56 political prisoners released, Myanmar says
Rights groups praise the amnesty but say it’s not enough. One observer likens it to ‘bargaining chips.’
NEW DELHI — Myanmar on Tuesday released 56 political prisoners, according to local news reports, part of a pledge to free all political detainees by the end of the year.
The prisoners, including more than a dozen from the northern state of Kachin, were released at 11 a.m., Aung Min, a representative of the prime minister’s office, reportedly said at the start of three days of peace talks in the state. Government troops have been fighting with ethnic Kachin rebels since a 17-year cease-fire collapsed in mid-2011.
Prisoner rights groups and human rights activists welcomed the amnesty by Myanmar, also known as Burma, but said much more needs to be done.
“This is good news for all of us, for the people of Burma,” said Tint Swe, a former lawmaker and chairman of Burma Center Delhi, a civic group. “But there are still a lot of problems, including new people being arrested for demonstrating.”
News of the release came on the eve of a two-day forum in Brunei that will be attended by more than a dozen heads of government from Southeast Asia and the Pacific, including Myanmar President Thein Sein.
Human rights activists say Myanmar has a history of announcing prisoner releases just before high-profile foreign meetings to buy goodwill and blunt foreign criticism.
“It’s entirely within the pattern to parse these political prisoners out as bargaining chips when they want to improve their international image,” said Phil Robertson, Bangkok-based Asia deputy director of Human Rights Watch, a watchdog group. “This trick is getting a bit worn.”
The number of political prisoners still detained in Myanmar is a matter of some dispute, with different ideas about what constitutes a political prisoner, along with poor recordkeeping in the nation’s network of 42 prisons and 109 labor camps. Most groups place the figure at 130 to 200, down from an estimated 2,100 several years ago.
Myanmar’s military government, which ruled the country with an iron grip for decades, long maintained that it held no political prisoners, only common criminals.
Thein Sein released political prisoners in April, as Europe was lifting economic sanctions and before a trip to Washington, and in July vowed in London to end the detention of “prisoners of conscience” by the end of the year.
Thein Sein may hope Tuesday’s prisoner release will blunt tough questions in Brunei about continuing sectarian violence between Muslim Rohingya and ethnic Rakhine Buddhists. Last week, he made a three-day visit to Rakhine state in a bid to stem the bloodshed.
“Our international reputation was damaged,” the president said of the recent carnage. “We shouldn’t allow these things to happen again.”
For Thein Sein, there’s a risk that attacks against Muslims could overshadow the well-received political reforms he’s fostered since the end of military rule in 2011. About 250 people have been killed and more than 140,000 left homeless in the last year because of Muslim-Buddhist fighting.