Striking with Their Lives

By KYAW ZWA MOE
On Sept 10, 1929, U Wisara took his last breath after having fasted for 166 days in jail. The Buddhist monk, 41, refused to eat because he had been denied permission to wear his saffron robe and participate in twice-monthly religious observances at a temple. His British jailers refused to give in to his demands, and so his long hunger strike ended in death.

The patriotic monk is believed to have been the first Burmese hunger striker to die as a prisoner of Burma's British colonial rulers. He was arrested several times after 1926 for inciting sedition in public, and he often refused to eat while in custody to obtain his rights as a monk. But the riskiest non-violent method failed to win over his British captors.

Aung Kyaw Moe(left), U Wisara
To this day, Burmese regard U Wisara as a martyr. In Rangoon, there is a road named after him and a monument erected in his honor. And now, more than 80 years after his death, his method of protest is still occasionally used in Burma's prisons, which for the past half century have been under the control of successive military and authoritarian regimes.

On the hot and humid morning of May 10, 1998, Thein Htoo and six of his fellow inmates at the Tharrawaddy Prison, about 100 km from Rangoon, woke up and immediately swallowed three spoonfuls each of butter.

They also ate pieces of coconut prepared the day before. The previous night, they took laxatives to empty their stomachs. Now the butter and the fat from the coconut flesh would coat the walls of their stomachs, projecting them from the digestive acids that would remain active, even in the absence of food.

Then, their deadly story officially started. The seven political prisoners, including Thein Htoo, informed their jailers that they had stopped eating to protest their continued imprisonment, despite having served the full terms of their sentences. (All of the members of the group had served at least eight years of their 10-year sentences, and were denied the customary one-third reduction of their prison terms because they were illegally connected with the Communist Party of Burma.)

Meanwhile, two of the hunger strikers rushed to the cell of U Zawana, a Buddhist monk, and asked him to pray for them. Their request was one that Buddhists traditionally make for the dead. U Zawana began to chant for them.

The prison authorities and military intelligence officers tried to get them to abandon their strike by using threats and persuasion, but they failed to change the men's minds. All of the strikers were put in solitary confinement cells in the death-row cell block.

Thein Htoo, then 35, didn’t know which cell he had been put in because a hood had been placed over his head before he was taken out of his previous cell-block. In the evening, he said, the authorities stopped giving him drinking water. The next morning, they provided rice porridge, but he refused to eat it, as did the other strikers in their separate cells.

Thein Htoo recalled: “I was fine without eating food, but it was unbearable to go without water, and the weather was so hot, too.”

“Day by day, I felt my body getting hotter. My lips and mouth were drying up. My urine was turning from yellow to red. It was also getting hot, and there was less and less of it,” he said. “I had to turn over on the concrete floor to cool down my body.”

Another thing Thein Htoo couldn’t stand was force-feeding. Around 10 o'clock every morning, a medic and five wardens came into his cell, and while the five wardens tightly gripped his hands and legs, the medic put a tube into his nostril to feed a solution of salt and sugar directly into his stomach.

“It was unbearable,” he said.

Force-feeding, which is a common way of dealing with hunger strikers—the British also used it on U Wisara—is an inhumane practice, according to World Medical Association. Other methods often used to break hunger strikers include threats and solitary confinement.

These days, there is another, even more effective method used by jailers in Burma and some other countries: depriving hunger strikers of drinking water.

“Cutting water can force a hunger striker to stop fasting much quicker than expected,” Thein Htoo said.

After four days with no food and no water, Thein Htoo ended his strike. He later heard that some of his colleagues stopped even earlier. He was hospitalized in prison.

On May 17, seven days after their strike began, Thein Htoo learned that Aung Kyaw Moe, one of his fellow strikers, had died.

He and the other strikers found out later that Aung Kyaw Moe resisted force-feeding and hit his head against a brick wall. After this, the wardens beat him to death.

Thein Htoo and the other five strikers were transferred to remote prisons, where they served the rest of their full 10-year sentences.

“We failed,” said Thein Htoo, who was released in 1999 and fled Burma in 2004. “But we didn’t stage that strike believing that we had to win. We just felt we had to fight for our rights. It was a form of protest.”

Hunger strikes are the last resort of political prisoners who want to fight for their rights as prisoners. It is considered extremely risky, and is usually referred to by the initials, HS.

After 1988, when the military staged a coup, crushed the pro-democracy uprising and jailed thousands of dissidents, Insein and other prisons occasionally became hotbeds of HS.

Since then, dozens of hunger strikers have occurred in Burma’s jails, in which about 1,500 political prisoners are still being detained.

Late last month, 15 political prisoners in Insein Prison started refusing to eat. They are making the same demand that Thein Htoo and his six colleagues made: a reduction of their sentences, denied to them despite a recent amnesty that saw thousands of criminal prisoners and around 220 political prisoners released earlier in the month, and despite the fact that they have already nearly completed their original sentences.

Since the strike began on Oct 26, the authorities have used all the usual techniques against the strikers, including cutting off their supply of drinking water, putting them in solitary confinement and denying family members access to them. Like Thein Htoo, these strikers must have been aware of how risky their fight would be.

But sometimes, with careful planning, HS wins.

In 2001, when U Zawana, the monk who had prayed for the Tharrawaddy hunger strikers three years before, was detained in Taungoo Prison, he instructed six other young political prisoners who were planning to stage a hunger strike on how to do it effectively.

“I think HS can work in some cases as a way to demand prison rights,” said U Zawana, who spent 16 years as a political prisoner in three prisons from 1993 to 2009.

The monk suggested that the six people divide themselves into three groups. The first two strikers should be healthiest, because they would start the strike and were likely to last the longest. Two days later, the second group would join them, and two days after that, the third group would join.

U Zawana said that this method would prolong the strike in the event that the first two strikers were unable to endure the lack of food and water.

After the strike began, U Zawana and around 60 other political prisoners announced to the authorities that they wouldn’t accept food provided by the prison, but made it clear that they would eat food provided by their families. They did this to show solidarity with the hunger strikers, without actually joining them. In this way, they could put additional pressure on the authorities to peacefully resolve the issue.

After three days, the authorities summoned U Zawana and three other political prisoners. The prison authorities said to U Zawana, “You are a monk, so you can persuade the strikers to eat.” But the monk refused.

After five days, the prison authorities granted the six strikers their demand—the right to walk around freely in their cell-block compound, instead of being locked up all day in their cells. The strike was successful.

“If it’s something the prison authorities can grant, there's a chance of success,” said U Zawana. “But if you demand a change in official policies or raise political issues, you are highly likely to fail.”

U Wisara failed. So did Thein Htoo and his colleagues. But in Burma’s HS history, there was a big victory.

The Great Coco Island, which served as a penal colony in the 1960s under Ne Win’s authoritarian regime, was the scene of a number of hunger strikes. The island had no other inhabitants and the food and living conditions there were terrible. Finally, in 1971, some political prisoners staged the second-longest hunger strike in Burmese history, lasting more than 50 days. Their demand was to close down the prison island. Eight strikers died. But in the end, the government shut down the island prison and sent all of the prisoners back to Insein Prison.

Despite this very rare success, political prisoners are wary of resorting to the extremely risky tactic of staging a hunger strike.

Moe Zaw Oo, who spent over eight years in jail during 1990s, said he sees the hunger strike as a method that uses the striker's own body as a weapon.


“Among all types of fights in prison,” he said, “HS is the last stage.”

The youth member of the National League for Democracy said that in Insein’s cell-blocks, the political prisoners had policies for every kind of strike, including HS. Their policies included: a strike shall concern issues affecting all political prisoners; it shall relate to issues of prisoners’ rights; it shall not be about political issues (such as a transfer of power to the NLD, national reconciliation or the release of political prisoners).

“In jail, no issue warrants taking one's own life,” said Moe Zaw Oo. He said that one disadvantage of staging hunger strikes in Burma’s jail is that they never get enough media attention. “Without media coverage, the HS is ineffective.”

For Thein Htoo, HS can be used in situations where it is absolutely necessary, even though it can be fatal. “It is a war with death. But we need to do it for our dignity,” he said. “Rights can only be achieved if you fight for them.