Burmese journalist and pro-democracy activist U Win Tin marked his 73rd
birthday in detention on 12 March. It was an opportunity for media
freedoms groups to renew their calls for the immediate release of one of
the world's longest-jailed prisoners of conscience.
Free expression groups and media rights campaigners worldwide marked the
73rd birthday of jailed Burmese journalist U Win Tin with renewed calls
for his release from detention.
One of the country's best-known journalists and a founder member of the
opposition National League for Democracy (NLD), Win Tin has spent the
last 13 years of his life in prison. Press freedom organisations have
appealed for his release on medical and humanitarian grounds.
Index on Censorship, Reporters Sans Frontières (RSF), the Burma Media
Association (BMA) and other groups called on 12 March for Win Tin to be
released from Rangoon general hospital, where he has taken for treatment
for heart problems three and half months ago.
The groups fear his already fragile health would worsen if he were sent
back to prison from hospital, and they therefore hope the Burmese
authorities will show him some compassion RSF reports that Win Tin was
transferred from prison to Rangoon general hospital on 22 November 2002
and since then has been confined to one of the 15-square-metre rooms for
political prisoners in the hospital's basement. A doctor examines him
daily and he is receiving the medicines he needs.
A delegation from Amnesty International, making its first ever
fact-finding mission to Burma at the military junta's invitation, visited
Win Tin in his hospital room on 5 February. They were able to talk for
more than an hour. On its return to Europe, the delegation reported that
Win Tin's morale was excellent and that his state of health reasonably
satisfactory. He is nonetheless also suffering from urinary problems.
The former editor of the newspaper Hanthawadi and vice-president of the
Association of Burmese Writers, Win Tin has been detained since 4 July
1989. He was a founder with Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi
of the National League of Democracy, Burma's main pro-democracy party.
The NLD's landslide election victory in 1990 was not recognised by the
military regime. He is also the 2001 laureate of the UNESCO World Press
Freedom Prize. U Win Tin was arrested in 1989, tried in a closed military
court and sentenced to 14 years in prison for advocating democracy.
A year later he played a leading role in a hunger strike inside the
notorious Insein prison, and in 1995 he smuggled out letters describing
prison conditions to Yozo Yokota, the United Nations Special Rapporteur
for Human Rights for the country.
For this act, U Win Tin was beaten, removed from all human contact,
deprived of all writing materials, transferred to Myingyan Jail in the
north of Rangoon and sentenced to an additional seven years imprisonment.
Comment on this article.
Links:
Siobhan Dowd writes on Win Tin for
Digital Freedom Network and the Writers in Prison Committee of
International PEN.
Amnesty International background to the
case
http://www.indexonline.org/news/20030312_burma.shtml
