The Burmese junta has executed four prisoners, including a former deputy from the party of former civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi, state media reported on Monday (July 25th), while the death penalty had not been imposed. not been practiced for decades.
The convicts, including an active pro-democracy activist, had been charged “brutal and inhumane acts of terror”, according to the Global New Light of Myanmar. According to the official gazette, the executions followed “prison procedures”without specifying either how or when they were carried out.
The activist in question is said to be hip-hop singer Zayar Thaw, 41, a former deputy of the National League for Democracy, the party of Aung San Suu Kyi. He was co-founder of the first Burmese hip-hop group, Acid, then imprisoned from 2008 to 2011 for leading a graffiti campaign against the junta. He was elected deputy of the National League for Democracy in 2012, during the first partial elections which were open to him, then again in 2016.
One of the other executed prisoners is believed to be activist and writer Ko Jimmy, whose real name is Kyaw Min Yu, 53. He was a student leader during the 1988 uprising, and spent more than fifteen years in detention between 1988 and 2012.
Protesters hung a banner reading “If death sentences are carried out, we will surely retaliate,” on Yangon’s Pansod… https://t.co/Qy71v61yaA
Both had been sentenced in January for organizing and planning attacks considered by the junta to be acts of terrorism. On June 4, the spokesman for the coup government said that the appeals of the two prisoners, and two others on death row, were rejected and that they would be hanged, angering NGOs and many countries – including France, which denounced a “abject decision”. In Burma, demonstrators unfurled a banner promising “retaliations” against the junta, reported the pro-democracy news site The Irrawwady, on Twitter, June 15.
Bloody repression
Since the military coup of 1er February 2021, Burma sentenced dozens of opponents of the junta to the death penalty.
Phyo Zeya Thaw, a former lawmaker from Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy party, was arrested in November and sentenced to death in January for violating the anti-terrorism law.
The other two prisoners executed are two men accused of killing a woman they suspected of being a junta informant. The ruling army continues a bloody crackdown on its opponents with more than 2,000 civilians killed and more than 15,000 arrested since the coup, according to a local NGO.
She also faces genocide charges against the Rohingya. In 2017, more than 740,000 members of this Muslim minority found refuge in makeshift camps in Bangladesh to escape military abuse.