Ex-Inmates Describe Torture In Burma

A painting in the office of a political prisoner advocacy group depicts mistreatment of inmates in Burmese prisons. (By Ellen Nakashima -- The Washington Post)

RANGOON, Burma -- Min Ko Naing spent nearly 16 years in solitary confinement. Not even his jailers would make eye contact with him. Myo Myint was repeatedly stripped, shackled and beaten while spending much of the same period in prison, also for challenging Burma's military rulers. During one interrogation, he recalled, he was kept naked for four days while being bludgeoned with canes. During another, he was lashed for hours to a seesaw, head down, until he blacked out. Each man had passed more than a third of his life in prison when both were released in 2004. Min Ko Naing, 44, remained in Burma, under scrutiny of the secret police. Myo Myint, 43, fled to a small town just over the border in Thailand. Their testimony, provided in separate interviews last month, highlights the psychological and physical abuse endured by political prisoners in Burma, which is ruled by a military junta. More than 1,100 people remain in jail for seeking democratic reform, according to Amnesty International. The two men's accounts reveal how determined they remain to press for social change despite torture inside prison walls and only the remote prospect for a shift in power outside them.

Myo Myint now works with a group advocating prisoner rights. Min Ko Naing is urging the government and its opponents to set aside political differences to ease the country's deepening poverty and treat spreading disease.

It was not possible to independently verify the two men's accounts, but their descriptions of conditions in the prisons were similar to those provided by other former Burmese inmates.

Min Ko Naing organized a national student union in the 1980s to press for democracy. But in August 1988, Burmese security forces smashed the movement, killing thousands of students and workers demanding an end to military rule. In 1989, when he was plucked off the street by men in a red pickup truck, he became one of his country's most famous political prisoners.

Though Min Ko Naing is now at constant risk of being rearrested, he agreed to meet a foreign journalist because, he said, he wanted to emphasize his hope for national reconciliation. "There were so many bitter experiences," he said during the interview behind closed doors in a private room in central Rangoon. "My individual life and experience was bitterness."

But he refuses to dwell on the past. "We've glimpsed the light of the Buddha's teachings," he said, referring to other former student activists. "Forgiveness and loving kindness can conquer the hatred. Our aim for all citizens of our country is to leave our individual sacrifice and individual suffering for the past."

Min Ko Naing's voice is deep but soft, his dark brown eyes sober. When he explains his views, he ticks off the points on slender fingers. When he wants to summon a memory, he presses a thumb to his forehead.

Throughout his time in prison, Min Ko Naing said, he was kept in a cell apart from others, watched by unseen military agents and denied even a book or a pen. "There was no human contact," he recalled, then switching from Burmese to English for emphasis: "Nothing."

He spent the first nine years in the infamous Insein Prison, in a dim cell eight feet by 10 feet.

Leaning forward during the interview, he drew a tight circle in the air with his hand to illustrate the size of his cell. Then he rose to his feet and turned his back, extending his right arm behind him. He pretended to flick a lighter, demonstrating how his jailers would light his cheroot cigar without facing him.

"The guard wouldn't even look at me because military intelligence was watching," he said. "They were so afraid of letting me have contact with others -- not even a cat, not even a bird."

In 1991 his parents and sister were allowed to see him, but no one else outside his family, and never for more than 15 minutes every two weeks, he said. He was hooded when he was taken to and from the meeting point, to prevent any other human contact. In 1998, he was transferred to Sittwe Prison in remote Rakhaing state, 350 miles from Rangoon. Visits became almost impossible.

Min Ko Naing was released in November 2004, unexpectedly and without official explanation.

He said in the interview that he believed the country's military rulers were unlikely to relinquish power any time soon. So since his release, he and other activists have urged the government to cooperate with them on social programs to raise incomes and help reverse what are among Asia's worst outbreaks of AIDS and malaria.

The government has so far shunned the proposals. Some Burmese who have been in contact with the former prisoners have themselves been jailed recently.

The information minister, Brig. Gen. Kyaw Hsan, said his government respects the rights of all people in Burma, which the rulers call Myanmar.

"The people of Myanmar are enjoying human rights no less than the people of other countries," Kyaw Hsan said in an interview. "There is a high level of human rights in our country. But all people have to abide by the rules and regulations of the nations." People's rights can be curtailed only if they act in a way that "affects the stability and security of the state and the national interest," he said.

Myo Myint did not know Min Ko Naing. But he knew of him. And he knew they shared the same goals.

A handsome, six-foot-tall son of a Burmese army captain, Myo Myint followed his father into the service. But then a land mine blew off his right arm and leg. He said that his long convalescence gave him time to reflect on atrocities he had seen fellow soldiers commit and that he began to see the bleakness of the government.

In 1989, he met Aung San Suu Kyi, the charismatic opposition leader whose fledgling party, the National League for Democracy, was beginning to attract legions of followers. Myo Myint became an official in the party's youth wing.

In August 1989, Myo Myint was arrested and sent to Insein Prison. The following year, inmates there went on a hunger strike, demanding that political prisoners be released. The jailers broke the strike. Myo Myint recalled that they forced him to lie facedown for more than seven hours while they stood on his remaining arm and leg, beating him with a wooden rod.

Other times they made him squat on his one good leg for four hours a day, blindfolded.

The prisoners called the tiny, darkened isolation cell at Insein the "military dog cell," Myo Myint recalled during an interview in Mae Sot, a Thai town on the Burmese border. Once, he said, he was left in that cell for a month. He could not see anything, only the hand of the prison guard passing him a stale portion of fish paste.

"You didn't know if it was day or night," he said.

Another time, he recalled, he was stripped, blindfolded and forced to perch on a four-foot-high stool, handcuffed to the seat. Then the guards kicked it out from under him, punching him and beating him on the back and hips with canes.

What sustained him throughout his three terms in prison over nearly 15 years, he said, was his belief that one day Burma's internal strife would end. "Many people made sacrifices," he said. "I myself, I lost my leg. Many people lost their parents, their children. . . . Only having reconciliation and a democratic government, that is what I wanted."

Upon his second release, in 1997, he set out to support those who were still inside. Using his prison contacts, he smuggled food and letters into the jail. Within one month, he was caught and taken to a military intelligence center. There, he said, he was starved and beaten until he suffered rectal bleeding.

Myo Myint was released for the final time in May 2004 and again resumed his underground efforts. But every two days, an intelligence officer would visit his home, warning him to stop, he said. Last March, after he was interrogated for an entire day and threatened with arrest yet again, Myo Myint decided it was time to leave. He used his old military ID card to slip across the border into Thailand. He now works in Mae Sot for the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners, documenting the number of political prisoners still behind bars.

A report issued last month by the assistance association said the type of abuse experienced by Min Ko Naing and Myo Myint is widespread. Based on interviews with 24 former political prisoners, the report said torture is used to "break down" political activists and instill fear in the public.

At night, Myo Myint said, he still wakes up sweating and shaking. It could be a dog barking that jars him from sleep. It could be a memory. The images of tortured prisoners haunt him.

"I know exactly how they feel, how they suffer," he said. "As long as they are behind bars, I cannot ignore that. So I work for them."

Nakashima reported from Mae Sot, Thailand.

Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, January 3, 2006