Myanmar junta crackdown nabs journalists

updated 1:37 p.m. ET Nov. 30, 2008

YANGON, Myanmar - Two journalists have been jailed for seven years each on charges of undermining Myanmar's military junta after they were caught with a U.N. human rights report.

A court in a northeastern suburb of Yangon on Friday sentenced Thet Zin, editor of the local Myanmar-language journal News Watch, and Sein Win Maung, the paper's manager, under the country's draconian Printing and Publishing Law.

The convictions are part of a renewed crackdown by the regime in the past month that has led to more than 100 people including activists, writers, musicians and Buddhist monks receiving jail sentences of as long as 68 years. Many have been transferred to prisons in remote regions.

The journalists' jailing came on the same day a court inside Yangon's Insein prison sentenced the remaining 13 members of the 88 Generation Students, a group at the forefront of a 1988 pro-democracy uprising, to six years for undermining stability, family members said.

The 13 activists are among 46 from the group handed long prison sentences for their roles in leading nonviolent protests, including the pro-democracy demonstrations in September 2007 led by Buddhist monks that were violently suppressed.

Myanmar's military, which has held power since 1962, tolerates no dissent. It frequently arrests artists and entertainers regarded as opposing the regime.

The lengthy prison sentences have been condemned worldwide by Western governments and human rights organizations, who charge that the heavy-handed tactics makes a mockery of the ruling junta's professed plan to restore democracy through elections in 2010.

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