JAKARTA, Indonesia (AP) – Whether taken home at midnight or caught on the street during protests, hundreds of people have been arrested in the weeks following Myanmar’s military coup, leading to human rights groups and experts to fear a considerable expansion of the number of political prisoners in the country.
As of Tuesday, some 696 people, including monks, writers, activists, politicians and others, had been arrested in connection with the coup, according to the Political Prisoners Assistance Association or AAPP, an organization based in in Myanmar.
Many of those arrested were accused of using a legacy of laws – some dating back to British colonial times and others instituted under previous military regimes – that have been used against critics by all governments, including the leadership of Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy. party, which was ousted in the February 1 coup.
“The National League for Democracy felt comfortable leaving repressive laws in the books because in some cases they believed they could take advantage of those laws for themselves,” said Ronan Lee, a visiting scholar at Queen Mary University of London International State Crime Initiative .
“It is now clear that some of these laws will now be armed against the defenders of democracy in a way that perhaps the National League for Democracy did not provide for,” Lee said.
While the military continues to use and modify old laws to repress dissidents, new laws are also being introduced that signal the military’s intention to continue arresting protesters.
Hundreds of detainees since the coup join the country’s already hundreds of political prisoners who were imprisoned under both the previous board and the National League for Democracy (NLD).
“We have now seen not only a new generation of political prisoners, but also the reorientation of former political prisoners,” Manny Maung, a Myanmar researcher at New York-based Human Rights Watch, said.
During the NLD government, journalists, army and government critics, and others were charged under the laws of the colonial era. According to the AAPP, Myanmar had more than 700 political prisoners as of January 31, and hundreds were charged during the NLD’s tenure in power.
Many of the repressive laws used against dissidents date back to the country’s colonial era.
After more than 120 years of British colonial rule, Myanmar, then called Burma, became an independent republic in 1948. Although no longer a British territory, the country retained many of its laws at the time. colonial, which were “designed by their nature to be repressive and silence political opponents,” said Nick Cheeseman, a member of the Department of Political and Social Change at the National University of Australia.
In 1962, the military took control of the country through a coup and remained under the rule of the Junta for decades. Under the Junta, people were regularly imprisoned for protesting against the military. Those arrested were often sent to prison for years and torture, including beatings, waterboarding and deprivation of food and sleep, was common, according to the AAPP. Suu Kyi was under house arrest for 15 years for a period of 21 years during that period.
Before the democratic reforms took place, a period in which Suu Kyi was released from house arrest, her political party agreed to run in the 2012 by-elections and press censorship was softened. Amnesty International estimated that Myanmar had more than 1,000 political prisoners, calling it “One of the highest populations in the world.”
In the years following the 2010 release of Suu Kyi from house arrest, an amnesty for prisoners led to the release of thousands of inmates, including some 200 political prisoners, while others remained imprisoned.
For many observers, this signaled the hope for new reforms, a vision reinforced when Suu Kyi’s party took power after a total defeat in the 2015 elections.
But hope quickly dissipated in the following years, as repressive laws were largely left in books and political prisoners remained without official recognition.
The lack of repeal of strong penal codes left some freedom of expression activist groups and other activist groups annoying Myanmar, but “it didn’t really affect the number of people in the West who interacted with Aung San Suu Kyi” or the his government, said Lee, the academic.
“What the military is trying to do is use the laws to add some legitimacy to their illegitimate seizure of power and the NLD gave them the opportunity to do so by leaving the old laws intact,” Lee said. “But there is also no doubt that if these laws did not work for the military, they would still find other ways to arrest people.”
Since this month’s coup, the military has also amended the old penal codes and proposed new laws that experts say could be used as additional tools to crack down on dissidents.
For example, the amendments made on February 14 to the sections of the country’s Penal Code on high treason state that people can be sentenced to “up to 20 years for planning to prevent the success of the defense or the law enforcement “.
A controversial proposed cybersecurity law requires the removal of online comments considered misinformation or misinformation that could cause “hate” or disrupt stability and any comments that may violate any existing law. Those found guilty of breaking the law can be sentenced to a maximum of three years in prison.
The legal changes “are an example of a textbook by a military man trying to suppress dissent,” said Bo Kyi, a former political prisoner and founder of the AAPP. “The wording of these amendments exposes literally anyone in prison.”
With continued crackdown on protesters against the coup (including the arrests of plainclothes police at midnight), prominent pro-democracy activists told The Associated Press that they have begun staying in safe houses to avoid arrest. . Other detainees have had no contact with their families and their locations are unknown.
“Conditions (for inmates) are something we really care about,” said Maung, a researcher at Human Rights Watch. “We expect the worst, which is that people are being mistreated and even tortured, because that was what was happening before.”