The police came for U Hla Min because his friends sang a few tunes about this country's most taboo subject - democracy."They told me political songs were illegal," said the opposition activist, 63, who was caught in 1996 handing out cassette recordings of his friends' music. "They said I had committed a serious crime."
He was charged with subversion and sentenced to seven years in prison. But in September, after what he called "more than four and a half years of hell," the military regime that controls Burma suddenly decided to release him.
His freedom stemmed from secret negotiations between the ruling generals and Aung San Suu Kyi, the opposition leader, who was also under detention. The United Nations-brokered talks, which began in late 2000 as a way for each side to build confidence in the other, have resulted in the release of 280 political prisoners, the latest and most notable of whom was Aung San Suu Kyi, set free by the government Monday after 19 months of house arrest.
Although her release has been hailed as a major step in the process of reconciliation, democracy activists say more than 1,000 people, many of them members of Aung San Suu Kyi's political party, remain in prison because of their political views. Opposition leaders and diplomats now regard the freeing of those prisoners as a critical test of the military's willingness to embrace genuine political reform.
"Releasing Suu Kyi was the easy step," a diplomat here said. "The generals know she's not going to rock the boat too much, and they're getting a lot of good publicity for it."But what about the student leaders? The other party activists? The people who might loudly criticize the generals?"
The release of those activists, the diplomat said, "will give us the clearest indication of whether they see this as a one-off move designed to reduce the international pressure on them, or whether they're committed to the process."
In a statement issued as Aung San Suu Kyi was released, the military said it would "continue to release those who will cause no harm to the community nor threaten the existing peace, stability and unity of the nation."
The human-rights group Amnesty International estimates that there are 1,500 political prisoners in Burma, also known as Myanmar. Aung San Suu Kyi's party, the National League for Democracy, and other groups have said the figure is higher.
But at a news conference after her release, Aung San Suu Kyi indicated that a lowering of the figure was likely. "In fairness to the authorities, I must say that the number of prisoners is probably less than we estimated," she said. "But we have yet to have enough information about all those who are on our list of prisoners of conscience."
She acknowledged that some prisoners have been "double-counted and even perhaps triple-counted because in Myanmar names are notoriously repetitive." Even so, she urged the government to free all political detainees, a subject that prompted her most pointed criticism. "I and my party have been disappointed at the slow rate of releases," she said. "We hope that whatever obstacles that are in the way of the releases will be overcome very soon."
Among those detained, according to Amnesty, is Salai Tun Than, a professor in his early seventies, who was arrested in Rangoon in November for advocating democratic change. He was given a seven-year prison sentence in March.
Some have been held since the military crushed democracy demonstrations in 1988. And some, including a student leader, Paw U Tun, who uses the alias Min Ko Naing, have been placed in solitary confinement for much of that time, according to rights groups.The military, in its statement, said it has released nearly 600 detainees in recent months. But not all of those are believed to be political prisoners.
Aung San Suu Kyi, according to people close to her, is worried that her release might weaken both international pressure and the government's progress on the prisoner issue.
When she began her talks with the government, she insisted that she be released only after hundreds of political prisoners were freed, including scores she deemed priority cases because of their ages or the terms of their sentences, according to sources familiar with the discussions. As a consequence, she probably spent more time in detention than she had to, the sources said.
"The authorities would most probably have considered releasing me early if I had asked for my release," she said at the news conference. The reason she and the government agreed on her release this week, she said, was because she and other leaders of her party "decided that the time has come for the party to move on."
With a steady trickle of releases - every few weeks a few more prisoners are let go - the UN special envoy to Burma, Razali Ismail, urged her to continue her struggle from outside her house. "Razali told her that she shouldn't hold herself hostage to the other political prisoners," a person familiar with the negotiations said.
U Hla Min says he thinks Aung San Suu Kyi made the right decision. "Now that she is free, she will be able to fight for others to be free too," he said Tuesday at party headquarters. His case illustrates how activists in Burma can be imprisoned for even the smallest actions that upset the military. The cassettes in question contained two songs that infuriated the police, he said.
One was titled "Spirit of the Fighting Peacock," a reference to the National League for Democracy's symbol, and the other was "From 1988 to Eternity," which was about the military's 1988 coup d'etat.He did not even know the vocalists, but because he was in charge of organizing entertainment at party programs, the police insisted he was responsible for the recordings.While awaiting trial, he was held in Rangoon's filthy and overcrowded central jail. After he was sentenced in January 1997, he was transferred to a prison in central Burma, near the city of Mandalay.
He said that although he was not tortured, he was subjected to physical and mental abuse. One day, a guard came into his cell and asked him to catch flies, he said. When he couldn't, he said, the guard made him cross his hands, hold onto his ears and jump up and down for hours. "They would say, 'Old man, what are you thinking about?'" he recounted. "If they didn't like your answer, they'd beat you." "Every day, I would hear the sounds of beating, shouting, yelling. It filled the jail."
When it came to food, he said there was too little, but enough so that he did not have to eat rats, as detainees in other prisons have been forced to do. He was served "so-called vegetables" once a day and "so-called meat" once a week, he said. His toilet consisted of a tin can. Being taken outside to bathe, he said, "was like a cattle drive."
Now that he is free, he said, he is working with the families of other prisoners to arrange food and medicine shipments with the help of the International Committee of the Red Cross."I was very lucky," he said. "There are so many people just like me who still are suffering." Nobel laureate meets UN officials
Aung San Suu Kyi met United Nations officials Wednesday, Reuters reported from Rangoon. U Lwin, the secretary of the National League for Democracy, said that the 56-year-old Nobel peace laureate would spend mornings at her lakeside residence receiving guests, and would come to the party headquarters each weekday afternoon.Party workers have prepared an office for her in the dilapidated party building, complete with an air-conditioning unit to combat the stifling heat.