Burma: 5,000 demonstrators jailed since the coup will be released – franceinfo

Towards a lull in Burma? The country will release more than 5,000 people imprisoned for protesting against the army’s coup in February, the junta leader announced on Monday (October 18th). A total of 5,636 prisoners will be pardoned and released before the Buddhist festival of Thadingyut which begins on Tuesday, said General Min Aung Hlaing, a few days after being excluded from the next Asean summit. -East).

The February 1 military coup put an end to a brief decade-long democratic parenthesis in the country. Since then, the army has carried out a bloody crackdown with more than 1,100 civilians killed and some 7,000 in detention, according to a local NGO, the Association for Assistance to Political Prisoners (AAPP), which reports cases of torture, rape and extra-judicial executions.

The junta leader did not give details of who would be included in the list and prison authorities did not respond to AFP requests for comment. By the end of June, the authorities freed more than 2,000 coup opponents who were being held in various prisons across the country, including local journalists arrested for criticizing the junta’s bloody crackdown. Frontier Myanmar editor-in-chief Danny Fenster, a U.S. citizen, has remained in Insein prison near Yangon since his arrest on May 24.

The new decision to release prisoners comes after Asean excluded Min Aung Hlaing from an upcoming summit on Friday due to the military government’s handling of the crisis. The bloc’s foreign ministers agreed that a “non-political representative” Burmese would be invited in his place to the summit scheduled for October 26-28.