Reporters Without Borders calls on Myanmar to release prisoners ( AFP ) October 10, 2002


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Reporters Without Borders calls on Myanmar to release prisoners

BANGKOK, Oct 10 (AFP)

Press rights watchdog Reporters Without Borders and the Burma Media Association (BMA) Thursday called on Myanmar's junta to release dozens of dissidents imprisoned recently for possessing banned newspapers.

"This new crackdown is evidence of the military regimes hostility towards the pluralism of information," said Robert Menard, secretary-general of Reporters Without Borders (Reporters Sans Frontieres - RSF).

"It is intolerable that dozens of Burmese people should be imprisoned simply for having read or distributed a newspaper," he wrote in a letter to Myanmar's Home Minister Colonel Tin Hlaing signed jointly by BMA president U Thaung.

RSF said some 30 activists, mostly former political prisoners, were arrested and interrogated by intelligence services last month for possessing opposition publications including a Thai-based newspaper Khit Pyaing.More than a dozen people are still being held in undisclosed locations, it added.

The two groups also asked Tin Hlaing to persuade the junta to allow the opposition National League for Democracy (NLD) to launch a newspaper.NLD leader Aung San Suu Kyi reportedly requested a licence to publish a newspaper after her release in May from 19 months under house arrest.

The US State Department earlier this month sharply criticised the arrests of the 30 opposition activists, describing them as a "significant step backwards" for hopes that the junta is easing its iron grip on political activity.

"We continue to urge the regime to release all those detained for the peaceful expression of their political views," an official said.

Exiled opposition groups have claimed the arrests expose the junta's pledge to permit people to freely indulge in political activities as a sham.

Aung San Suu Kyi has said her party's top priority is to secure the release of all the political prisoners in the country's jails.The Nobel peace laureate suggested in August that a mass release would be a precondition to her beginning a fully fledged political dialogue with the Yangon junta.The two sides have been engaged in a dialogue aimed at national reconciliation since October 2000.Hundreds of political prisoners have been freed since the dialogue began, but between 1,300 and 1,500 are believed to be still incarcerated.

According to RSF and the BMA, almost 40 people have been arrested over the last two years for having distributed or read an opposition newspaper printed in Thailand.

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