June 2008
This is a long-term case, unlikely to be resolved soon, but we are determined to keep sending letters.
. We update the page whenever more is learned.

Senior General Than Shwe
Chairman
State Peace and Development Council
Naypyitaw
Union of Myanmar (Burma)

Dear General,

I urge you to order the release of Myo Min Zaw.

He was a student arrested in 1998 for peaceful political activity. He was sentenced to 38 years in prison, later increased to 52.

I believe that he was moved from Pathein Prison to Mandalay and then to Puta O in Kachin State.

Ten years of his life have been wasted. That is enough.

Sincerely,

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We suggest writing Union of Myanmar (Burma) in the address because the government that took power in 1989 changed the country's name from Union of Burma to Union of Myanmar. The United Nations recognized the new name. Amnesty International follows UN protocols for names of member countries. But the USA and its postal service still use "Burma" (as does the democratic opposition in the country), so omitting that on the envelope could delay or prevent delivery.
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Story of Myo Min Zaw, based on Amnesty International documents and on the long experience of AI USA group 182 in Greenville, S.C.:

Myo Min Zaw, born about 1978, was a second-year student of English. He was involved in the large-scale student demonstrations of 1996. The military sought him but he managed to evade arrest. In 1997 he joined the central organizing committee of the All-Burma Student Union (ABSFU). Using the alias of Moe Hein Aung, in July 1998 he founded the Student and Youth Unity Front. Between June and September 1998, more than 300 students were arrested when they staged small demonstrations to protest the human rights situation and the poor quality of education. Before these demonstrations, letters appealing to the public for support and signed by "Moe Hein Aung" were widely distributed in Yangon (Rangoon) and were used prominently by the demonstrating students.
On September 14, 1998, Myo Min Zaw was arrested in the street and accused of agitating unrest. He was sentenced to 38 years, later increased to 52.
He was at first in the notorious Insein Prison in Yangon. In April and May 1999, just before an attempt by the International Committee of the Red Cross to investigate Burma's prison conditions, the military authorities secretly transferred hundreds of political prisoners from Insein to remote prisons around the country; the families of the transferred prisoners were not told, and no official news was released. Myo Min Zaw was transferred to Pathein Prison.
After a hunger strike in 2003 calling for the release of Aung San Suu Kyi, he was transferred with 28 others from Pathein to Mandalay Prison. up in the middle of the country. When he arrived he was hooded, and beaten at the prison gate and then in the cell, with prison service batons. He was held for one month in shackles and solitary confinement, then put in a cell with others. Later he was transferred to Puta O prison in Kachin State — the remote north of Burma — making it even more impossible for his family in Rangoon to bring him food and medical assistance.
Myo Min Zaw was adopted as a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International in 1999, and his case was assigned to USA groups 182 and 280 in Greenville, SC, and Manhattan, NY, and to groups in Britain, the Netherlands, and Sweden.

Burma's elected government was overthrown by General Ne Win in 1962, and since then it has been ruled by a military regime, now called the State Peace and Development Council. In a 1990 election the National League for Democracy won 82 percent of seats (and other opposition parties won most of the rest, leaving the regime with 2%), even though the NLD's presidential candidate Aung San Suu Kyi was in house arrest and most of its other leaders in prison. The military refused to accept the result, and Suu Kyi has been in house arrest for most of the years since then, the only imprisoned Nobel Peace Prize winner. The regime wages wars against the country's ethnic minorities. In the words of one activist, it "sells the teak forests to foreign companies for bullets to kill the tribes that live in them."