Democracy and oppression, human rights and abuses in buddhist Burma, Myanmar

Reports from ex-prisoners at the Insein infamous prison, where also the monks have reportedly been deported.

Torture

"They beat me in the frog position, spread-eagled on the floor," he said.
"When I was in solitary confinement, I was not allowed to have a shower or wash. They refused to allow me to change my clothes, even though it was so hot. My whole body was covered in skin diseases," he said.

"I was struck by the horrible stench. There was no toilet, just a slop bucket filled with human waste and crawling with maggots. Most of the prisoners have dysentery because of the conditions they are kept in" he said.

Insein prison, 433 m diameter, plus other buildings in the northern part

(Google Earth, 2007 sat pictures).

Monks' particular conditions

"In my room there were 7 monks. All of them were political prisoners, and all had been forced to disrobe. When they were first captured, the soldiers just took their robes and forced them to put on civilian prison clothes. In the prison, all of them kept on practising as monks, and only eating one meal a day, but the guards treated them the same as everyone else. There is a group in the prison which is responsible for keeping all the prisoners' hair cut, but the guards wouldn't allow the monks to shave their heads.

They had all been in since 1991, sentenced under section 5J for signing the monks' boycott petition. [This was the petition to join the Buddhist monks' religious boycott of the military, which was instigated due to the SLORC's massacres of Buddhist monks, desecration of Buddhist temples and general disregard for the human and religious rights of the people]. There were also 3 senior reverend monks who had refused to disrobe. They were kept all in one cell, in a part of the prison separate from us. I heard that a warder said to them, "You can't go on like monks - we treat everyone equally here."