Myanmar labour activists get 20 years in jail

By Aung Hla Tun

YANGON (Reuters) - Myanmar's military junta has sentenced six young labour activists to between 20 and 28 years in jail at a closed trial inside Yangon's infamous Insein prison, their former lawyer said on Saturday.

The six, who are in their late 20s and early 30s, were arrested for helping organise a May Day workers' rights seminar at the American Center in the former Burma's main commercial city.

Four of the activists, named as Thurein Aung, Wai Lin, Kyaw Min and Myo Min, received 20 years for sedition, five years under "illegal association" laws, and three years for immigration offences, lawyer Aung Thein said.

The other two, Nyi Nyi Zaw and Kyaw Kyaw, were found guilty only of sedition, and given a 20-year jail term plus a fine of 1,000 kyats -- about 75 U.S. cents.

"What they did at the May Day ceremony was explain labour rights to the workers," Aung Thein, who was forced to quit as the group's attorney due to police harassment, told Reuters. "It had nothing to do with sedition."

The closed-door trial started on July 23 and the sentences -- the maximum allowed for sedition -- were handed down late on Friday. The activists' families were allowed into the court to hear the judgments. There was no defence lawyer.

The particularly harsh sentences do not augur well for 13 top dissidents arrested last month and now in prison awaiting trial on sedition charges.

Continuing its crackdown on more than two weeks of protests against soaring fuel prices, the junta's papers launched a second day of attacks on exile dissident groups, accusing them of fomenting unrest and planning a violent revolution.

"The expatriate terrorists are plotting by various ways and means to undermine national peace and stability and prevalence of law and order in cohort with destructive elements within," the New Light of Myanmar, the junta's official mouthpiece, said.

Most of the groups mentioned are based in India or Thailand, where they have been since the army was sent in to crush a nationwide uprising against decades of military rule in 1988. Around 3,000 people are thought to have been killed.

The paper also called on the public to keep their eyes open for "saboteurs", saying it was vital the government, the people and the army united to crush "the enemies within and without".

There were no reports on Saturday of any more of the fuel price protests that have spread from Yangon to the centre and coastal northwest, and which are starting to involve the monkhood, major players in the 1988 revolt.

This week, several hundred young monks seized 13 government officials and torched their vehicles in Pakokku, 80 miles (130 km) west of Mandalay, in an angry response to soldiers firing warning shots at a monks' protest march the previous day.

The crackdown, one of the harshest since 1988, has drawn withering criticism from the United States and European Union, and unusually strong words from Myanmar's Asian neighbours.

Even China, the generals' main trading partner and the closest they have to a friend, said it wanted to see "reconciliation and improvement in the situation".