True revolutionaries don’t need a Che Guevara T-shirt or a catchy slogan. Sometimes, a student activist’s quiet resilience—emanating from within a Burmese jail cell—can speak volumes.

For five and a half years, Min Min stayed inside cell number five of Inseine prison. The floor of his cell was concrete. His soiled uniform was thin cotton. At six thirty in the morning, every day, he was allowed out of his cell for fifteen minutes to empty the clay jar he used as a toilet of waste and maggots. When he was lucky, he was allowed to shower once a week. The usual was once a month.

Min Min never thought of escape. Only once, he says, had anyone managed to break out of the prison. He shrugs his shoulders. “They were killed.”

In 2000, 40 student activists in Burma’s capital Rangoon staged a demonstration in protest of the military junta. All 40 were arrested. Min Min was a Zoology major, and he knew, even before deciding to demonstrate, that to be present on the street would mean years in jail.

He does not regret anything. He would do it again. Prison, he said with a grin, “is a very good place to meditate.”

Min Min is now in his late twenties, with a shaven head and a white grin that flashes across his round brown face. He sang in prison, he says, sang in the morning and sang in the dark, sang to keep his sanity in a tiny box of a room that stank of unwashed bodies and ripe urine.

“There, I am always thinking, how to make trouble?”

To make trouble, for Min Min, is the one right thing he can do for his country in jail. To be in trouble meant to stand for hours in the poun-zan position for punishment: weight on his toes, knees bent, back arched forward, head at the level of his back, his hands clasped behind the head. Sometimes, he was made to stand barefoot on pins, while being beaten by guards.

To make trouble meant he was still fighting. “We have to do for our country.”

Min Min’s mother used to visit him in jail, carrying fish with kyats—Burmese money—stuffed into the fish’s open mouth. He used the kyats to buy reading materials . . . He read, he says, to keep sane.

Over 127 political prisoners deaths in custody have been documented. It is a large number for a country notoriously known for its refusal to release any sort of information on its abuses. Of the 127 deaths reported in the 2006 Assistance Association for Political Prisoners, 90 have died in prison, eight in the interrogation centers, four in the labor camps, and 10 after being released. Fifteen activists disappeared from prison.

When a political prisoner dies, his family is informed of his death after his body has been cremated. It is a simple enough way to ensure that torture cannot be proven. Families have sometimes been bribed to keep silence on the deaths of their loved ones. Funerals have been infiltrated by the junta’s intelligence officers, to take note of attendees for interrogation and detention.

Min Min’s mother used to visit him in jail, carrying fish with kyats—Burmese money—stuffed into the fish’s open mouth. He used the kyats to buy reading materials. There were the Time and Newsweek magazines sold to him by guards, at four times the normal price. There were the books about love, about adventure, that he read at the corner of his cell right beside the door, the one place he couldn’t be seen. He read, he says, to keep sane.
When political prisoners are released, they are turned away by employers and universities. Many are unable to cope with the psychological and physical stress of years of torture. According to the AAPP, as of 2006, at least ten political prisoners have died shortly after their release, several from suicide.

Min Min says his time in jail was short, short compared to Aung Kyaw Oo.

Aung Kyaw Oo was part of the 1988 democratic uprising, and a member of the All Burma Student’s Union. He was not arrested in 1988, when thousands were arrested and imprisoned by military. After the 1990 election held by the military junta, many of the country’s oppositionist leaders were jailed, including the woman the Burmese called “The Lady”: democratically-elected Aung San Su Kyi. Su Kyi was kept under house arrest.

Students remained underground, although many were attempting demonstrations. Aung Kyaw Oo was one of the organizers. In 1991, he was arrested, beaten and put in solitary confinement in a small cell in Inseine prison. For six months, he saw no one, until he was called to attend a hearing in a special military court. The judge was an army man, and there was no lawyer for the defense. For the first time, he was read his charges. Aung Kyaw Oo was in violation of 5/J, the 1950 Emergency Law, and 17/2, the Unlawful Association Act. Within an hour, a decision was handed down. Ten years in Inseine prison.

They were treated like animals, says Aung Kyaw Oo. “What they want, we obey.”

In 1996, he was alone in his cell in the early evening, waiting for his portion of undercooked rice and watery curry. The prison guard told him not to eat. It was an arbitrary decision by the guard, one of many they gave out. Aung Kyaw Oo says he did not know why the guard chose him, but Aung Kyaw Oo demanded his food.

He was dragged out of his cell and reported to the general. Before the general and the guards, he was ordered to sit in the Pouzan punishment position and bow down. He refused. He was ordered again, and he refused. He was shackled, hooded, then kicked and beaten. His left ear bled. For two days, he sat on sand in the pouzan position. Two days later, they put him on death row with the real criminals. It was the most frightening he had yet been through. His cellmate was a murderer who kicked at the walls and shouted in the night.

Six months later, he left death row. The price—nine more years in jail in addition to his original ten.

He was not hopeless in jail. “We are trying to make our [selves] happy, improve our life. Make something. If we have chance to go out, we must be ready.”

Former political prisoner Min Min is now very active in the Free Burma Movement

Aung Kyaw Oo left school when he was an Economics freshman in 1988. He did not know how to speak English when he entered Inseine prison. In jail, the political prisoners in the cells in his block were doctors, lawyers, prominent personalities. There were ten cells, and when a prisoner was allowed his fifteen minutes for washing, he passed by Aung Kyaw Oo. One particular prisoner, a lawyer, would teach him English words when he passed, words that Aung Kyaw Oo would write on concrete with a piece of brick. Aung Kyaw would ask for their meaning when the lawyer passed to return to his cell. And when it was Aung Kyaw Oo’s turn to wash, he would pass by the lawyer’s cell to repeat the words.

“We know we need to learn in English, because we deal in politics when we leave, to help Burma. We need to inform embassies. If we speak to international community, they don’t understand Burmese.”

In August 2007, the Burmese government imposed an oil price hike on an already impoverished Burmese citizenry. Thousands crowded the street in protest, led by students and flocks of saffron-robed Buddhist monks. There was the sound of gunfire on the streets, and many of the orange robes turned red. Over 700 people were detained during and after the protests. According to the Forum for Democracy in Burma, there are over 1,862 political prisoners incarcerated today, including 17 members of parliament and a 78-year-old man who was handed a 106-year jail sentence.

Both Min Min and Aung Kyaw Oo work with the Free Burma Movement. It has been three years since Min Min’s release from prison. He laughs and lifts a hand to rub his polished head.

“I always sing. I always laugh. Because everyday, I have to be alive.”