While the world has had its attention turned rightly towards the Cyclone Nargis tragedy and the worst-ever response to a natural disaster by a government of modern times, the authorities in Burma have carried on with what they do best, prosecuting and imprisoning people who have been identified as leading the nationwide protests against the military regime of last August and September 2007.
Among those, the Asian Human Rights Commission on June 10 issued an appeal for U Ohn Than, a 60-year-old who made a solo protest outside the former US Embassy in Rangoon in the early days of the response to the dramatic increases in fuel costs last August 15. Like other arrested protestors, Ohn Than was held illegally in a military intelligence camp for months before he was finally brought to a court, and then he was convicted in a trial that was so filled with errors and abuses of domestic legal procedure that in any sane system of criminal justice it would have been rendered void.
One of the interesting features of the case brought against Ohn Than was that out of the nine witnesses for the prosecution, seven were police and council officials while two others openly identified themselves to the court as members of Swan-arshin working together with the police on township security duties.
The existence of the Swan-arshin, or masters of force, has been known for some time. The group was allegedly connected with the attack on a convoy carrying political party leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi at Depayin in upper Burma in May 2003, an attack that a former intelligence officer recently claimed was ordered directly by Senior General Than Shwe and was intended to kill the democracy icon. Its members have been connected to the Union Solidarity Development Association, a mass body tipped to become the juntas political front in the future, and implicated in a range of assaults, including that on 70-year-old U Than Lwin that has resulted in him going blind due to lack of medical treatment in jail. They were also seen on the streets dealing with the protests last year, at first in the forefront and then in a backup role when the scale of the demonstrations became too much for anyone but the army to handle.
But while the groups existence and activities have been known, it is not an officially recognised organisation. It does not feature in the state media and has no public face. Yet there its members were at the closed hearings in Western Rangoon district, an estate agent and a trader, admitting to being Swan-arshin members, to working with the police for security, and to taking orders from township councils. Not only were their stories plausible, from what the AHRC has learnt from other sources they were typical.
Apart from being undercover, the problem with Swan-arshin is that there is no provision in law for the authorities in Burma to use a group like it to capture and detain private citizens like U Ohn Than. On the contrary, the Penal Code makes it very clear that the only group authorised to do this is the police. Private citizens can try to arrest offenders, but only as individuals, and then only when they take the arrested person directly to a police station. U Ohn Than, however, was taken to an army camp and held there incommunicado and without charge for five months before the police came into the picture at all.
That an illegal group has been brought to testify in a court of law against a person illegally held and detained speaks to the dementia that characterises Burmas legal system of which the AHRC and its sister organisation, the Asian Legal Resource Centre, have spoken repeatedly. In fact, the AHRC warned of the growing use of the Swan-arshin as an extralegal plain-clothed undisciplined arm of the military forces in Burma a year ago, yet up to now the existence and true nature of the group has not been adequately recognised or researched by key outside agencies and mandates, including the UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in Myanmar.
Now that the Swan-arshin is on record as working as a de facto security arm of the police under the township councils it is time for more serious and concerted attention to be paid to this group, its workings and its bigger implications. The government of Burma must be pressed to explain who and what it is, and for what purpose it exists. At a time that the military is moving to extricate itself from its full frontal position in state affairs and create the fraudulent appearance of some kind of parliamentary and constitutional process, the Swan-arshin among other agencies may come to play increasingly important roles in policing and dictating the terms of the state to Burmas long-suffering people. If so, they will only further erode the few remaining vestiges of legality in the countrys judicial and administrative systems, and give way to the prospect for many more atrocities with the armed forces in the background than even with them in the front.
