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Myanmar Exiles Tell pf Torture



Myanmar Exiles Tell of Torture

By ROBERT HORN
 .c The Associated Press 

BANGKOK, Thailand (AP) -- The soldiers came in the middle of the night, Ye
Teiza said. At least a dozen of them, surrounding his home in Myanmar's
capital and pounding on the door. 

``My heart was racing,'' he said. ``I knew I was going to be arrested.'' 

Ye Teiza was a member of a student union campaigning for democracy and an end
to decades of military rule in Myanmar, also known as Burma. 

Like 18 foreign activists caught handing out pro-democracy leaflets in Yangon
last month, Ye Teiza said he was taken into the custody of military
intelligence. 

Most of the American, Thai, Malaysian, Indonesian, Filipino and Australian
activists said they were treated humanely. Sentenced to five years in jail,
they were immediately deported to their home countries. 

In interviews with The Associated Press and in a soon-to-be-published book, Ye
Teiza and eight other former political prisoners in Myanmar tell far different
tales of their own treatment. They detailed their accounts of physical and
psychological torture suffered at the hands of the nation's military
government. 

The book, called ``Tortured Voices: Personal Accounts of Burma's Interrogation
Centers,'' will be published by the All Burma Students Democratic Front, an
anti-government exile group. It covers their arrests in the early 1990s.
Reports from human rights groups say conditions haven't improved since then. 

The military government denies people are mistreated while under arrest. 

``Myanmar is a land of strong Buddhist belief, and such inhumane acts are
nonexistent,'' said a government spokesman. He called the book anti-government
propaganda. 

Nonethless, the government gunned down 3,000 pro-democracy demonstrators who
were calling for an end to military rule in a nationwide protest in 1988. 

Ye Teiza and his colleagues say they were brutalized and subjected to torture
until they named other democracy activists and signed false confessions. Then,
they say, they were given sham trials and sentenced to long prison terms. 

Prisoners said they were kept in dungeon-like cells. At the hands of
successive squads of interrogators they were beaten daily, threatened with
death, rape, subjected to electric shocks, deprived of sleep, food, water and
using a toilet for days at a time. 

During questioning they were always blindfolded, the writers said. Some were
kept in stocks, while others had iron rods rolled over their shins. They were
forced to kneel on sharp stones until they bled, or stand on their toes for
hours with pins beneath their heels. 

People arrested by the regime, the authors said, enter the centers with bags
pulled over their heads. Sightless, they were terrified by a continuous
wailing of people in excruciating pain. 

Naing Kyaw, an arrested student, wrote that with every question he was hit, no
matter how he answered. The interrogators never let prisoners slip into
unconsciousness, something many of them longed for. 

Ye Teiza said an officer told him: ``We can kill you without any problem.'' He
eventually managed to flee Burma in 1997. 

Asking for water was asking for abuse. Many had it poured over the hoods they
were forced to wear, causing the fabric's fibers to close, nearly suffocating
them. Fear of rape was frequent among female prisoners. 

Eventually, the prisoners were tried and charged, like the 18 foreigners, with
disturbing the peace and tranquility of the state. All said they were denied
lawyers and sent to Insein Prison in Yangon. 

Those who thought that meant the abuse was over were wrong. Prisoners are
frequently returned to interrogation centers from the jail for more torture. 

The regime's tactics have been effective. Most people are too fearful to risk
rising up against it. 

The government has failed to break the will of a small vanguard of democracy
activists. On Monday, 200 students spilled into the streets of Yangon and
demonstrated for an end to military rule, the first public protest in almost
two years. 

They fled down side streets as soldiers arrived.