For some of the political prisoners held in Burma's wretched jails, the hardest thing to bear is the pain and horror of being physically tortured. For others, held away from fellow inmates, it is the isolation and the creeping sense of despair. Some think about their families, others about the seemingly hopeless cause for which they fought. For the relatives and friends of those incarcerated, there is the struggle of trying to make regular visits and the constant, aching worry as to whether a loved one will ever be freed.
Win Tin, a senior colleague of detained opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, served more than 19 years in jail – almost all of them in solitary confinement – before being released in 2008. "The hardest thing was the separation from other people," says the lively 80-year-old, speaking from his home in Rangoon. The former journalist was routinely beaten, kept in a dog kennel and on one occasion interrogated for five days straight. And yet it was the separation from other people that he now remembers as causing him the greatest distress. He recalls: "Even when I was in hospital I was put in a different room ... You long to have a discussion with your friends. You feel as if you are losing your mind."