Burma - KNU Leader On Trial

KNU Leader On Trial
THE IRRAWADDY Tuesday, December 13, 2011

Detained Karen rebel leader Mahn Nyein Maung is again on trial, this time charged with having connections to an illegal organization, according to Rangoon journal The Flower News.

The report said the Karen National Union (KNU) leader appeared at Mingaladon court in Rangoon on Dec. 8. He is currently serving a one-year sentence after being charged on Sept. 27 with breaking immigration laws and possessing a fake passport.

Mahn Nyein Maung, a prominent member of the KNU and a central committee member of the ethnic armed alliance, the United Nationalities Federal Council (UNFC), disappeared at China’s Kunming Airport in late July.

His family and other sources on the Sino-Burmese border said that Mahn Nyein Maung had been picked up by immigration officials in the Yunnanese capital after being sent back from Bangkok where he was denied entry. It was reported that he was then deported from China to Burma.

Saw Hla Ngwe, the joint general secretary (1) of the KNU, said that he believed The Flower News' report about Mahn Nyein Maung is credible and the KNU is trying to secure his release.

Sources told The Irrawaddy that Mahn Nyein Maung had earlier traveled to Yunnan from his home in Thailand to observe first-hand the armed conflict between ethnic armed groups and government troops near the border.

Mahn Nyein Maung was a former underground activist inside Burma. In 1960, he was arrested and later sent to the Coco Islands, an infamous detention center for political prisoners located about 300 km off the Burmese mainland in the Indian Ocean.

Mahn Nyein Maung and two other political prisoners, Mahn Aung Kyi and Aung Ngwe, managed to escape from the island in 1970 by floating across the Indian Ocean clutching driftwood. However, they were rearrested when they reached the Burmese mainland. It was the only known escape from the prison, located on what is commonly referred to as “Burma's Devil's Island.”

Due to his extraordinary escape from the prison at Coco Island, Mahn Nyein Maung is frequently likened to the famous French prisoner Henri Charrière, nicknamed Papillon, who escaped a penal colony in French Guyana. Like Charrière, Mahn Nyein Maung wrote and published a book about his experiences inside the brutal prison at Coco Island and his subsequent escape.

KNU Leader On Trial