How many activists were arrested for having taken part in the 2007 protests against the military government?
Burma’s military government announced that 2,836 people were arrested during the August-September 2007 demonstrations. Arrests continued for several months afterwards, as the authorities hunted down activists in hiding and any other people suspected of involvement in the marches. Human Rights Watch believes this number to be much higher, and has documented many cases of arrests and ill-treatment in custody in its report Crackdown (http://www.hrw.org/en/reports/2007/12/06/crackdown). The total number of Burmese political prisoners before the 2007 demonstrations was 1,100. Since then, an additional 1,082 people arrested around the time of the demonstrations remain in custody or have been sentenced to jail, the total number effectively doubled. Why did the Burmese government arrest activists who sought to help victims of Cyclone Nargis in 2008? In the absence of government assistance and responsibility, Burmese civil society stepped in to help the survivors of Cyclone Nargis. In the thous
