[The news agency Reuters published an in-depth report on the Inn Din slaughter in February. U Wa Lone and U Kyaw Soe Oo, two local reporters for the agency who had investigated the killings, were detained late last year. They are now on trial for violating Myanmar’s Official Secrets Act. The prisoner amnesty on Tuesday, which covered only those convicted of crimes, did not include their names.]
By Hannah Beech
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A
photograph said to show 10 Rohingya Muslims before their killing in the village
of
Inn Dinn, Myanmar, in September last year. Credit via Reuters
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BANGKOK
— For about an hour on
Wednesday, the website of Myanmar National Television carried a surprising
report: A mass prisoner amnesty the previous day, it said, had included seven
members of the country’s military who were briefly jailed for a massacre of
Rohingya Muslims.
The report was quickly taken down and was
strongly denied by a government spokesman, U Zaw Htay. “It’s not true, it’s
false news,” he said. “They are still in prison.”
The jailing of the seven, three officers and
four soldiers, was announced only on April 10, a rare admission of guilt by
armed forces accused by the international community of unleashing a
scorched-earth campaign in northern Rakhine State last year that compelled
around 700,000 Rohingya Muslims to flee Myanmar, a predominantly Buddhist
country, for Bangladesh. The United Nations has called the military campaign
“ethnic cleansing.”
The television network issued an apology for
its piece, which had shown men emerging from a prison in Sittwe, the capital of
Rakhine State, and one of them shaking hands with a uniformed prison official.
The network did not make clear what had happened, saying only that “further
investigation” had revealed its information to be incorrect.
The seven men, whose identities have not been
made public, were sentenced to 10 years in prison, for the extrajudicial
killings in September of 10 Rohingya in the village of Inn Din, according to a
military statement.
The news agency Reuters published an in-depth
report on the Inn Din slaughter in February. U Wa Lone and U Kyaw Soe Oo, two
local reporters for the agency who had investigated the killings, were detained
late last year. They are now on trial for violating Myanmar’s Official Secrets
Act. The prisoner amnesty on Tuesday, which covered only those convicted of
crimes, did not include their names.
U Min Tun Soe, the deputy director of
Myanmar’s Prisons Department, confirmed that those convicted of crimes in Inn
Din remained behind bars. “I don’t remember all their names,” he said, “but I
can say these seven soldiers are still in Sittwe prison.” The seven men filmed
exiting Sittwe prison, he added, had not been members of the military.
The amnesty on Tuesday was the first major
one since Daw Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy took over
Myanmar’s civilian administration two years ago. More than 8,000 prisoners were
freed, many of them drug offenders or soldiers who had deserted.
President Win Myint — who holds the position
because Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi is constitutionally precluded from taking the post
— issued the pardons to coincide with Myanmar’s new year. The presidential
pardon also included 36 political prisoners.
During her long years in political
opposition, most of which she spent under house arrest, Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi
campaigned against the military government’s penchant for locking up
dissidents. When she was released in 2010, she said her first priority would be
to clear the country’s jails of political prisoners.
But since the National League for Democracy
began sharing power with Myanmar’s military in 2016, the number of people
charged with violating a harsh online defamation law has skyrocketed. Others
have been jailed for unlawful association or under vague legislation
criminalizing the circulation of information that could cause public
disharmony.
More than 200 people engaged in political
activity remain in jail or are awaiting trial, according to rights groups that
monitor Myanmar, formerly known as Burma.
“With the use and scope of repressive laws
being increased rather than repealed, it seems that under the N.L.D.
government, there is no end in sight to the scourge of political prisoners in
Burma’s jails,” said Mark Farmaner, director of Burma Campaign U.K., a rights
advocacy group.
Saw Nang contributed reporting from Mandalay,
Myanmar.
