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| Prison shackles on display at a museum run by the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (Burma) in Mae Sot, Thailand (Photo: Enigma) |
Some of the strikers were sent to punishment cells in the prison while the rest were transferred to other prisons outside Rangoon, according to a prison official who spoke to Irrawaddy sources. The prisoners were demanding reading materials, adequate food rations and better health care.
“There were no negotiations of any sort on the part of the authorities before the crackdown,” said a prison source. The incident, involving at least seven female political prisoners, took place less than a week after the new government announced an amnesty which resulted in the release of only 47 of more than 2,000 political prisoners in Burma.
Insein Prison authorities were not available for comment, despite repeated attempts to contact them by phone. The sister of one of the political prisoners who took part in the hunger strike said that she was trying to find out if her brother was still in Insein Prison or has already been transferred to another location.
“I am so worried about him now. I am now going to the prison,” she said.
Former political prisoners in Rangoon said that when prison authorities crack down on hunger strikers, they usually take them to different prison wards and put them in shackles before beating them or transferring them to other prisons.
In 1998, a group of political prisoners who had served more than the full length of their sentences held a hunger strike at Tharawaddy Prison to demand their release. One of the hunger strikers, Aung Kyaw Moe, died after being tortured along with six other prisoners who joined his protest.
The former political prisoners said they visited the local office of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in Rangoon today and urged officials there to negotiate with the government to seek permission to visit the prisons.
In 1999, the ruling military regime started giving the ICRC access to political prisoners, but this ended in 2006 after the authorities demanded that ICRC officials be accompanied by government-backed social organizations during their visits.
In the same year that the ICRC's prison visits were suspended, Thet Win Aung, a 35-year-old political prisoner who had held a number of hunger strikes, died in Mandalay Prison. At the time, the state-run media blamed his death on health problems and his “failure to eat regularly.”
On Monday, the ICRC representative in Burma, Georges Paclisanu, held talks with Soe Maung, the minister of the president's office, to discuss a number of issues, including the ICRC's request to regain permission to visit prisons, according to the ICRC's Southeast Asian media spokesperson Philippe Marc Stoll.
“We are now trying very hard to visit the prisons again,” said Stoll, who declined to provide further details of the discussions.
Source:http://irrawaddy.org/article.php?art_id=21350
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