JAKARTA, Indonesia (AP) – Whether taken from their homes in the middle of the night or taken from the streets during protests, hundreds of people have been arrested in the weeks since the military coup in Myanmar, leaving human rights groups and experts fearful of a significant expanding the number of political prisoners in the country.
According to the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners, or AAPP, a Myanmar-based organization, about 696 people had been arrested in connection with the coup as of Tuesday, including monks, writers, activists, politicians and others.
Many of those arrested were charged under a legacy of laws – some dating back to British colonial times and others established under previous military regimes – that have been used against critics by every government, including those led by the National League for Democracy from Aung San Suu Kyi. party, which was ousted in the coup d’état of February 1.
“The National League for Democracy had no qualms about leaving repressive laws on the books because in some cases they felt they could benefit from those laws themselves,” said Ronan Lee, a visiting scientist at the International. Queen Mary University of London State Crime Initiative. .
“It is now clear that some of those laws will now be armed against democracy campaigners in a way that the National League for Democracy may not have envisioned,” Lee said.
As the military continues to use and amend old laws to deal with dissent, new laws are also being enacted, indicating that the military plans to continue to arrest protesters.
The hundreds who have been arrested since the coup join the already hundreds of political prisoners in the country who were imprisoned under both the previous junta and the National League for Democracy or NLD.
“We have now not only seen a new generation of political prisoners, but also the re-targeting of former political prisoners,” said Manny Maung, a Myanmar researcher at Human Rights Watch in New York.
During the NLD’s rule, journalists, critics of the military and government, and others, were charged under colonial-era laws. According to the AAPP, Myanmar had more than 700 political prisoners on Jan. 31, hundreds of whom were charged during the time the NLD was in power.
Many of the repressive laws against dissidents date back to the country’s colonial days.
After more than 120 years of British colonial rule, Myanmar, then called Burma, became an independent republic in 1948. Although the country was no longer a British territory, it retained many of its colonial-era laws, which were “by nature intended to silence repressive and political opponents,” said Nick Cheeseman, a fellow at the Department of Political and Social Change at Australian National University.
In 1962, the military took control of the country through a coup d’état, and it remained under junta rule for decades. People were regularly imprisoned under the junta for speaking out against the army. Those arrested were often sent to prison for years, and torture – including beatings, waterboarding, and food and sleep deprivation – was commonplace, according to the AAPP. Suu Kyi was held under house arrest for 15 years for a period of 21 years during this period.
Before any democratic reforms finally took place – a period when Suu Kyi was released from house arrest, her political party agreed to run in 2012 midterm elections, and press censorship toned down – Amnesty International estimated that Myanmar had more than 1,000 political prisoners and named it “One of the highest such populations in the world.”
In the years after the release of Suu Kyi’s house arrest in 2010, a prisoner amnesty led to the release of thousands of prisoners, including about 200 political prisoners, while others were held.
For many observers, this was a sign of hope for further reforms, a vision reinforced when Suu Kyi’s party seized power after a landslide victory in the 2015 election.
But hope quickly faded in the years that followed, as repressive laws remained widely on the books and political prisoners without official recognition.
The lack of repeal of harsh criminal codes left some free speech and other activist groups in Myanmar upset, but “really didn’t affect how many people in the West interacted with Aung San Suu Kyi” or her government, Lee said. the scholar.
“What the military is trying to do is use the laws to add some legitimacy to their illegal hold on power and the NLD gave them a chance to do that by leaving old laws intact,” Lee said. “But there is no doubt that if these laws didn’t work for the military, they would still find other ways to arrest people.”
Since this month’s coup, the military has also amended old criminal codes and proposed new laws that experts say could be used as further tools to combat dissidents.
For example, changes to the country’s high treason criminal law sections on February 14 state that people can be sentenced to “up to 20 years for interfering with the success of defense or law enforcement.”
A controversial proposed cybersecurity law demands the elimination of online comments that are perceived as misinformation or disinformation that could cause “hatred” or disturbance of stability, and any comment that could violate existing laws. Those deemed to be breaking the law can be sentenced to up to three years in prison.
The legislative changes “are a textbook example of a military effort to quell dissent,” said Bo Kyi, a former political prisoner and founder of the AAPP. “The wording of these amendments exposes literally anyone to imprisonment.”
With the ongoing crackdown on anti-coup protesters – including arrests by plainclothes police in the middle of the night – prominent pro-democracy activists told The Associated Press they have begun to stay in safehouses to avoid arrest. Others who have been arrested have been out of touch with their families and their location is unknown.
“Conditions (for inmates) are something we are really concerned about,” said Maung, a Human Rights Watch researcher. “We expect the worst, which is that people will be abused and possibly even tortured, because that happened in the past.”