The former head of the Burmese government, overthrown last year and so far under house arrest, has just been transferred to a prison complex located in the Zabuthiri district of Naypyidaw. “According to criminal laws […]she is now placed in solitary confinement in prison”, said Thursday, June 23, the spokesman for the army, Zaw Min Tun, specifying that she was “well treated”according to Burmese digital media The Irrawaddy.
Since his arrest in the coup of 1is February 2021, Aung San Suu Kyi was held incommunicado in Naypyidaw, accompanied by several domestic workers and her dog Taichido, recalls Myanmar Now. The Nobel Peace Prize laureate in 1991 was only allowed to go out to attend the hearings of her river trial at the end of which she risks several decades of detention. The hearings are held behind closed doors: his lawyers are prohibited from speaking to the press or to international organizations.
In her cell, Aung San Suu Kyi remains alone, without her dog. Three prison guards are nevertheless assigned to her, according to the BBC, which recalls that a total of 14,000 Burmese have been arrested since the coup.
Demonstration in the south of the country
Demonstrators regularly protest against the arrest of Aung San Suu Kyi, who turned 77 on Sunday June 19, like this Thursday in Launglone, a city in southern Burma. On social networks, the decision to place her in solitary confinement sparked many reactions: Aung San Suu Kyi “sacrificed everything for the love of his country and his people, but [les militaires] are ungrateful and cruel” ; “Free Suu Kyi so she can do more good things for our country”.
“What we see is a Burmese junta tipping into a much more repressive phase towards Aung San Suu Kyi”, commented for AFP Phil Robertson, deputy director for Asia of the NGO Human Rights Watch.
Rangoon’s English-language weekly Frontier Myanmar explains that the former leader is accused of a multitude of offenses (violation of a state secrets law dating from the colonial era, electoral fraud, sedition, corruption, etc.) and has already been sentenced to eleven years of detention, in particular for violation of the health rules linked to Covid-19 and violation of the law on telecommunications. Under a previous junta, she had spent fifteen years under house arrest at her family compound in Rangoon, Burma’s largest city.