0 PUNISHMENT OF MONK POLITICAL PRISONER HIGHLIGHTS ON-GOING ABUSE AND REPRESSION

ေသာျကာေန့က ျမန္မာနိုင္ငံက ျပန္ထြက္ခြါသြားတဲ့ ကုလသမဂၢ အတြင္းေရးမႉးခ်ုပ္ရဲ့ အျကံေပး မစၥတာ ဗီေဂ်းနမ္ဘီးယားကလည္း နိုင္ငံေရး အက်ဉ္းသား အားလံုး ျပန္လွြတ္ေပးဖို့ ထပ္ျပီး ေတာင္းဆိုခဲ့ပါေသးတယ္။ ဒီလို ေတာင္းဆိုေနျကတဲ့ အခ်ိန္မွာပဲ နိုင္ငံေရး အက်ဉ္းသား သံဃာေတာ္ တပါးကေတာ့ က်န္းမာေရး ဆိုးဝါးေနတဲ့ အခ်ိန္မွာပဲ တိုက္ပိတ္ခံထားရတဲ့ အတြက္ အသက္အနၱရာယ္ စိုးရိမ္ ေနရတယ္လို့ ေအေအပီပီ နိုင္ငံေရး အက်ဉ္းသားမ်ား ကူညီေစာင့္ေရွာက္ေရး အဖြဲ့က ဆိုပါတယ္။ဆရာေတာ္ ဦးစနၵိမာကို ၂၀ဝ၉ ခုနွစ္ ျသဂုတ္လ ၁၁ ရက္ေန့မွာဖမ္းဆီးခဲ့ပါတယ္။

၂၀ဝ၉ ခုနွစ္ တုန္းက ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုျကည္ကို ဂြ်န္ယက္ေတာ အမႈနဲ့ ရံုးထုတ္တုန္းက အင္းစိန္ေထာင္ တရားရံုးေရွ့မွာ သြားေရာက္ အားေပးခဲ့ရာက ေန အဖမ္းဆီး ခံခဲ့ရတာျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ ဖမ္းဆီးျပီးတဲ့ ေနာက္ စစ္ေျကာေရးမွာ စစ္ေဆးနွိပ္စက္မႈေျကာင့္ အူက်ေရာဂါနဲ့ တျခားေရာဂါေတြ ခံစားခဲ့ရတယ္လို့ ဆိုပါတယ္။သူခံစားရတဲ့ ေရာဂါေတြကို သင့္ေတာ္တဲ့ ေဆးကုသခြင့္မရတဲ့ အတြက္ ေရာဂါအေျခအေနဟာ ပိုဆိုးလာျပီး ေဆးကုသခြင့္ေတာင္းခဲ့တယ္လို့ ဆိုပါတယ္။ ဒါေပမဲ့ ေဆးကုသခြင့္ မရဘဲ သူေတာင္းဆိုတာကို အျပစ္ေပးတဲ့ အေနနဲ့ တိုက္ပိတ္ခဲ့တာျဖစ္ပါတယ္။အခုအခါမွာ ဆရာေတာ္ ဦးစနၵိမာဟာ အစာအငတ္ခံ ဆနၵျပေနပါတယ္။ သူ့ကို ေထာင္ဝင္စာေတြ့ခြင့္လည္း မေပးဘဲ ျဖတ္ထားပါတယ္။ တကယ္ေတာ့ ဆရာေတာ္ ဦးစနၵိမာဟာ ေလွ်ာ့ရက္မရဘဲ နွစ္ေစ့ ေနရရင္ေတာင္ လာမယ့္ ျသဂုတ္လ ၁၁ ရက္ေန့မွာ ေထာင္က လြတ္ရေတာ့မွာပါ။ ဒါေပမဲ့ဒီျကားကာလမွာ အသက္ ေသဆံုးသြားမွာကို မိသားစုက စိတ္ပူေနျကတယ္လို့ ေအေအပီပီ နိုင္ငံေရး အက်ဉ္းသားမ်ား ကူညီေစာင့္ေရွာက္ေရး အဖြဲ့ရဲ့ အတြင္းေရးမႉး ကိုတိတ္နိုင္က ဆိုပါတယ္။ဒီကိစၥနဲ့ ပတ္သက္ျပီး ေအေအပီပီ အေနနဲ့ လူ့အခြင့္အေရး ကာကြယ္ေစာင့္ေရွာက္တဲ့ အဖြဲ့ေတြကို ဆက္သြယ္အေျကာင္းျကားထားျပီး ျမန္မာနိုင္ငံဆိုင္ရာ ကုလသမဂၢရဲ့ လူ့အခြင့္အေရး အထူးကိုယ္စားလွယ္ ေတာမတ္စ္ အိုေဟး ကင္တားနားကို လည္း အသိေပးထားတယ္လို့ ေျပာပါတယ္။(BBC)
Press release
13 May 2011

The Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (AAPP) has grave concerns for Ashin Sandar Dika, a monk political prisoner, after learning he has been placed in solitary confinement as a punishment for requesting adequate health care. Ahshin Sandar Dika is currently incarcerated in Insein prison in Rangoon.

He was arrested on 11 August 2009 for waiting outside the Insein prison gates during Daw Aung San Su Kyi’s trial. He was taken to the High Court office in Rangoon where he was interrogated and severely tortured, resulting in a hernia and adversely affecting his long-term health. He was ultimately sentenced to 2 years in prison under 295 (a) of the Penal Code for insulting religion, and is set to be released on 11 August 2011.

There are currently at least 225 monks in prisons in Burma. “Monks considered political are held in particular contempt by the regime. After arrest they are forcibly disrobed and subjected to torture and harsh treatment. Some have died in detention. We do not want Ashin Sandar Dika to follow the same fate”, said Tate Naing, Secretary of AAPP. His family has expressed deep concern for his deteriorating health condition and fear the worst if he is not released immediately.

Ahshin Sandar Dika was punished for demonstrating for his basic rights, as he has not been provided with adequate health care while in prison. As a response, he was placed in solitary confinement where he is more vulnerable to torture and conditions are harsher. His family has reason to believe he has been tortured in his cell, which could have a devastating impact on his already fragile health condition.

At least 159 political prisoners are in poor health due to the harsh prison conditions, torture, transfers to remote prisons where there are no doctors, and the denial of proper medical care.

“Ashin Sandar Dika’s case is emblematic of the abuse suffered by political prisoners in Burma,” Tate Naing said. “Beaten, deprived of medical treatment, and cut off from the outside world, they have no effective complaint mechanism to seek redress, granting prison authorities total impunity”.

The failure by the authorities to respond to concerns raised by prisoners about their conditions of detention, and the ongoing arbitrary use of solitary confinement is a violation of both domestic and international laws and standards. Despite the new ‘civilian’ administration, which came into power through a fundamentally flawed election held in November 2010, Ashin Sandar’s case is further evidence that changes made do not signify sincere steps towards democratic reform and national reconciliation. AAPP urges the international community to intensify pressure on the current administration to immediately and unconditionally release all political prisoners.

Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (Burma)

For more information:

Tate Naing (Secretary): +66 (0) 81 287 8751
Bo Kyi (Joint Secretary): +66 (0) 81 962 8713

Thanks N Regards,

Assistant Association for Political Prisoners (Burma)
Office Ph: 66-55-545495
Web: http://www.aappb.org/, http://www.fbppn.net/

"There can be no national reconciliation in Burma, as long as there are
political prisoners."