The head of Myanmar’s military junta has granted amnesty to nearly 4,900 prisoners to mark the country’s traditional new year, state media has reported.
At least 19 buses carrying prisoners left Yangon’s Insein prison and were welcomed outside the gate by family members and friends who had been waiting since early morning.
Political Prisoners Network – Myanmar, an independent watchdog group that records violations of human rights in Myanmar’s prisons, said in a statement that by its initial count, 22 political prisoners had been released.
Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, the head of the ruling military council, pardoned 4,893 prisoners, MRTV reported.
Thirteen foreigners will also be released and deported from the country, it said in a separate statement.
Other prisoners received reduced sentences, except for those convicted of serious charges such as murder and rape, or those jailed on charges under various other security acts.
If the freed detainees violate the law again, they will have to serve the remainder of their original sentences in addition to any new sentence, according to the terms of their release.
Mass amnesties on the holiday are not unusual in Myanmar.
Myanmar has been under military rule since February 2021, when its army ousted civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi’s elected government.
That takeover was met with massive nonviolent resistance, which has since morphed into a widespread armed struggle.
Some 22,197 political detainees, including Suu Kyi, were in detention as of last Friday, according to the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners, an independent organisation that keeps detailed tallies of arrests and casualties linked to the nation’s political conflicts.
Many political detainees had been held on a charge of incitement, a catch-all offence widely used to arrest critics of the government or military and punishable by up to three years in prison.
Journalism under attack
One of the former prisoners released was Hanthar Nyein, a news producer for Kamayut Media, who was arrested in March 2021 along with co-founder, US journalist Nathan Maung, after authorities raided their office in Yangon.
Maung was released and deported to the US in June of that year.
Hanthar Nyein had been handed a total of seven years’ imprisonment after being convicted of incitement in March 2022 and violating the Electronics Transactions Law, a charge that critics say criminalises free speech, in December that same year.
Maung told the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists that he and Hanthar Nyein were blindfolded, beaten, deprived of food and water and otherwise tortured during interrogations in Yangon, Myanmar’s biggest city.
More than 220 journalists have been detained since the 2021 military coup, according to the US-based International Center for Not-for-Profit Law, with at least 51 still being held in jail.
This year’s celebrations of Thingyan, the new year’s holiday, were more reserved than usual due to a national grieving period following a devastating earthquake on 28 March that killed about 3,725 people.
In a new year’s speech, Min Aung Hlaing said his government will carry out reconstruction and rehabilitation measures in the quake-affected areas as quickly as possible.
He also reaffirmed plans to hold a general election by the end of the year and called on opposition groups fighting the army to resolve the conflicts in political ways.
