JACARTA, Indonesia (AP) – Taken from their homes in the middle of the night or taken off the streets during the protests, hundreds of people have been arrested in the weeks since the military coup in Myanmar, leading human rights groups and experts to fear a major expansion of number of political prisoners in the country.
On Tuesday, some 696 people – including monks, writers, activists, politicians and others – were arrested in connection with the coup, according to the Association for Assistance to Political Prisoners, or AAPP, an organization based in Myanmar.
Many of the prisoners were accused of using a legacy of laws – some dating back to British colonial times and others instituted under previous military regimes – that were used against critics of all governments, including the one led by the National League for Democracy in Aung San Suu Kyi party, which was overthrown in the February 1 coup.
“The National League for Democracy felt comfortable leaving repressive laws in the books because, in some cases, they felt they could take advantage of those laws themselves,” said Ronan Lee, a visiting scholar at Queen Mary’s International State Crime Initiative London University.
“It is now clear that some of these laws will be turned into weapons against the defenders of democracy in a way that perhaps the National League for Democracy did not foresee,” said Lee.
As the military continues to use and amend old laws to crack down on dissidents, new laws are also being introduced, signaling the military’s intention to continue arresting protesters.
The hundreds of prisoners since the coup join the already hundreds of political prisoners in the country who were arrested by both the previous junta and the National League for Democracy, or NLD.
“Now we have seen not only a new generation of political prisoners, but also the redirection of former political prisoners,” said Manny Maung, a Myanmar researcher at Human Rights Watch in New York.
During the NLD government, journalists, critics of the military and the government and others were charged under colonial-era laws. According to the AAPP, Myanmar had more than 700 political prisoners on January 31, with hundreds of them being charged during the NLD’s ruling time.
Many of the repressive laws used against dissidents date from the country’s colonial era.
After more than 120 years of British colonial rule, Myanmar, then called Burma, became an independent republic in 1948. Although it is no longer British territory, the country retained many of its colonial-era laws, which were “designed by nature to be repressive and silence political opponents, ”said Nick Cheeseman, a researcher in the Department of Political and Social Change at the National University of Australia.
In 1962, the military took control of the country through a coup, which remained under the junta for decades. Under the junta, people were regularly arrested for speaking out against the military. Inmates were often sent to prison for years, and torture – including beatings, drowning and deprivation of food and sleep – was common, according to the AAPP. Suu Kyi was held under house arrest for 15 years over a period of 21 years during that time.
Before democratic reforms finally took place – a period during which Suu Kyi was released from house arrest, her political party agreed to participate in the 2012 partial elections and press censorship was eased – Amnesty International estimated that Myanmar was over 1,000 political prisoners, calling it “one of the largest of these populations in the world”.
In the years following Suu Kyi’s release from house arrest in 2010, the prisoner amnesty resulted in the release of thousands of prisoners, including about 200 political prisoners, while others remained incarcerated.
For many observers, this signaled hope for further reforms, a vision reinforced when Suu Kyi’s party came to power after an overwhelming victory in the 2015 elections.
But hope quickly dissipated in the years that followed, as repressive laws remained largely in the books and political prisoners remained unofficially recognized.
The lack of repeal of strict criminal codes left some freedom of speech groups and other groups of activists upset in Myanmar, but “it really didn’t impact how many in the West interacted with Aung San Suu Kyi” or his government, said Lee, the scholar.
“What the military is trying to do is use the laws to add some legitimacy to their illegitimate takeover and the NLD gave them the opportunity to do that, leaving the old laws intact,” said Lee. “But there is also no doubt that 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 changed old penal codes and proposed new laws that experts say could be used as additional tools to crack down on dissidents.
For example, the changes made on February 14 in the country’s Penal Code sections on high treason state that people can be sentenced to “up to 20 years for planning to impede the success of defense or law enforcement”.
A controversial proposed cybersecurity law requires the elimination of online comments deemed disinformation or misinformation that may cause “hatred” or disrupt stability, and any comment that may violate any existing law. Those who break the law can be sentenced to up to three years in prison.
The legal changes “are a classic example of a military man trying to suppress dissent,” said Bo Kyi, a former political prisoner and founder of the AAPP. “The formulation of these changes literally exposes anyone to prison.”
With continued repression of anti-coup protesters – including arrests by plainclothes police officers in the middle of the night – prominent pro-democracy activists told the Associated Press that they have begun to go into hiding places to avoid arrest. Others who were arrested had no contact with their families and their locations remain unknown.
“Conditions (for prisoners) are something that concerns us a lot,” said Maung, a researcher at Human Rights Watch. “We expect the worst, that people are being mistreated and possibly even tortured, because that was what happened.”