By Ye Teiza
About the Author
Ye Teiza was born in Lathar Township in Rangoon in 1971. He began his political activism as a high school student during the 1988 pro-democracy uprising and participated in demonstrations held on Rangoon University campus before the general strike on August 8, 1988. A few days before the general strike he was forced to leave his home because Military Intelligence had come looking for him.
He joined the All Burma Basic Education Students' Union (ABBESU) after the military coup in September 1988. He came to prominence in the ABBESU because of his hard work and commitment, and was subsequently elected to the organisation's Central Executive Committee.
Ye Teiza was arrested in August 1989 and was sentenced to four years imprisonment under Section 5(j) of the 1950 Emergency Provision Act. He was sent to Insein Special Prison and a week later was transferred to Thayawaddy Prison, some 200 kilometres north of Rangoon, where he spent most of his time in solitary confinement.
Ye Teiza was released from Thayawaddy Prison in 1992. He immediately began to contact his colleagues and continued his political activities. However, after participating in the December 1996 demonstrations in Rangoon, he decided he could no longer remain in Burma. He subsequently left for the Thai-Burma border and is now living in exile in Thailand.
IN CAME THE DEVIL
When I was working as a member of the central executive committee of the All Burma Basic Education Students' Union (ABBESU), I mainly dealt with political issues. I also faced many hardships and some days I wouldn't have enough money to buy food and I had to go home and ask for money.
I remember one of those days very clearly. It was the evening of August 26, 1989. I came back from a student union meeting and hadn't eaten dinner so I decided go home and ask for some money. It was about half past ten in the evening when I got home. Fifteen minutes later while I was greeting my mother, I heard three or four men calling out in front of our house.
"Are you going to open the door or will we have to break it down?" they were shouting.
My mother looked extremely concerned. She glanced at me and then opened the door. They kicked the door while my mother was opening it and entered the house without taking off their boots. A sergeant came in followed by three privates who took positions at the back of the house. Then two plain-clothed officers and one army captain came in after them. I saw about ten armed soldiers standing outside the house.
The captain, who had an accent, looked at me and then turned to my mother, "We are going to take your son with us," he said. "We need to ask him some questions."
"Did he do anything wrong?" asked my mother. "He's just a student."
"Do you know that your son is involved in forming a student union and spreading propaganda against the government? That's why we are bringing him in to ask him some questions."
As the captain spoke, the two plain-clothed officers handcuffed me behind my back.
"Don't handcuff me," I began, "I'm not a criminal. You can bring me in and ask me questions without doing all this."
One of the Military Intelligence Service (MIS) officers then hit me in my ribs, "Don't talk so much!"
The other officer put a hood over my head and I heard my mother crying, pleading with them not to beat me. I also heard the captain with the accent push my mother while shouting at her to stay away.
After that I couldn't see anything. The two MIS officers held me by my arms and dragged me out of the house. They put me in an army truck that was parked in front of our house. As soon as I was pushed into the back of the truck, they ordered me to lie on my stomach on the floor and they then started stamping their boots all over my head and body. During that time I heard the captain ordering his men to search the house, and about an hour later I heard the soldiers quickly return.
Then I heard the sound of my mother's crying and the truck starting up.
MY COMRADES
The officers were kicking and swearing at me all the way to the interrogation centre. When we arrived I was taken from the back of the truck and told to walk with my head lowered with the hood still on. I soon stepped on a concrete floor and I realised that I was entering a building. At one point they asked me to stop. They then opened a door and kicked me into a room.
"Sit there!" someone ordered. They slammed the door shut and left. I couldn't breathe properly in the hood and my head and face were bathed in sweat. I was also still handcuffed. A while later, I heard the door open and someone asked me to stand up. I was taken to another room and as soon as we arrived they took the hood off. Because I had the hood on for a long time, I was momentarily blinded by the strong light in the room and it took me a while to be able to see things properly. When I was able to see properly again, the sorts of things that were going on in the room shocked and distressed me.
There were a number of my colleagues, who were hooded and handcuffed behind their backs, being forced to kneel with their heads bowed. One student was being forced to stand in a position of riding a motorbike and his knees were shaking from exhaustion and pain. All of the students were filthy.
Two MIS officers were interrogating one of the students. "How did you duplicate and distribute your documents?" one asked.
The student was kicked in his chest. "I don't know," he replied as he fell down in front of me.
One of the officers grabbed his neck and took him where the other students were kneeling down. Another officer turned to me and warned, "You are the last one we need to interrogate. If you don't tell us the truth, you'll get hurt more than the others."
I was then taken out of the room by the captain who had brought me from my house.
THE BREEZE BEFORE THE STORM
After they showed me how they tortured my comrades, they took me into a large room where an officer sat. The officer had quite a dark complexion and looked strong.
"Captain Soe Kyi, what did you get as evidence from him?" he asked the captain who accompanied me.
"I got nothing from the house," the captain replied, "but it's alright." He then turned to me and said, "We have evidence, even though we didn't catch you with it."
The officer in the room said his name was Captain Tun Aung Kyaw and that he was from Military Intelligence Service Unit 14 (MI-14). I later found out that he was one of the main officers responsible for investigations into the student unions. He started asking me questions as he leafed through the files in front of him. "Is your student union, the ABBESU, a legal organisation?"
"As long as we students exist the student union will exist, so it legal."
"We, the government, do not recognise your union."
"And we do not recognise the SLORC as a legitimate government."
"You all are young people," he continued, "Who taught you become involved in politics and say these things?"
"No one did. We say things that reflect the present situation." "Who is behind all your political activities?" he repeated.
"No one is," I replied. "Our political activities reflect our feelings." "Do you think you will become a government minister by doing these things?"
"We are not doing this for ourselves. Throughout our history, no student union has ever been involved in politics merely for the sake of winning power."
Then Captain Tun Aung Kyaw asked me about the activities of our student union and he grew angry when I failed to give him any information. "We have many ways to make you tell these things!" he said. "Our superiors have told us that we can kill you without any problem."
Captain Tun Aung Kyaw then issued some orders to Captain Soe Kyi who grabbed my neck and took me into another room.
GATEWAY TO HELL
As soon as we came out from the room Captain Soe Kyi put the hood back over my head, hit me across the face, and told me to keep my head bowed. He then grabbed my hair forcing me to bow my head, and told me to walk. He was not leading me, but was at my side telling me what to do. Although the floor was level, they told me to bend down saying there was a bar in front me, and to jump over a ditch. Sometimes they even asked me to squat like a frog. They treated me like an animal.
Even when the MIS officers told me to bow and I did so, they would hit me across the head with a stick and say, "You didn't bow properly!" Sometimes they told me to step across something and I would do it, but they would hit my shins and shout, "You didn't step across it properly!" They would also ask me to jump and then trip me up, saying "You didn't jump properly!" After they were satisfied with harassing me, they took me into another room.
When we got there they asked me to squat as though I was riding a motorbike, and three officers began to ask me various questions. I refused to give them any information so they beat me. They beat me when they asked me questions and when I refused to answer them as well. The officers would change shift and would keep asking me questions without ever giving me time to rest, even at night. I fell to the floor many times from the beatings and from the pain from sitting in the motorbike position. Whenever I fell down the officers would kick me with their heavy boots and step on my toes and fingers. They would then tell me to stand up again. Whenever I moved, my wrists and my hands felt terrible pain from the handcuffs, which were specially designed to tighten with any movement.
I was interrogated the whole night without being allowed any sleep. My throat had become completely dry and I was extremely thirsty, so I asked for some water. They told me to lie down on a long bench and they removed the hood. They then covered my face with a thin cloth and slowly poured water over my face. The cloth was soon soaked and I started to suffocate. The MIS officer then asked me "Have you had enough water? Or would you like some more?"
After they tortured me with the water, they put the hood back over my head and told me to kneel down where they had placed some sharp rocks. While I was kneeling on the rocks, they continued to interrogate me by kicking my ribs and hitting me on my temples. Whenever they hit me the movement of my body tore the skin on my knees which started to bleed over the rocks. I asked them to move the rocks, and they told me to sit down on the floor with my legs stretched out. They continued their questioning and then rolled a stick across one of my shins. It was extremely painful. They pushed and rolled the stick even harder and I was soon covered in sweat from the pain.
When I was in the interrogation centre I was not given enough food or water. When my union colleagues and I were fed together, the MIS guards would lift our hoods to our mouths but wouldn't release our handcuffs. They gave us husky-unrefined rice with rotten dahl soup in the cover of a big cooking pot. My comrades and I had to bend over and eat the rice by sucking it. Sometimes MIS guards would come in during our meals and kick us, saying we were eating too slowly.
Before they sent my colleagues and I to jail, we had to spend a night in one particular room in the interrogation centre. The room was wet, smelt rotten and was full of garbage. They tied all our legs together with one rope that was tied to bars at both ends of the room. With our legs tied together, the rope would tighten if someone moved. As a result no one was able to get any real sleep. To make matters worse, the guards also frequently came into the room that night and shouted at us, "You bastards! Aren't you asleep yet!"
In the morning we were sent to the police lock-up. Before we left, we were able to see our interrogators, Captain Naing Win and Lieutenant Aung Din. We had only heard their voices while they had been interrogating us over the previous days. Now they took photos of us and asked us to sign some documents which we were not allowed to look at. When I tried to look at the documents, one of them hit me across my head and shouted, "You don't need to look at that!"
THE POLICE LOCK-UP
We were then taken to a police lock-up, and after two days they put a hood on me once again and handcuffed me from the back. They took me to another room and asked me to squat in the motorbike position. Later on, an officer came into the room and asked me questions about the Mandalay Division of the ABBESU. When I refused to provide any information he got angry and threatened me.
"You will know about me," he said. "I'm tougher than the people you've met before. We could crush you students like sugarcane pulp after it's been crushed for juice!"
They then tied my legs with a rope and turned me upside down. They started kicking my ribs and kept asking me more questions, but I still refused to answer them. They were getting angrier with me, so they untied me and told me to sit in a chair. After that they placed a ballpoint pen, with angled sides, through my fingers so some fingers were on top and others were underneath. They then squeezed my fingers. The pain was so agonising that my whole body shook.
When that was over, the officers reached for the electric bulb that was on in the room and lowered it on top of my head. The light was excruciatingly hot and my head began to heat up and I felt dizzy. They did these things for the whole night and sent me back to the lock-up in the morning. I couldn't see anything when I got back to the lock-up. My head was spinning and my fingers were swollen.
We were not allowed to see our parents while we were in the lock-up. This was because the authorities were afraid that our parents would see the marks and bruises on our bodies and discover that we were being tortured.
From the police lock-up we were taken to Insein Special Prison. I was later transferred to Thayawaddy Prison where I was detained for three years, mostly in solitary confinement.