Burma will release protesters jailed for protesting the army’s coup in February. A total of 5,636 prisoners will be pardoned and released before the Thadingyut festival which begins on Tuesday, General Min Aung Hlaing said Monday, Oct. 18, without giving details of who would be included in the list.
The military putsch of 1er February ended a brief decade-long democratic hiatus in the country. Since then, the army has carried out a bloody crackdown with more than 1,100 civilians killed and some 7,000 in detention, according to a local NGO, the Association for Assistance to Political Prisoners, which reports cases of torture, rape and rape. extrajudicial execution.
The head of the junta excluded from the Asean summit
By the end of June, the authorities had released more than 2,000 coup opponents who were being held in various prisons across the country, including local journalists arrested for criticizing the junta’s bloody crackdown.
The editor-in-chief of the media Myanmar border, Danny Fenster, of American nationality, has been held in Insein prison, near Yangon, since his arrest on May 24.
The new decision to release prisoners comes after the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) on Friday excluded Min Aung Hlaing from an upcoming summit because of the handling of the crisis by the military government. The bloc’s foreign ministers agreed that a “Non-political representative” Burmese would be invited in his place to the summit scheduled for October 26-28.
The organization, which brings together ten Southeast Asian countries, including Burma, took this exceptional step after the junta rejected requests to send a special representative to dialogue “With all stakeholders”, including former civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi.
“Insufficient progress”
Overthrown by the army in February, Aung San Suu Kyi, Nobel Peace Prize winner and 76 years old, is targeted by a multitude of legal proceedings which could earn her long years of imprisonment.
The ASEAN press release reported “Insufficient progress” in the implementation of a five-point plan, adopted in April, which was to help restore dialogue in Burma and facilitate the arrival of humanitarian aid. The Burmese junta had criticized this decision, accusing ASEAN of having broken the rule of non-interference in the internal politics of its member states.
Last week, Aung San’s senior lawyer Suu Kyi said the junta had banned him from speaking to journalists, diplomats or international organizations.
The defense team of the former Burmese leader was the sole source of information on her trial, which is being held behind closed doors. Aung San Suu Kyi is called to testify for the first time on October 26.