Sep 21, 2009

Free Myo Min Zaw!



(စစ္အစုိးရ အက်ဥ္းေထာင္ထဲတြင္ အက်ဥ္းက်ေနဆဲ ၁၉၉၆-ခုႏွစ္ ဒီဇင္ဘာ
ေက်ာင္းသားေတာ္လွန္ေရးအတြင္း ရန္ကုန္တကၠသုိလ္၊ လွဳိင္နယ္ေျမ၏
ေက်ာင္းသား ေခါင္းေဆာင္ ကိုမ်ဳိးမင္းေဇာ္- အဂၤလိပ္စာ အဓိက၊ ဒုတိယႏွစ္)



(စစ္အစုိးရ၏ အက်ဥ္းေထာင္အတြင္း မၾကာခဏဆုိသလုိ ညွင္းပန္းႏွိပ္စက္ျခင္း
ခံေနရေသာ ေက်ာင္းသား ေခါင္းေဆာင္ ကိုမ်ဳိးမင္းေဇာ္)

Myo Min Zaw, born about 1978, was a second-year student of English.
He was involved in the large-scale student demonstrations of 1996.
The military sought him but he managed to evade arrest. In 1997 he joined
the central organizing committee of the All-Burma Student Union (ABSFU).
Using the alias of Moe Hein Aung, in July 1998 he founded the Student and
Youth Unity Front. Between June and September 1998, more than 300 students
were arrested when they staged small demonstrations to protest the human
rights situation and the poor quality of education. Before these demonstrations,
letters appealing to the public for support and signed by "Moe Hein Aung" were
widely distributed in Yangon (Rangoon) and were used prominently by the
demonstrating students.

On September 14, 1998, Myo Min Zaw was arrested in the street and accused
of agitating unrest. He was sentenced to 38 years, later increased to 52.
He was at first in the notorious Insein Prison in Yangon. In April and May 1999,
just before an attempt by the International Committee of the Red Cross to
investigate Burma's prison conditions, the military authorities secretly
transferred hundreds of political prisoners from Insein to remote prisons
around the country; the families of the transferred prisoners were not told,
and no official news was released. Myo Min Zaw was transferred to
Pathein Prison.

After a hunger strike in 2003 calling for the release of Aung San Suu Kyi,
he was transferred with 28 others from Pathein to Mandalay Prison,
up in the middle of the country. When he arrived he was hooded,
and beaten at the prison gate and then in the cell, with prison service
batons. He was held for one month in shackles and solitary confinement,
then put in a cell with others. Later he was transferred to Puta O prison
in Kachin State — the remote north of Burma — making it even more
impossible for his family in Rangoon to bring him food and medical assistance.

Myo Min Zaw was adopted as a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International
in 1999, and his case was assigned to USA groups 182 and 280 in Greenville, SC,
and Manhattan, NY, and to groups in Britain, the Netherlands, and Sweden.

(http://www.humanrightsletters.com/ မွ ထပ္ဆင့္ ကူးယူေဖာ္ျပပါသည္။)

No comments: