The Burmese military junta announced this Thursday an amnesty for 9,766 Burmese prisoners, including 114 foreigners, in various prisons in the country on the occasion of Independence Day. This year the independence day celebrations have been more low-key than usual. There was no military parade or rocket launch as is tradition, and the speech by the head of the military junta, which has controlled the country since 2021, was delegated to a subordinate.
In a statement issued Thursday, the State Administration Council, as the junta is officially called, said it had “granted amnesty to 9,652 detainees in prisons and detention centers to commemorate the 76th anniversary of independence and respect peace in the hearts and minds of the people. The announcement was not entirely surprising because the presentation of amnesties on days of national celebration is already a common practice by the Burmese military junta, which last May freed more than 2,000 political prisoners during a Buddhist holiday.
No official information has been provided on whether there will be political prisoners among those released. A lawyer who has represented many political prisoners told the AP that most of those released had been convicted of common criminal offenses and that only about 120 were political prisoners. The releases began this Thursday and are expected to last several days.
Since the coup d’état on February 1, 2021 that gave way to the military junta government, 19,930 people have been detained for political reasons, according to data from the Burmese NGO Association for the Assistance of Political Prisoners (AAPP), and at least 4,277 people have died due to repression by the military junta and related groups.
The announcement of the mass amnesty comes at a tense time for the military junta, which is fighting an alliance of resistant groups from various ethnic minorities in the north of the country. This same Thursday one of those groups, the Kachin Independence Army, claimed to have shot down a helicopter on Wednesday afternoon, killing six military junta soldiers. This insurgent group controls part of Kachin state in the northeast of the country.
The arrival of the military almost three years ago exacerbated the guerrilla war that the country has been experiencing for decades. Since independence from the United Kingdom on January 4, 1948, Burma has been mired in ethnic conflict and ruled by military governments for most of its recent history, between 1962 and 2011 and again since 2021.
The military junta led by Min Aung Hlaing is increasingly isolated by the international community and the UN Security Council, the European Union and the United States, among others, have called for the release of all political prisoners and an end to the violence.
