The AAPP is working towards several objectives. It is documenting and reporting on the oppression suffered by political prisoners and encouraging the international community to pressure the regime to prevent further persecution. It is also struggling to ensure that basic human rights are respected in the prisons and that authorities provide the basic necessities of food and medicine. For now the jails remain a malignant cancer on Burmese society. After that my fingers were stretched upon the concrete and they proceeded to trample my fingers with their jungle boots.
Most societies undergo a generational pattern of defining experience.
This might be a war, worldwide as in the 1940s, or more localized, as later in Vietnam. It could be an economic cycle-the disheartening depths of depression years or, conversely, the irrational exuberance of a boom s gilded age. For the country as a whole metaphorically, and for thousands more in a very literal sense, the clank of the iron-barred prison door may well be the collective memory. It doesn t take much to earn cell space in Burma. Direct political activity certainly makes the ruling junta see red.