At around 10am one morning earlier this week, a dazed and haggard man in surprisingly clean blue convict’s fatigues walked out of Insein jail on the outksirts of the Burmese city of Rangoon. Tang Naing Oo had been in prison – held for the most part in a cell measuring 30ft x 50ft that he shared with 110 other inmates – for 14 months.

He had originally been sentenced to three years in jail, back in September 2010, for distributing pictures of Aung San Suu Kyi, the famous Burmese pro-democracy campaigner and Nobel prize laureate, on a Rangoon pavement. Now, he was walking past the noodle sellers, the watermelon hawker, a crowd of waiting passengers at the ramshackle bus stop, to a form of freedom.

Tang Naing Oo had learned he was to be released only a few hours earlier. When he woke in the fetid cell at 5am, he saw “hope” on the faces of his fellow inmates, he says. His release came the day before the national celebrations commemorating the independence of Burma from Britain 64 years ago, and some kind of amnesty had long been expected from the government.

However, the hopes of most inmates in Insein, and the vast network of other prisons and interrogation camps around the country, were disappointed. Of the between 600 and 2,000 political prisoners estimated to be in detention, only a couple of dozen were released. None were senior figures.

Full Story: Is democracy finally coming to Burma?

Source: The Guardian