Burma's Prisons a Caldron of Protest Fury

Outside the walls, behind this former capital's surface scars of broken windowpanes and mildewed buildings choked with vegetation, the wounds of the detention system reach deep into Burmese society.

One recent evening, a university lecturer sat on the concrete floor of her living room, clutching a pillow to her stomach as if to draw solace from it. She talked of being racked by "mental torture," a mix of depression and anxiety from years spent anguishing over her imprisoned husband, an opposition politician.

And a teacher said he went for weeks with no news from a close colleague who was to fly out of the country on a prestigious foreign fellowship. It turned out that for having spontaneously joined thousands in street protests last September, he was hunted down by intelligence agents who caught him two months later. The colleague later turned up at Insein. Word from his mother was that he could no longer walk.

It is a system in which a lawyer fights a largely futile battle against bureaucracy, shuttling daily back and forth from a special tribunal at the prison to defend the rights of political detainees before a judge who generally will send them to prison regardless, often on a technicality.

In his Rangoon office, he rifled through a dusty tome that dated to the British colonial era to explain the terms under which 16 prominent dissidents, including the 88 leaders, have been held without trial since their arrest last August, he said.

Asked whether he had ever secured the release of a political detainee, he thought a moment, set down his cup of tea and related the lone incident of his 27-year career: accusations against a politician client turned out to be so outlandish that a 10-year sentence was revoked.

For being caught one night with an anti-government pamphlet, the once starry-eyed Rangoon University student served seven years. He was lucky, he said. For being caught with two pamphlets, friends netted double the sentence. He described enduring beatings, hours in shackles and weeks in solitary confinement. When he was transferred to another prison far upcountry, his mother never knew where he was.

Worst of all, he said, was his hunger for ideas. To feed his mind, he said, he sometimes used a piece of broken pottery to scrawl on the cold concrete, struggling to recall parts of beloved stories by British novelist Somerset Maugham.

Or he would bribe a criminal to bring him a prison-made cheroot, a cone-shaped cigarette. Then he'd slowly unpeel its leafy layers to reveal a thumb-size square of gluey state newspaper, and with it a snippet of information from the world outside his cell.

Now he smuggles reading material -- often about democracy -- to friends still inside.

Sometimes he returns from a prison visit with a poem. A poet he befriended recently wrote about the insanity of living within its walls:

The white color of the moonlight,

Sticking like a sword inside that very wall,

Will make the demand

For the rest of your life to be numb to thoughts,

For your sorrows to swell,

For your philosophy to be always aching.