An internet blogger and a writer who disguised an attack on Burma’s dictator in the form of a love poem were among dozens of activists sentenced to draconian jail terms as the junta ordered a fresh crackdown on dissidents.

Nay Myo Kyaw, 28, who wrote blogs under the name Nay Phone Latt, was sentenced to 20 years and 6 months in jail by a court in Rangoon. The poet, Saw Wai, received a two-year sentence for an eight-line Valentine’s Day verse published in a popular magazine.

Aung Thein, the lawyer for the men, was given four months in prison on Monday for contempt of court during his defence.

More than a dozen people arrested during the protests last year against the ruling junta were handed harsh prison terms yesterday. “Altogether 23 activists were sentenced today at Insein prison. They were sentenced to 65 years each,” a family member of one jailed activist said.

Other sources said that 14 people from the Generation 88 Students group, who spearheaded the revolt against Burma’s military rulers in 1988, were jailed for 65 years. Ten rank-and-file members of a provincial branch of the opposition National League for Democracy party were given sentences ranging from 8 to 24 years.

The group included Ko Jimmy and his wife, Nilar Thein, who had to abandon her four-month-old daughter when she went into hiding after the suppression of the protests. Nilar Thein was arrested in September after more than a year on the run.

The dissidents will join more than 2,000 political prisoners in Burma’s jails, half of whom have been incarcerated since the Saffron Revolution last year, when tens of thousands of Buddhist monks and political activists took to the streets in a failed uprising against the military regime.

The United Nations estimates that at least 31 people were killed when the junta sent in troops to end the demonstrations that were led by columns of Buddhist monks, the biggest challenge to military rule in 20 years.

Condemning the imprisonment of the writer and the blogger, Reporters Without Borders, an advocacy group, said: “The authorities have imposed an extraordinarily severe punishment on Nay Phone Latt just for using the internet. This shocking sentence is meant to terrify those who go online in an attempt to elude the dictatorship’s ubiquitous control of news and information and we call for his immediate release. Saw Wai, for his part, is being made to pay for his impertinence and courage as a committed poet.”

Mr Saw Wai’s poem, entitled 14th February, was ostensibly a Valentine’s Day verse published in January last year in a weekly magazine. “You have to be in love truly, madly, deeply and then you can call it real love,” it read. “Millions of those who know how to love, Laugh and clap those gold-gilded hands.”

The first word of each line, however, spelt out a message about the leader of the country’s military government: “Power Crazy Senior General Than Shwe”. Mr Saw Wai was charged with harming “public tranquillity”.

Mr Nay Phone Latt is a youth member of the National League for Democracy, the opposition party led by Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel Peace Prize winner whose victory in elections in 1990 has never been acknowledged by the generals.

He is the owner of three internet cafés in Rangoon, and his Burmese language blog, which was not explicitly political, described the difficulties of day-to-day life in Burma’s biggest city.

He was regarded as an inspirational figure among Burmese bloggers, who contributed greatly to the Saffron Revolution by e-mailing digital photographs of the antiGovernment demonstrations and their brutal aftermath across the world.

As well as crimes against public tranquillity Mr Nay Phone Latt was charged with offences under video and electronics laws. “I was expecting him to get 10 or 12 years in prison at the most,” Aye Aye Than, his mother, said. “I never imagined he would get this much. The authorities have been excessively cruel with him.”

She was not allowed to attend the closed hearing in Insein prison, a British colonial structure in northwest Rangoon where Burmese political prisoners are held.

Bo Kyi, of the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners, a Burmese exile group in Thailand, said: “There is no possibility of justice through these proceedings.”

Poetic justice

Ar rin bek ka pyaw dair
(Aaron Beck, the psychiatrist, said)
Nar nar khan sah dat hma khan sah hma
(Only if you know how to suffer painfully)
Yoo yoo moo moo go phyit nay hma
(Only if you are crazy – crazy )
Kyi myat tet a noot pyinnya lo
(Can you appreciate a great work of Art)
Hmoo hmoan hmaing way zay det dat poan model ma lay yay
(Dear little photomodel who makes me dizzy)
Kyi daunk kyi mah kya hma a thair kwair det yawgah det
(They say it is a broken liver disease, a great and terrible one) [note: broken heart in Burmese is usually expressed as a broken liver]
Than baung myah zwa thaw chit tat thu myah
(Millions of those who know how to love)
Shwe a teet cha hta thaw let myah phyint let khoak tee yway yair bar
(Laugh and clap those gold-gilded hands)

Saw Wai, January 10, 2008 The bold words describe Gen Than Shwe as a power-crazy madman

Times Recommends

• LA profits from Michael Jackson stimulus
• Berlusconi's absent wife causes G8 headache
• Chimps that took a punishing step for Man