"Former inmates reveal their scars"

Former inmates reveal their scars
By Denis D. Gray
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published March 25, 2006

MAE SOT, Thailand -- As Myo Myint tells it, his torturers opened the
door to a large room heaving with naked prisoners, some moaning, others
unconscious, all lying soaked in their own blood and feces, and
screamed at him: "If you don't tell us everything, you will be joining
them."
That, he said, was his shattering entry into Burma's gulag, a
network of some 40 interrogation centers, 43 prisons and more than 60
labor camps through which thousands have passed, often for the mildest
dissent against the country's military rulers.
"He's gone to Moscow," is the term people here use for someone
hauled off to Insein Prison in Rangoon.
The junta began filling the camps and prisons shortly after
crushing a nationwide anti-military uprising 18 years ago. The first
large batch of arrivals were the pro-democracy winners of the 1990
general election.
Myo Myint, now 43, said he endured 14 years, 10 months and 16 days
in these brutal confines. The ex-soldier fled to Thailand after his
release, joining a band of freed prisoners who are documenting their
ordeal on paper and in a small museum in the northwest border town of
Mae Sot.
"I experienced such hardship in prison that as long as there are
political prisoners I will work for them," he said. He survived, he
thinks, "by believing in democracy."
Torture victims unite
Founded in 2000, the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners
now numbers more than 100 men and women along the Thai-Burmese border
as well as in the United States, Norway and elsewhere. All say they
were tortured.
Supported by the Dutch government and the U.S.-based National
Endowment for Democracy, the group helps with mental and physical
rehabilitation and financial aid for the neediest former prisoners,
delivered clandestinely through a chain of couriers. This year,
schooling for 200 children of jailed mothers and fathers will also be
funded.
In grisly detail, the group reports on the regime's array of
torture and degradation techniques. Survivors tell of homosexual rape,
electric shock to the genitals, partial suffocation by water, burning
of flesh with hot wax and being made to stand for hours in tubs of
urine and feces.
In what survivors describe as a grotesque perversion of Burmese
culture, prisoners are ordered to perform the traditional Semigwa
dance, and are mercilessly beaten if they fail to execute its intricate
postures or to please the torturers with their singing.
Victims describe the searing mental impact of seeing others being
tortured, or of being escorted to the prison gate and then, within
sight of welcoming relatives, rearrested to serve more time.
Jailers' names passed on
Such accounts - including lists of jailers and torturers by name
and location - are passed on to international human rights
organizations in hopes they will one day serve as evidence in court.
Regime spokesmen were not available for comment on the claims, but
the government has repeatedly denied using torture or inflicting other
abuses on prisoners. Last July, 249 prisoners were freed, 118 of them
from Insein, and the International Committee of the Red Cross has
visited prisons and labor camps across Burma, renamed Myanmar by the
military regime. The committee never details its findings, so
independent corroboration of the prisoners' accounts is not available.
Foreign monitoring groups report some improvement in conditions
since the Red Cross visits began in 1999. But Brad Adams of U.S.-based
Human Rights Watch said: "We are very, very confident that torture
continues. It's an instrument of policy. This is not a country where it
happens by chance, committed by a few rotten apples."
"They try to kill our beliefs," said John Glenn as he guided
visitors through the prisoners' association museum. The 36-year-old
former biology student, who is named for the American astronaut, said
he spent two years in Insein for handing out a mildly critical
pamphlet.
Survival items displayed
Purposely stark and windowless like a prison cell, the exhibition
begins with photographs of the demonstrators gunned down by troops in
the 1988 uprising led by Aung San Suu Kyi, the pro-democracy leader and
Nobel Peace Prize laureate who is under house arrest in Rangoon.
Another wall is covered with snapshots of more than 150 of the
1,151 men and women the group says are known to be in prison for
political activities. Human Rights Watch also estimates more than 1,100
are in detention, though Mr. Glenn said the number is higher.
Also on display are items that help prisoners get by - chess
pieces carved from soap bars; sharpened bamboo used to scratch English
vocabulary onto strips of plastic; newspaper clippings, often years
old, disguised as cigarette papers.
Aye Aye Moe, 31, came to Thailand after two years' incarceration
for "contact with illegal opposition groups." She said she spent eight
months alone in a cell so airless that she had to lie on her stomach to
breathe through a slit at the base of a wall.
"I suffered and I fear the new generation will also face the same
suffering," said the former economics student.
Myo Myint is a strikingly handsome man despite having lost a leg,
an arm and an eye as a loyal soldier in the Burmese government's long
war with ethnic insurgents. He said that like many other ex-soldiers,
he was driven by the ethnic strife and the military's atrocities to
become a passionate supporter of Mrs. Suu Kyi and a member of her
National League for Democracy.
During 4½ years alone in a cell ("except for some butterflies and
ants") he meditated, learned English from a teacher in an adjacent cell
and wrote poems on the wall with shards of brick.
He recalls one he titled "Returning Home" - "In the house of
locks, dawn will never come. ... We have been robbed of our tomorrows."

· Associated Press correspondent Denis Gray recently completed a
550-mile trip to interview refugees along the Thai-Burmese border and
in rebel-held territory inside Burma.

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