YANGON, Myanmar, May 24 (UPI) -- A group of 22 political prisoners in Yangon's notorious Insein jail has staged a hunger strike to demand better living conditions.
The prisoners said they need more food, clothes, reading material and blankets, Kyaw Hoe, a lawyer who represents some of prisoners, told the BBC's Burmese service. They also are demanding their families are allowed to visit them, a right enjoyed by other prisoners.
Hoe said prison authorities have put some of the protesting prisoners in solitary confinement and threatened to move others from Insein to remote prisons far from Yangon, meaning family and legal visits would be almost physically impossible.
The strike comes as thousands of prisoners began leaving prison last week under an amnesty granted by the government but called "pathetic" by Human Rights Watch.
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As many as 15,000 people are expected to be granted freedom eventually under the amnesty, which also commuted many death sentences to life sentences. Other prison terms were commuted by one year, according to a report in the government newspaper New Light of Myanmar, which hasn't run any reports on the hunger strikes.
There were concerns of a crackdown by the prison authorities against the striking prisoners but sources said there has been no official response to the prisoners' demands.
Families of political prisoners said the strikers include women prisoners, a report by the Irrawaddy news Web site, run by Myanmar ex-patriots and based in India, said. The main reason for the strike is to express resentment toward the amnesty, which left more than 2,000 political prisoners in custody.
Thein Sein, former junta prime minister and now Myanmar's civilian president, said the amnesty was to "turn prisoners into citizens who will in one way or another contribute toward the process of building a new nation."
But critics of the amnesty said the ploy is the government's naive attempt to garner international support for itself after coming to power officially in March.
Many of Myanmar's former military rulers resigned their commissions to run as civilians and predictably won a majority of seats in Parliament where one-quarter of seats are reserved for military appointments.
Sein, a former general, is a long-standing ally of former junta leader Senior Gen. Than Shwe, 77, who had ruled Myanmar, formerly called Burma, since 1992.
Human Rights Watch said very few of the country's 2,200 political prisoners were among those being released. Also, the one-year reduction in sentences for political prisoners serving 65 years was "a sick joke," Human Rights Watch said when the amnesty was announced earlier this month.
Only 47 political prisoners have been released under the amnesty by the new civilian government, according to the National League for Democracy, an opposition party.
The NLD's was hoping to put up its leader, the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, to run in the election. But Suu Kyi, who had won the previous national election in 1990, remained under house arrest and was disallowed from running.
She has since been released.
