0 The freedom fighter who dares to defy the Burmese regime

For some of the political prisoners held in Burma's wretched jails, the hardest thing to bear is the pain and horror of being physically tortured. For others, held away from fellow inmates, it is the isolation and the creeping sense of despair. Some think about their families, others about the seemingly hopeless cause for which they fought. For the relatives and friends of those incarcerated, there is the struggle of trying to make regular visits and the constant, aching worry as to whether a loved one will ever be freed.

Win Tin, a senior colleague of detained opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, served more than 19 years in jail – almost all of them in solitary confinement – before being released in 2008. "The hardest thing was the separation from other people," says the lively 80-year-old, speaking from his home in Rangoon. The former journalist was routinely beaten, kept in a dog kennel and on one occasion interrogated for five days straight. And yet it was the separation from other people that he now remembers as causing him the greatest distress. He recalls: "Even when I was in hospital I was put in a different room ... You long to have a discussion with your friends. You feel as if you are losing your mind."Burma's jails are awash with political prisoners. The military authorities that seized power in 1962 dealt harshly with dissidents, but the current junta, which took power in 1988, has jailed increasing numbers of opponents. It has done so when it felt most threatened, most notably after a pro-democracy uprising in 1988 and a democratic election in 1990 – the results of which the junta ignored – and most recently following the so-called Saffron Revolution of September 2007, when tens of thousands of Buddhist monks and demonstrators filled the streets of Burma's cities to demand change. It is impossible to know how many such prisoners are being held, but activists say they currently have details of 2,186.
Independent.co.uk