In Burma, making a joke can get you arrested. The proof of that is the 59-year sentence handed down to the well-known comedian Zarganar for laughing at the junta's brutal regime.
Zarganar joins Burma's most famous political prisoner, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, in being incarcerated for actions that in any normal democracy would not be considered even mildly offensive.
In the past four decades, the United Nations has issued more than 30 resolutions on Burma, most of them calling for the release of Suu Kyi. She has just begun her 14th year in detention, and others remain in custody. In fact, the number of Burmese political prisoners has doubled in the last year to more than 2000. Still the people of Burma suffer and the international community fails to generate positive change. Since military leaders grasped power in 1962, Burma has gone from one of Asia's richest countries to one of its poorest. Its human right record, as the above evidence indicates, is among the worst in the world.
There are 70,000 child soldiers in Burma, the highest number anywhere in the world. Here, children can spend their formative years fighting the world's longest running civil war, in the east of the country.
Should they survive this, they may, as adults, become one of hundreds of thousands of Burmese who flee the country every year to eke out an existence as refugees in neighbouring countries. In the decade to 2005, the flow of refugees from Burma increased 800 per cent. Burma is the world's third biggest source of refugees, with more than one million now listed.
In the name of the regime's political agendas, more than 3000 villages have been stolen since 1996. There are about 600,000 internally displaced people in Burma. All these numbers do of course have names and faces. This is why, along with more than 100 other ex-leaders around the world, I have signed a letter to the United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon to aim to release all political prisoners in Burma by the end of this year.
Among my co-signatories are Corazon Aquino, George H. Bush, Jimmy Carter, Kim Dae-jung, Mikhail Gorbachev, Vaclav Havel, Jose Ramos Horta, Margaret Thatcher, Mary Robinson and Lech Walesa.
The letter recalls that the UN issued a presidential statement on October 11, 2007, calling on the Burmese military to release all political prisoners in Burma. This action has since been bolstered by further official moves from the UN to require the regime to release its political detainees.
The co-signatories have called on Ban, whether he visits Burma again or not, to ensure all political prisoners will be released by the end of 2008. The letter states, ''The Burmese people are counting on the United Nations to take the required action to achieve the breakthrough they desperately need to both restore democracy to their country and to address the serious humanitarian and human rights challenges they face.''
The world has not served Burma well. Its people have suffered for too long and it is time that positive words are combined with forward movement. All the signatories believe the situation is serious enough to warrant the specific intervention of Ban himself. Without such action, Burma's regime will continue forestalling democracy and denying freedom in one of Asia's major nations. The release of political prisoners in Burma, including the revered Suu Kyi, cannot be delayed any longer.