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YANGON, Myanmar: Two journalists who languished for years in Myanmar
prisons have been freed as part of an amnesty granted to some 2,800
inmates.
Journalists Than Win Hlaing and Thaung Tun were
freed after an amnesty announced Wednesday by the military
government, Reporters Without Borders and the Burma Media
Association said in a statement.
The opposition National League for Democracy (NLD)
said about 50 political detainees were among those freed from
prisons around the country.
“The release of prisoners of conscience is
always good news, even if the junta kept the ailing Thaung Tun and
Than Win Hlaing in prison for nearly seven years just for writing
articles and books it did not like,” the two press rights groups
said.
“We reiterate our appeal to the military
government to free all imprisoned journalists immediately,” they
said.
Five other journalists are still being held in
Myanmar, they added.
Than Win Hlaing, 48, was arrested in June 2000
and sentenced to seven years in prison for writing about the NLD’s
detained leader Aung San Suu Kyi and her father, independence hero
General Aung San.
He was denied treatment for diabetes and kidney
problems while held at Tharrawady prison, north of Yangon, the
groups said.
Thaung Tun, who is known by his pen name Nyein
Thit, was also released. He was arrested in October 1999 and
interrogated and tortured for more than three weeks before being
sentenced to eight years in prison, they said.
He was jailed under Myanmar’s sweeping
Emergency Act, which is often used to target political dissidents,
for compiling information about rights abuses and sending his
findings overseas. He also worked for a magazine in Yangon and
produced video reports.
Conditions in Myanmar’s prisons are
notoriously grim. The government has refused to allow the Red Cross
to visit them for more than a year.
Nobel peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi has been
kept under house arrest for more than 10 of the past 17 years. Her
NLD party won a landslide victory in 1990 elections but has never
been allowed to take office.
--AFP
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