Word: prisons
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Before he becomes a forgotten footnote in Aung San Suu Kyi's biography, it's worth pausing to consider the price John Yettaw is about to pay for his unauthorized nighttime swim. On Aug. 11, Yettaw, 53, was sentenced to seven years in a Burmese prison for donning a pair of flippers and paddling across a lake to the Rangoon home of Suu Kyi, the prodemocracy dissident and Nobel laureate. (Suu Kyi received an additional 18 months of house arrest for violating the terms of her sentence by sheltering the Missouri native.) Seven years is a stiffer sentence than many...
Democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi will spend another 18 months as a prisoner of Burma's military junta, a Rangoon court decreed today. She was found guilty of violating the terms of her house arrest after an American man called John Yettaw swam to her lakeside house in Rangoon in May. Yettaw, who has been in poor health, was sentenced to seven years in prison with hard labor...
...verdict was delayed, apparently while Burma's generals calculated the likely domestic and global response to its continued persecution of the world's most famous political prisoner. The junta's idea of lenience - an 18-month sentence - is long enough to keep Suu Kyi in custody during a 2010 election which will formalize the military's grip on power, but shorter than the maximum sentence of five years in the notorious Insein Prison. "The generals are trying to manage the anger of both the international community and the people of Burma," says Win Min, a Burma analyst at Payap University...
...Local outrage has been necessarily muted, what with 2,000 police and militiamen at the prison to prevent any protests. Since 2007, when monks led an abortive uprising, Burma's opposition has been all but neutralized by a pitiless campaign of arrests and lengthy sentences. (Read about the 2007 crackdown in Burma...
...outcome of the trial was unsurprising. "I'm afraid the verdict will be painfully obvious," Suu Kyi was heard to say in court last month. But she isn't going to prison. According to recent reports, she was stockpiling Winston Churchill's biographies and other books in anticipation of jail time. "If you are going through hell," Britain's wartime leader famously said, "keep going." Suu Kyi and her supporters can do little else...