JASPREET KINDRA, Johannesburg | Friday
ABOUT 2 000 political activists remain imprisoned under the Burmese military junta, which has renamed the South Asian country Myanmar.
According to the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners, the military regime is running more than 43 forced labour camps. These camps are used for infrastructure and agricultural projects to profit the regime. The prisoners are allegedly kept in chains and suffer from overwork, beatings and malnutrition.
According to members of the National Council of the Union of Burma, on their first official trip to South Africa, about 84 members of the Parliament are imprisoned, 39 of them without trial.
Despite talks between the regime’s State Peace and Development Council, led by General Than Shwe, and Aung San Suu Kyi, who remains under house arrest, the activists claim people are still being arrested for their political beliefs.
Shwe has refused to hand over power to Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy despite its 1990 landslide victory in the first ever multiparty elections held in Burma in 30 years.
Owing to increasing international pressure Shwe has started releasing political prisoners. However, activists say many of the 243 political prisoners released since January last year had already completed their sentences. People are arrested for simple acts of political expression.
According to Aye-Htun Ohn, an activist based in Johannesburg, his participation in a demonstration outside the military regime’s diplomatic mission in Pretoria last year led to his father being hauled in for questioning by the regime’s officials.
Years ago when Suu Kyi was a student in the United Kingdom, she was stopped from purchasing some oranges by a friend. On questioning, she was told that the oranges had been imported from South Africa, which had an apartheid government in place. From that day Suu Kyi never bought South African products.
Dr Thein Win, who runs the Free Burma campaign in South Africa, says: “The irony is that now South Africa is free and Suu Kyi has been under house arrest for almost three years.”
Nobel laureate Desmond Tutu last month referred to Burma as the “next South Africa” and called for pressure on the regime to release Suu Kyi. Win says international pressure must be put on the regime to hold their secret talks with Suu Kyi out in the open.
Teddy Buri, chairman of the National Council of the Union of Burma’s Foreign Affairs Committee, says they would like more sanctions imposed on the regime. The European Union has already frozen assets held by members of the regime overseas and imposed a ban on the export of equipment that might be used for internal repression.