that
experience, nor the even more deadening one of life for a quarter of a
century under the Burmese Way to Socialism, succeeded in killing his
political convictions.  In 1988, U Tin Maung Win took part in the movement
for democracy in concert with other student leaders of the past.  In the
elections of 1990, he contested as the NLD's candidate in his native Khayan
against his own brother who represented the NUP, the main adversary of the
democratic parties.  Five months after his victory in the elections he was
arrested.
	U Tin Maung Win spent a month at Ye-Kyi-ain, an infamous military
intelligence interrogation center, before he was sent to Insein Jail.  When
he was charged with high treason in January 1991, he was not able to be
present at his trial because he was too ill.  By Jan. 18, U Tin Maung Win
was dead.  The authorities claimed that he had died of leukemia but before
he was incarcerated just four months previously there had been no sign that
he was suffering from such a grave disease.  It is the contention of those
who saw his body before burial that he died as a result of ill treatment in
prison.
	Last year, U Kyi Saung, secretary of the NLD branch in Myaungmya, a town
the Irrawaddy division, was arrested.  He had attended a Karen New Year
ceremony in a Karen village and there, he had read out the message of
goodwill that the NLD had brought out for the New Year.  This peaceful,
innocuous act of courtesy was reported by the Union Solidarity and
Development Association, the "social welfare" organization formed under the
aegis of the government, the Myaungmya Township Law and Order Restoration
Council and to the local military intelligence unit.  The TLORC thereby
arrested U Kyi Saung under Section 5 of the 1950 Emergency Act, which has
come to be known as the "Can't Stand Your Looks" section as it is used
indiscriminately against those whom the authorities cannot abide.  An
elderly man, U Kyi Saung's health deteriorated rapidly and he died in May
1996 before his trial was completed.
	I have written only about well-known members of the NLD who died in custody
but they are not the only victims of authoritarian injustice.  Prisoners of
conscience who lost their lives during the 1990s represent a broad range of
the Burmese political spectrum and even include a Buddhist monk.  Of those
sacrificed to the misrule of law, the oldest was 70-year-old Boh Set Yaung,
a member of the Patriotic Old Comrades' League, and the youngest was a
19-year-old member of the NLD.  The exact number of deaths in custody cannot
be ascertained but it is not small and it is rising all the time.  The price
of liberty has never been cheap and in Burma it is particularly high.

* * * * * * * *
(This article is one of a yearlong series of letters.  The Japanese
translation appears in the Mainichi Shimbun the same day, or the previous
day in some areas.)