Myanmar rejects request to shut down labor camps

By Kyaw Ye Lynn

YANGON, Myanmar

Myanmar's government has rejected a parliamentary request to close the country's notorious labor camps, amid allegations of rights abuse against prisoners.

More than 5,000 prisoners have died in the overcrowded nationwide detention centers -- where occupants break rocks and breed livestock -- since they were first opened, according to government figures.

On Wednesday, Deputy Home Affairs minister Major General Aung Soe rejected a request from Myint Lwin, a lower house lawmaker, that the camps (known as Yebet locally) be closed as the country's prisons -- where the camp workers would instead have to be kept -- were also chronically overcrowded.

Aung Soe said that Myanmar's 46 prisons can hold 44,411 inmates, but the number of inmates and detainees recently reached 74,893.

“Currently 58,000 inmates are serving in 46 prisons while about 15,000 inmates are serving" in the camps, he said, adding that all were treated according to rules and regulations.

Talking to Anadolu Agency on Wednesday, Myint Lwin said that the camps should be abolished as prisoners were being mistreated.

“The government should close all the so-called manufacturing centers as prisoners there are being punished in a way that violates existing laws,” he said by phone.

According to the government, there are currently 48 labor camps under the prison department.

The camps were first introduced in 1978, but with over 4,000 prisoners dying between 1978 and 2004, the then military junta decided to dissolve 36 of the 83 labor camps and rename 29 of them Training Centers for Business Ranching and Agriculture

The other 18 were named Industry Centers.

Between May 2004 and August 2014, a further 1,100 inmates died.

In 2015, the quasi-civilian government of Thein Sein renamed the camps Agriculture and Livestock Breeding Career Training Centers, and Manufacturing Centers.

Of the 48 camps that exist today (the 2015 government opened one more livestock camp), 30 manage prisoners working on plantations run by the Correctional Department or on private plantations and local farms.

The remaining camps oversee thousands of convicts deployed in rock quarries where they break granite and limestone boulders and crush them into gravel with sledgehammers.

According to several reports by the Thailand-based Assistance Association for Political Prisoners, most of the camps situated in Mon state near Myanmar’s border with Thailand still do not have a prison hospital or clinic, and at least 12 do not even have a prison doctor.

On rejecting the request Wednesday, Aung Soe underlined that there was nothing inhumane about the treatment of inmates serving in the camps.