By Jared Genser and Nicole Carelli
December 17, 2008
Last month, U Gambira, a leader of the All Burma Monks Alliance, received a 68-year sentence for his role in organizing last year's Saffron Revolution, when tens of thousands of Buddhist monks and political activists peacefully protested the junta's brutal regime. Myanmar comedian Zarganar was sentenced to 59 years in jail by one of the military junta's secret courts. His crime? Publicly criticizing the regime's slow response to Cyclone Nargis. And poet Saw Wai received a lighter sentence: a "mere" two years. His crime? Penning an eight-line Valentine's Day poem that contained a hidden message. Putting the first letters of each line of the poem together read "Power Crazy Than Shwe" in Burmese, mocking the junta's leader. Two years in prison. That's three months per line. 9.4 days per word.
Zarganar, U Gambira, and Saw Wai are three of the approximately 2,100 political prisoners currently held in Myanmar jails, formerly known as Burma. Nearly half of these prisoners were arrested in the past year alone. Recently, the junta's courts have begun sentencing these protesters and even some of their lawyers who have been courageously defending them in closed-door hearings. More than 20 members of the 88 Generation Students Group received 65 years apiece. That's 65 years spent in jails described by survivors as filled with rats, filth, and disease; where many of the protesting monks are stripped of their religious garb and kept in solitary confinement; where prisoners are commonly tortured and allowed a few sips of water each day.
Meanwhile, a woman known affectionately by her people as "The Lady" is held in isolation, cut off from virtually all communication. This year, Aung San Suu Kyi, leader of Myanmar's National League for Democracy and the world's only imprisoned Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, begins her 14th year under house arrest.
Earlier this month, 112 former presidents and prime ministers from more than 50 countries around the world - including former South Korean Presidents Kim Dae-Jung and Roh Moo-hyun as well as former Prime Ministers Lee Hae-chan and Lee Hong-koo – united in sending an unprecedented letter to United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urging him to personally visit Myanmar by the end of 2008 to secure the release of the junta's political prisoners.
This historic outpouring of global support reflects deep international frustration with the failure of UN engagement to secure democratization - or indeed, any substantive reforms at all - since Myanmar's democratic elections 18 years ago. A few days later, a similar letter was sent to the Secretary-General by 241 Asian legislators.
Since the military junta seized control of Burma in 1962, the regime has accumulated a terrible human rights record. Despite the country's rich natural resources, Burma's 48 million inhabitants are among the most impoverished in the world, with virtually no access to healthcare and other basic services. More than 3,300 villages have been destroyed since 1996 as the military wages a relentless campaign of murder, torture and rape against ethnic minorities. More than one million refugees have fled the country, and 600,000 internally displaced people struggle to subsist in primitive jungle conditions. In the month following Cyclone Nargis, which left 130,000 dead, the junta refused access to international humanitarian organizations, depriving thousands of Burmese of essential emergency assistance.
In response to recent requests for him to travel to Burma, Secretary-General Ban convened a meeting of the so-called Group of Friends of Burma and later responded publicly by saying "At this time, I do not think that the atmosphere is ripe for me to undertake my own visit there . . . But I’m committed and I’m ready to visit any time whenever I can have reasonable expectations of my visit to be productive and meaningful."
We hope that this does not mean that Mr. Ban intends to wait for the junta to inform him that it intends to take constructive action. Indeed, only the vigorous exercise of leadership by the Secretary-General has the potential to make something possible out of what appears to be an impossible situation.
Should the junta continue to defy the international community, decisive steps need to be taken. Since Than Shwe's regime has refused to respond to the UN Security Council's call for change, the Council should, at the very least, discuss a binding resolution that bans global arms shipments to Burma's military regime. Such an arms embargo would significantly disempower the military regime while in no way hurting the Burmese people.
"Please use your liberty to promote ours," Aung San Suu Kyi has often said. It's past time the world listened.
Jared Genser and Nicole Carelli serve as pro bono counsel to Aung San Suu Kyi with Freedom Now. The views expressed here are their own.
