In one drawing, dozens of men are jammed into a single room, slumped with their knees together, using up every available space. In another, they are lying back to back on the floor, their faces strained with pain.
Fourteen sketches smuggled out of Myanmar’s Insein Prison, as well as interviews with eight former inmates, provide a rare glimpse inside the country’s most notorious prison, where thousands of political prisoners have been sent since last year’s military coup and communication with the outside world is severely restricted.
The basic blue-ink sketches depict daily life in the dorms for groups of male convicts, who are queuing for water from a trough to wash, talking, or sleeping on the floor in the tropical heat.
Aside from those depictions, the eight recently released detainees told Reuters that the colonial-era facility in Yangon is infested with vermin, a place where bribes are rampant, prisoners pay for sleeping space on the floor, and widespread disease goes untreated.
‘We’re no longer humans behind bars,’ said Nyi Nyi Htwe, 24, who snuck the sketches out of the prison when he was released in October after serving six months for a defamation sentence on charges he denies in connection with protesting the coup.
Myanmar’s junta, which seized power from Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi’s civilian government, and prison administration did not reply to several requests for comment on the conditions depicted in the sketches and reported by former inmates.
According to Reuters, rights organisations such as the International Committee of the Red Cross have been denied entry to the jail.
Insein, Myanmar’s largest jail, was built by the British in 1871 and houses many individuals arrested for opposing the junta.
Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, Reuters journalists convicted of violating Myanmar’s Official Secrets Act in 2017, spent the most of their 511 days in prison in Insein. They were freed as part of a 2019 amnesty, before to the recent coup.
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