Involvement in university political life can make students key targets of repressive regimes, as Raghav Chawla explains

In October 2003, Sanjiv Kumar Karna, a 24 year old student in Nepal, was arrested and taken into police custody, along with 10 other students. Six of them were released soon after their confinement, and they reported having experienced profound torture and cross examination. The remaining five, including Karna, however, have not been heard of since.

Amnesty International (see box) has highlighted Karna's case in its 2004 Greetings Card Campaign.¹ The young man's disappearance is only one of over 400 cases that Amnesty has tracked down in Nepal since August 2003, when peace talks broke down between the Nepalese government and the Communist Party of Nepal, which is led by Maoist rebels.

Karna's arrest is believed to be linked to his interest in student politics and to his former membership of a Nepalese students' organisation, which is aligned to the Communist Party. However, according to his family, Karna resigned from the organisation in 1998 and was never involved with the party.

Prisoners of conscience

Another case in Amnesty's current campaign is that of Indonesian student Ignatius Mahendra Kusuma Wardhana, a senior member of the National Democratic Student's League, and of his friend, Yoyok Eko Widodo. The two of them were sentenced to three years of imprisonment for "insulting the president or vice president" because they had burnt their photographs during a demonstration against fuel price increases. The Jakarta Post, an English language daily newspaper, quoted President Megawati Sukarnoputri's reaction to these happenings: "When I look at my pictures--and I actually look pretty there--and see people stomping on them, I feel... like a volcano about to explode."

Amnesty argues that the burning of the portraits was a symbolic and non-violent action and views the two young men as prisoners of conscience. (This term was invented by Amnesty's founder Peter Benenson and denotes people who are imprisoned solely for the peaceful expression of their beliefs.)²

Why students are feared

In the past, many ideas for protests and demonstrations have originated from the pulsating world of university campuses. In his essay entitled "A history of student activism," Travis Lowry, news editor of Bock Press (a weekly online publication of Bock University, Canada) wrote, "Students, still at a time in their lives where they feel they can make a difference, commonly gather to fight for what they believe in, a quality that unfortunately seems to ebb as years go by."³

Lowry points out a few historic examples that show not only the determination of many students fighting for a cause, but also the experience that speaking out can have an effect. His examples include the civil rights protests in the United States of the early 1960s, the 1968 Paris uprising, and the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests in Beijing. Thanks to the legendary photograph of a solitary protester holding up a procession of advancing tanks, the latter will be remembered for many years.

Often being the first ones to think aloud, students have always played an important role in setting the world in motion and providing a starting point for change in society. They obviously pose a threat to the agenda of repressive leaderships, some of which are prepared to do anything to get rid of them.

Freedom of opinion is a human right

On 10 December 1948, the General Assembly of the United Nations proclaimed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a "common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations."⁴

Article 19 of the original text reads, "Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive, and impart, information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers."

This is followed by article 20: "Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association."

But what do rights matter if they only exist on paper and not in practice?

"Cemetery-like silence" across the campus

The violent reaction of police and plainclothes security forces (wearing civilian clothes while on duty) to a peaceful student demonstration, resulted in the landmark 1999 Tehran University protests and the detention of thousands of students. Although the Iranian government released many of the students fairly rapidly, others still remain in prison today, receiving extensive physical and psychological abuse, according to reports from Human Rights Watch, another non-governmental organisation dedicated to the protection of human rights.⁵

"The punishment and intimidation of students for joining peaceful protests is a serious violation of academic freedom. Students are being given a clear message: remain silent, or risk being kicked out [of college]," Joe Stork of Human Rights Watch commented on the happenings in Iran.⁶ The student body of Ferdowsi University in Mashhad stated that the Iranian government was seeking to create a "cemetery-like silence" across the campus.⁶

JEFF WIDENER/AP
Stand up for your rights: A lone Chinese
protester stands in front of government tanks on
their way to crush a student-led demonstration

Spark of hope in Myanmar?

On 18 November 2004, Myanmar's military government announced that they would release 3937 prisoners, after finding that "improper deeds" had been used to imprison them. "We applaud this decision by the Burmese government, and its implicit recognition that these people should never have been imprisoned in the first place," said Natalie Hill, deputy Asia director of Amnesty International. "We urge the government to use the momentum of this decision and release all prisoners of conscience."⁷

Two days later, Min Ko Naing, Myanmar's second most prominent political prisoner (after Aung San Suu Kyi, winner of the 1991 Nobel peace prize) was freed after 16 years of detention.⁸ Min Ko Naing, leader of the All Burma Federation of Student Unions, had been one of the main driving forces of the 1988 student democracy protests, which culminated in the massive nationwide demonstrations of 8 August, during which military troops tragically massacred more than 10 000 people.⁹

Despite the recent releases, however, 99% of Myanmar's prisoners of conscience still remain in confinement, activists say.⁸

What can we do?

Prisoners (including students) in many countries are locked up illegitimately, often for reasons that have been invented to cover up the real reasons. The American philosopher, John Dewey, once said: "If you want to establish some conception of a society, go find out who is in jail."¹⁰

Students are often detained for their vision of a better world. They have been stopped by rigid governments who rightly fear (as history has shown) that these young people, although inexperienced and vulnerable, can make a difference.

Amnesty International

Winner of the 1977 Nobel peace prize, Amnesty International is one of the world's most influential non-governmental organisations promoting human rights. Its founder, civil rights lawyer Peter Benenson, had allegedly been inspired to launch a global campaign, "Appeal for Amnesty," in 1961, after reading an article about two Portuguese students who had been arrested for making a toast to freedom in a bar in Lisbon.¹¹ More information is available at www.amnesty.org, and, for the current Greetings Card Campaign, visit www.amnesty.org.uk/gcc/2004.

Raghav Chawla Clegg scholar BMJ
Email: raghav.chawla@unil.ch


studentBMJ 2005;13:1-44 January ISSN 0966-6494

1. Amnesty International. Greetings Card Campaign 2004. London: AI, 2004.
2. Amnesty International USA. Prisoners of conscience. www.amnestyusa.org/prisoners_of_conscience (accessed 11 Dec 2004).
3. Lowry T. A history of student activism. Bock Press 2004 Nov 9. www.bockpress.com (accessed 11 Dec 2004).
4. United Nations. Universal declaration of human rights. www.un.org/Overview/rights (accessed 11 Dec 2004).
5. Human Rights Watch. Iran: five years after protests, release students (7 July 2004). www.hrw.org (accessed 11 Dec 2004).
6. Human Rights Watch. Iran: Stop Punishing Student Activists (1 Oct 2003). www.hrw.org (accessed 11 Dec 2004).
7. Amnesty International. Myanmar: Prisoners of conscience freed. London: AI, 2004.
8. Nakashima E. Key political prisoner is released in burma. Washington Post Foreign Service 2004 Nov 20: A10.
9. Burma Watch International. Some background information about Burma. www.burmawatch.org/aboutburma.html (accessed 11 Dec 2004).
10. Benenson P. The forgotten prisoners. Observer 1961 May 28: 21.
11. Amnesty International USA. About Amnesty International. www.amnestyusa.org/about (accessed 11 Dec 2004).

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