Mass Prisoner Amnesty in Myanmar

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The website of Myanmar National Television carried a surprising report: A mass prisoner amnesty the previous day, it said, had included seven members of the country’s military who were briefly jailed for a massacre of Rohingya Muslims.
The report was quickly taken down and was strongly denied by a government spokesman, U Zaw Htay. “It’s not true, it’s false news,” and claimed that “They are still in prison.”
The jailing of the seven, three officers and four soldiers, was announced only on April 10, a rare admission of guilt by armed forces accused by the international community of unleashing a scorched-earth campaign in northern Rakhine State last year that compelled around 700,000 Rohingya Muslims to flee Myanmar, a predominantly Buddhist country, for Bangladesh. The United Nations has called the military campaign “ethnic cleansing.”
The seven men, whose identities have not been made public, were sentenced to 10 years in prison, for the extrajudicial killings in September of 10 Rohingya in the village of Inn Din, according to a military statement.
The amnesty on Tuesday was the first major one since Daw Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy took over Myanmar’s civilian administration two years ago. More than 8,000 prisoners were freed, many of them drug offenders or soldiers who had deserted.

Comments

  1. UnknownMay 10, 2018 at 11:30 AM

    I certainly hope the seven people responsible for a horrible attempt at genocide are still in jail and will continue to be there for the rest of their lives. However, I do agree with the Myanmar government's decision to permit amnesty for 8,000 prisoners, as long as they are non-violent offenders. I think this practice is something the US should learn from. We have the highest imprisoned population of anywhere in the world, and many of those are due to non-violent drug charges.

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