The Burmese junta executed four prisoners, including a former lawmaker from the party of former civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi, state media reported on Monday (July 25th). The country had not applied the death penalty for more than thirty years.
The convicts, including an active pro-democracy activist, had been charged with“brutal and inhumane acts of terror”according to Global New Light of Myanmar. According to the official gazette, the executions followed “prison procedures”without specifying how or when they were carried out.
The activist in question is 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 once morest 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 once more in 2016.
One of the other executed prisoners is activist and writer Ko Jimmy, real name 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” once morest the junta, reported the pro-democracy news site The Irrawwadyon Twitter, June 15.
For the human rights NGO Human Rights Watch, these executions constitute “an act of the greatest cruelty”reacted Elaine Pearson, Asia director of the NGO, on Monday. “European Union member countries, the United States and other governments must show the junta that there will be accountability for its crimes”she said.
Bloody repression
Since the military coup of 1is 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 repression once morest its opponents, with more than two thousand civilians killed and more than fifteen thousand people arrested since the coup, according to a local NGO.
She also faces genocide charges once morest the Rohingya. In 2017, more than 740,000 members of this Muslim minority found refuge in makeshift camps in Bangladesh to escape military abuse.
