(RSF/IFEX) – RSF has welcomed the release from prison of 67-year-old journalist and political activist U Tha Ban, detained for more than seven years for helping a university student write about Burma’s student movement, but said it was “very concerned” about the physical and mental health of at least 10 other journalists in jail in […]
(RSF/IFEX) – RSF has welcomed the release from prison of 67-year-old journalist and political activist U Tha Ban, detained for more than seven years for helping a university student write about Burma’s student movement, but said it was “very concerned” about the physical and mental health of at least 10 other journalists in jail in Burma.
In a joint statement issued with the Burma Media Association (BMA), RSF expressed regret that the journalist had not been freed earlier. He was released on 12 July 2004 from Rangoon’s Isein prison, four months after his sentence had been served.
A lawyer and former staffer with the government paper “Kyemon” (“The Mirror”), U Tha Ban has spent 12 of the past 14 years in jail. He was imprisoned from 1990 to 1995 for his involvement in the United Nationalities’ League for Democracy (UNLD), which is linked to the opposition National League for Democracy.
He was held for several years in a prison in Kale, in his native northwestern state of Arakan. He now has trouble walking and seeing. Requests to see an eye doctor were repeatedly refused. His health sharply deteriorated in 1999 but he was not allowed to go to hospital. RSF and the BMA have criticised what they called a “criminal and deliberate policy” by the authorities of allowing prisoners’ health to worsen. At least 72 political prisoners have died in the country’s jails in the last 25 years.
U Tha Ban worked for “Kyemon” from 1962 to 1978 and with various independent magazines from 1986 and 1990. He was arrested in March 1997 and accused of helping a student write articles and a book about the Burmese student movement. Thirty-one other people were arrested in the case.