Remembering Burma's jailed political activists

After 18 years in prison, Burmese journalist U Win Tin is still in solitary confinement. U Win Tin is the most outstanding journalist in Burma. He recently told a friend who visited him at the notorious Insein Prison: "Two prison officers asked me last week whether I would take up a political career if I were released. I told them that I will unquestionably do so since it is my obligation as a citizen of this country to strive for basic freedom."

U Win Tin, a 78-year-old journalist and Central Executive Committee member of the National League for Democracy (NLD), was arrested on July 4, 1989, during a crackdown by the military authorities on the opposition. Originally, he was sentenced to three years with hard labour for being a dissident who used his influence to mount a civil disobedience campaign against martial law. Later, his sentence was extended to 21 years and public promises of his release in 2004 and 2005 have never been carried out. Since 2006, he is no longer able to receive visits from the International Committee of the Red Cross.

When Paulo Sergio Pinheiro, the UN special envoy for human rights in Burma, visited him on his 75th birthday in 2005, it wasn't the deplorable conditions he was kept in or even his failing health, made worse by poor medical care and the effects of improper surgery he wanted to highlight. Instead, it was Burma's human rights situation.

Summing up the situation, there can be no progress in the democratisation process and national reconciliation in Burma while the military junta is crookedly using political prisoners, including our Nobel Laureate, as scapegoats thrown into confinement to prolong the military dictatorship. If the SPDC truly want to show its seriousness, it should release all political prisoners, including U Win Tin and Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, prior to resuming the so-called national convention on July 18 at Nyaung-hnapin camp in Hmawbi Township.