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The four activists included a member of detained democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi's opposition National League for Democracy (NLD), the Paris-based media watchdog said in a statement.

"Reporters Without Borders and Burma Media Association voiced disgust at the sentencing of four young pro-democracy activists to prison terms of between seven and 19 years for publishing poetry and called for their release," it said.

The activists were accused of publishing a book of "anti-government" poems, the statement said, adding two activists were also accused of working with "illegal organisations".

The four, who received jail terms earlier in the month, were NLD member Aung Than, university student Zeya Aung, Maung Maung Oo and Sein Hlaing.

The media watchdog has called Myanmar a "paradise for censors" and listed the military-ruled nation as one of the world's most restrictive for press freedoms.

Last month the junta extended Aung San Suu Kyi's house arrest for another year, defying international calls for her freedom.

The 61-year-old opposition leader has spent 10 of the past 17 years in detention at her lakeside home in Yangon.

Burma's National League for Democracy (NLD) said it would appeal against the verdicts, which were handed down at a trial behind closed bars in Pegu, north of Rangoon, on 9 June.  Reporters Without Borders and Burma Media Association, supporting the NLD decision, said that "with the UN Human Rights Council currently meeting in Geneva, this appalling case, which is a serious violation of freedom of expression, should spur the international community to urgently take up the situation in Burma."

The activists are accused of publishing an "anti-government" book of poems called Daung Man -- "The Strength of the Fighting Peacock" (a symbol of the Burmese pro-democracy movement).

Two of the four, NLD member Aung Than and Pegu University student Zeya Aung, were also accused of unlawfully crossing the border with Thailand and working with "illegal organisations."  They were each given 19-year prison sentences.

Maung Maung Oo, who owns the workshop where the book of poems was printed, was sentenced to 14 years. Sein Hlaing, accused of helping to distribute it, was jailed for seven years and was also convicted of printing t-shirts showing a raised clenched fist, a symbol of struggle, lawyer Mya Hla told the exiled radio station Democratic Voice of Burma (DVB).

Aung Than, Zeya Aung and Maung Maung Oo were sent to Rangoon's Insein prison and Sein Hlaing was in prison in Pegu.

The Singapore conference will bring together participants from many fields, who will present papers on how communities have shaped images of Burma’s past, present, and its possible futures.

The Age's South-East Asia correspondent goes inside Burma for a rare look at a shunned regime that is in the grip of a social, political and economic meltdown. 

THE day after political writer Ludu Sein Win met a European visitor at his home in Rangoon, Burma's feared military intelligence knocked at his door. Stop talking to foreigners.

Maung Maung Kyaw Win arranged a meeting between an American journalist and a recently freed leader of the 1988 student protests. Two weeks later, armed plain-clothes intelligence officers met him at the bus stop and took him somewhere quiet.

"We know everything. Don't think we know nothing about you. We have been watching you for long years, so stay out of politics, stay away from (the student leader) or your wife will become a widow," they told him.

The next morning, he fled, crossing illegally into Thailand. His family followed two months later.

The threats are real. Last year, Aung Hlaing Win, 30, was arrested at a restaurant in Rangoon, then interrogated and tortured by military police for seven days. His interrogators told the family he died from a heart attack during questioning. His body was cremated by the military.

This is Burma in 2006. When they talk about Big Brother here, they don't mean a television reality show. There are at least 1156 political prisoners, child labour is everywhere and the military regularly uses forced labour to carry supplies and munitions.

Locals refer to living in Burma as being "on the inside", as if their whole country was a prison. Since 1988, at least 127 democracy activists have died in prison, according to the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (Burma).

Aid workers are viewed with suspicion, foreign journalists are black-listed, local media is censored and giving information about government activities to outsiders is a jailable offence.

All but one person, Ludu Sein Win, who provided information for this story from the inside, asked that their names be withheld.

Mr Sein Win wants to set an example of courage to the next generation of activists. On oxygen and partially paralysed by a stroke he suffered in prison, the 65-year-old activist fears the generals may outlast him.

For 44 years, the generals have brooked no opposition.

But now, as the economic wheels look set to fall off this gun carriage regime, they have launched an aggressive two-pronged campaign to stamp out their most loathed political and military opponents — Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy and the insurgent ethnic Karen National Liberation Army. The brutality of the State Peace and Development Council, as the junta is formally known, is only matched by its paranoia. The generals consulted astrologers before moving the capital from Rangoon to Pyinmana, in central Burma, last November and they are fighting their silenced nemesis, Nobel peace laureate Ms Suu Kyi, who is under strict house arrest in Rangoon, by planting astrologically powerful nut trees across the country.

The Union of Myanmar — as the generals call Burma — dropped its "Burmese way to socialism" for controlled capitalism about the same time it changed its name in 1989. But it remains fiercely isolated.

It has weathered 10 years of American and European Union sanctions, ignored the limp pleas of its ASEAN partners for reform, and dismissed as interference the December 2005 United Nations Security Council decision to look at the situation — for the first time. Instead, it deals with its powerful neighbours India and China, as well as Russia, countries that want to do business, not discuss human rights.

Inside Burma, the sanctions get mixed reviews. "The American sanctions are not affecting the Government, the generals are happy every day," said a monk who runs a school for the poor in the north. "The sanctions affect the poor. With the sanctions the poor are getting poorer and poorer, day by day."

However, a former political prisoner said that without the sanctions, the regime would be "more rampant" and the international attention offered some protective breathing space.

Despite the economic boost from its new business partners, Burma is in the grip of social, political and economic meltdown. This country of abundance — luxuriant tropical forests, plains of rice paddies in the south, swathes of opium poppy fields in the north and, below the ground, rubies, jade and diamonds — was once the world's major exporter of rice. Now it is one of the poorest countries in the region.

Life is uncertain. Electricity shortages mean most people get only eight hours of power a day; in the past month there have been a series of unexplained bomb blasts in Rangoon and near the new capital; and inflation is soaring — the price of rice, a staple of the poor, jumped 23 per cent in April — thanks to increases in public service salaries of up to 1200 per cent.

The co-opted farmers who are building Pyinmana's new roads by hand earn 1000 kyat (less than $A1) a day. There will be no pay rise for them. Only 1 million of Burma's 53 million people work for the Government, yet the salary increases have pushed up prices to breaking point for everyone.

The increases were given to suppress anger about the forced move to the new capital.

On November 6 last year, public servants were loaded into trucks with a day's notice because an astrologer had reportedly told the generals the stars had aligned for the move.

They arrived to find only a third of the 66 new ministry buildings ready for them.

One economic analyst estimated the pay rises, which took effect on May 1, will cost the Government 100 billion kyat a month, but that it only has 200 billion kyat in reserves.

"They don't have enough revenue. They will have to print more money, so prices are going up," he said.

The official rate for the Burmese kyat is six to the US dollar. On the black market, it is 1350 to the dollar. "In Burma, most people are poor; a thin slice are rich, a thin slice middle class," said a doctor in a town north of Rangoon. "No one hoards money. If you can afford to, you store food, rice, oil, because tomorrow maybe you can only buy half as much with your money."

The rice hoarding has raised concerns about a shortage by August, the last month before the new harvest. It is a sensitive issue.

"No one can write about rice at the moment, it's censored," said a Rangoon journalist.

The new capital, along with low water levels in hydro dams, is also being blamed for nationwide electricity shortages. Even on the streets of Rangoon, the generators outside each shop drown out conversations.

"Pyinmana takes electricity from all over the country. It means we have electricity for only eight hours a day," the doctor said.

"In Pyinmana, it's on 24 hours a day. You should drive through Pyinmana slowly, but don't stop, don't take photos."

In March, two Burmese journalists were jailed for three years for filming the capital's new administrative buildings.

Why a financially strapped regime would spend millions moving its capital from a sea port to a baking central plain in the middle of the country is a topic of widespread speculation.

The town has historical significance. It was the centre of operations for independence leader General Aung San — Ms Suu Kyi's father — during World War II, and was later used as a base by the communists. It is closer to the centre of the country, providing a territorial buffer in case of invasion by the US — a possibility the generals take seriously.

The communists had a saying: Pyinmana is a dagger in the heart of Burma. From there, they believed they could control the country. They were wrong. Now the junta hopes it will work for them.

A Mandalay journalist listed reasons for the move: "Astrological, it is an old trend from 200 years ago that the astrologers of the king advised him to move the palace for restoration of their life and property. Now they think they are kings; and economic, people make money moving the capital."

Two corporations control 80 per cent of contracts for the multimillion-dollar Pyinmana move. Htoo Corporation is owned by Tayza, the junta's main arms buyer; and Asia World, Burma's biggest conglomerate, is the legitimate business face of former opium kingpin Lo Hsing Han.

The third reason to move is security concerns, the journalist said, but not fear of the Americans. "They are protecting themselves from a people's movement as the economy gets worse and worse," he said.

"This Government will make some tricks soon. Rice is going up, the army will create a diversion, ethnic war or a clash between monks and the Muslims."

Two aggressive diversionary campaigns are being waged by the regime. Amid the economic turmoil, the junta is targeting Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy and the Karen National Liberation Army, which has been fighting a war for autonomy since 1947.

In the past month the junta has burnt Karen villages, blocked supplies into mountain villages east of Pyinmana, beheaded at least one villager, and driven thousands of new refugees to join the 700,000 already in camps on the Thai border and in other neighbouring countries.

Politically, it is going after the national league and Ms Suu Kyi, the most potent symbol of the regime's illegitimacy. In 1990, the league won 82 per cent of seats in Burma's first democratic election since the 1962 coup. The army refused to accept the result. In recent weeks, the regime has made it clear that it will never accept the result, preferring "discipline flourishing democracy" over liberal democracy for Burma.

Meeting league representatives has become the riskiest business in town, especially after a league proposal in February called for the junta to convene the elected parliament while, in return, the league would recognise the junta as holder of interim executive power. The proposal included a demand to free Ms Suu Kyi.

In rejecting the proposal, the junta sent a warning to the party. Information Minister Brigadier-General Kyaw Hsan told a news conference that "the Government has strong and irrefutable evidence that NLD was involved with anti-government groups as well as terrorist groups that would justify it being declared illegal".

The junta wants to separate the league from the electorate.

"The wider community, without the NLD connection, is less constrained, people are willing to talk in groups rather than just one on one, but it's very unpredictable, some people they watch like a hawk," said the Western diplomat.

As it turns the screws on the league, the regime is stage-managing high-profile mass resignations from the party, using bribery and coercion.

One league member told Radio Free Asia that he had been offered 100 million kyat to resign. The plan, say observers, is that by the time the junta has rewritten the constitution to protect army powers and is ready to hold elections, the league will no longer exist.

Where is Ms Suu Kyi in all this? Since 1989, she has spent a total of 11 years under house arrest. Her current detention, since 2003, is the strictest yet, isolated from all but her maid in the family home in Rangoon.

In the West, questions are raised about how relevant Ms Suu Kyi can be, locked away as she is.

A road trip through Burma answers that question. The Lady, as she is known, because to speak her name aloud is dangerous, is the one figure who unites the rural poor and the urban elite. Leaders of the ethnic minorities respect her.

There is no other political opposition. Prior to the huge demonstrations of 1988, when more than 3000 civilians were massacred by the military, there had been periods of unrest every three or four years. Since the election and subsequent bloody crackdown, there have been no significant protests.

Thousands of activists were jailed or fled to the jungles on the Thai-Burma border.

"Students are not political any more," said one former political prisoner, explaining that universities had been broken up and campuses had been moved so they were at least 16 kilometres from the town centre.

"We have lost our future, throughout the whole country. More and more people, have fear — of government, oppression, fear of being sent to jail."

Another former political prisoner agreed. "Now there are no underground movements, because there is no one to do so. They know all the people who have taken part and they are watching us. We can't move without their knowledge. We have to report (to the authorities) whenever we leave our residential district."

A Mandalay journalist described Ms Suu Kyi as the only public figure with the power to organise people.

"Many people believe in the power of dynasty. In Burma, political consciousness is a cult of personality, people don't know the 'isms', they admire Aung San and his daughter."

The generals recognise her influence and, to counter it, are employing the power of the stars.

Suu Kyi translates as Tuesday-Monday. To defeat Ms Suu Kyi's hold on the public consciousness, the regime was told to find a Monday-Tuesday symbol.

Enter the humble physic nut tree, a source for bio-fuel. More importantly, its name, "kyet suu", translates as Monday-Tuesday. There is now a nationwide physic nut tree-planting program, led by the generals and their wives.

They believe it will prevent Ms Suu Kyi's seeds of dissent from taking root.

The struggle continues. Analysts wonder how long, even with help from the physic nuts, this regime can continue to grind down its people.

"You assume you can't go on running a country like this forever," said a Western diplomat in Rangoon.

Mr Sein Win said that while the current military control was suffocating, the uprising 18 years ago also took many people by surprise.

A source close to the military government confirmed the ban on Ludu Sein Win, who helped found the opposition National League of Democracy (NLD) with Aung San Suu Kyi, over a May 23 article in the International Herald Tribune.

The article, published just days before the military extended the house arrest of Aung San Suu Kyi, urged the junta to hold talks with the NLD, which won elections in 1990 but was never allowed to take office.

"The authorities must understand that democracy is inevitable, and talks are the only way for a decent and smooth regime change," he said. The junta have ruled the country since 1962.

The Southeast Asian Press Alliance (SEAPA) in Bangkok said that the 65-year-old was writing for a dozen publications in Myanmar.

He began his career as a reporter at the left-wing Ludu newspaper, but former dictator General Ne Win shut down the publication in 1967.

Ludu Sein Win was sentenced to 13 years in prison and has been under military surveillance since his release in 1980, SEAPA said.

Burma’s information ministry has kindled a minor civil war among some Burmese journalists. In late April, according to Rangoon-based journalists, it formed a group of editors and publishers with a mission to counter the democratic opposition, activists and Western critics.

(SEAPA/IFEX) - Burma's military government has ordered domestic journals and magazines to stop publishing the columns of veteran journalist Ludu Sein Win after an opinion piece critical of the junta appeared in the "International Herald Tribune" (IHT) on May 23, 2006.

"Our journal can't use any of Saya Ludu Sein Win's articles because the censorship board ordered us not to publish," the New Delhi-based http://www.Mizzimanews.com quoted a journalist from a weekly paper in Rangoon as saying.

Authorities gave no reason for the order, the online news publication said, but it is believed to be a result of his IHT article entitled "The Burmese people can't wait much longer". In his piece, he said talks between the military and the opposition National League for Democracy were the "only way for a decent and smooth regime change."

"The government shut every door that might have offered a way out of our dead-end position," he wrote, referring to the junta's dismissal of NLD's latest effort at easing the 18-year-old political deadlock. He also called on the international community to pressure the junta to dialogue with the opposition.

The 65-year-old writer, who helped to found the NLD in 1988, contributes to more than a dozen publications, among them "The Flower News", "The Weekly Eleven" and "The News Watch", where he writes about youth, ethics and journalism.

Ludu Sein Win began his career as a young reporter for Upper Burma's left-wing "Ludu" ("The People") newspaper, launched in 1946. He later became the publication's Rangoon bureau chief.

General Ne Win, the former Burmese strongman (1962-1988), shut down Ludu in 1967, and he was arrested and sentenced without trial to 13 years in prison. He was released in 1980 and has since been under military surveillance. In one instance, he was questioned by military intelligence because a European tourist had visited his home.

Though often bedridden and forced to rely on an oxygen mask, he speaks freely about Burma's current affairs in short-wave radio interviews.

For further information, contact Kulachada Chaipipat at SEAPA, 538/1 Samsen Road, Dusit, Bangkok, 10300 Thailand, tel/fax: +662 243 5579, e-mail: seapa@seapabkk.org, Internet: http://www.seapabkk.org

By Ko Thet

Zarganar, the former dental surgery student who became one of Burma’s best-loved comedians and a mordant satirist, has had his teeth pulled by the censors. “No more public performances,” they told him last month, prompting threats by his colleagues—including well-known actors and directors—to cease production work in a display of sympathy.

The ban extends to all news about Zarganar in the Burmese press. The Orwellian regime has effectively made him a “non-person.”

Zarganar’s gag slipped, however, when The Irrawaddy contacted him by telephone at his Rangoon home. The irrepressible comedian chuckled as he talked about the regime’s latest attempt to silence him.

It was an interview in April with the BBC’s Burmese service that sparked the latest ban, Zarganar said. He had criticized official regulations that he said robbed Burma’s water festival of much of its traditions.

Zarganar, 46, and many of his colleagues had questioned what they saw as an effective ban on the water festival’s tradition of Than Gyat, the satirical stage shows that formed a popular part of the celebrations. Than Gyat pilloried government corruption and inefficiency and drew attention to the country’s social and political problems.

It was only a matter of time before the regime stepped in—Than Gyat scripts now have to undergo strict scrutiny by the censors, ensuring that the shows lose all their original sting.

Zarganar’s troubles with the regime date back 26 years, to the time when he was a third-year dental surgery student, registered under his real name, Maung Thura. He was a natural comedian and performed in shows at Burma’s universities. Soon he was a household name.

After completing his studies, obtaining a bachelor degree, Maung Thura took to the stage full time, adopting the name Zarganar. It means “Tweezers” and was a witty farewell gesture to a dentist’s career he swapped for the vagaries of cabaret and the stage.

Before the 1988 student uprising, Zarganar and his troupe entertained delighted audiences with their satires on the government and its corrupt ways. He got away with a highly popular play, “Beggar,” which ridiculed the late dictator Ne Win and his cronies. Friends and colleagues marveled that he stayed out of trouble and out of jail.

That all changed in 1988. He plunged himself into the uprising, agitating for change and addressing the crowds of demonstrating students. He was inevitably arrested, interrogated for eight days and then locked up in Insein prison for nearly a year, accused of being an “instigator” in the uprising.

At the time of the 1990 election he was again arrested for giving political speeches. His father, the writer and artist Nan Nyunt Swe, was also politically active, speaking at one time in National Day celebrations in Suu Kyi’s house and subsequently banned by the regime’s censors. Zarganar’s mother, Kyi Oo, won election as an independent candidate in the 1990 poll.

A four-year prison sentence now awaited Zarganar. One year after the prison doors again closed on him, he was awarded the Lillian Hellman and Dashiel Hammett Award, given by the Fund for Free Expression, a committee organized by New York based Human Rights Watch.

After his release from prison in 1994, Zarganar was allowed to participate in video productions, working as producer, director, scriptwriter and actor. But his work was closely scrutinized by the censors and military intelligence, in a cat-and-mouse game in which Zarganar and his audiences took delight in sidestepping the authorities.

They didn’t always succeed, and much of his work never reached a public audience. Last February, his video movie, with the prophetic title “Run Out of Patience,” was banned.

The London-based human rights group used an article in Britain's weekly Observer newspaper to launch the scheme -- irrepressible.info -- and criticise governments for censoring websites, blocking emails and shutting down weblogs.

It also slammed technology firms for operating limited search engine facilities to comply with state-imposed restrictions, as Google has done in China.

Amnesty International's use of The Observer as a forum has a precedent. The rights group was launched in 1961 after its founder Peter Benenson wrote in the newspaper about two Portuguese students who were arrested for raising a toast to freedom.

The paper noted that 45 years on, the global organisation is now fighting on behalf of three Vietnamese people arrested for taking part in a chatroom debate about democracy.

Amnesty's UK director Kate Allen said China was the most obvious example of state censorship of the Internet but evidence had also been unearthed in states such as Tunisia, Vietnam, the Maldives, Israel and Iran.

"The Internet has the potential to transcend national borders and allow the free flow of ideas around the world," Allen said.

"It is the greatest medium for free expression since the printing press...

"This is the new frontier in the battle between those what want to speak out, and those who want to stop them.

"We are asking people to show their support for Internet freedom by backing a simple pledge calling on governments to stop the unwarranted restriction of online freedom of expression and on companies to stop helping them do it."

Rafal Rohozinski, from the Advanced Network Research Group at Britain's Cambridge University, was quoted as saying that while countries like China, Saudi Arabia and Myanmar were open about censorship, "more worrying is the increasing number of countries implementing filtering under obscure national security provisions or other, hidden extra-legal means.

"We are seeing an alarming increase in these practices."

The announcement, released by Myanmar Teleport under the Ministry for Posts and Telecommunications, said the internet was down, "Due to the failure with the sub-marine optical link somewhere off the coast of Singapore".

Burma is linked to the internet through a SEA-ME-WE 3 submarine cable system via Singapore. A fault in the optic link from Singapore to Burma could have resulted in the loss of internet access.

Since Tuesday only MPT users have had access to the internet as their service is backed up by an emergency line.

Internet service providers were at a loss to explain the problem, and officials could not say if the connection was broken or if it had been deliberately taken down.

Internet users could only access local websites, which are usually government-run.

The link went down on Tuesday afternoon, forcing Internet cafes in Yangon to close their doors. "We don't know yet when the connection will be good. We feel very sorry for our customers," one cafe owner said.

The cost of a computer and Internet service is beyond the means of most people in this impoverished country.

But many city dwellers use Internet cafes, despite the strict monitoring of their activities by the junta.

Myanmar's military regime imposes some of the toughest Internet censorship rules in the world, blocking access to web-based email services like Yahoo and Hotmail, as well as to international news media.

The break in service has caused major problems for airlines that use the Internet to update their flight data.

A textile printer named Sein Hlaing has been detained for trial in connection with the case of three youths from Pegu in lower central Burma arrested on 29 March for writing and distributing a poem titled Daung Man (the might of the fighting peacock).

Sein Hlaing is being detained and interrogated for printing a T-shirt with the image of a fist, which was found with one of the detained youths Aung Than. The other two detainees are Aung Aung Oo of A20 Computing Business, Zeya Aung of King Star teashop who are currently detained in Pegu Prison.

All of them have been tried behind closed doors inside the local prison, without having access to legal representatives. Pegu District assistant judge Tin Htut has been cross-examining them every two days and 15 out of 22 witnesses for the prosecution have been cross-examined.

According to their family members, the four are being indicted under the notorious political act 5J (Emergency Provision Act), Printing acts, Act 17/1&2 for having contacts with illegal organisations (Unlawful association act) and crossing the border illegally.

YANGON - The United-States-based Educational Testing Services (ETS) has readjusted the conducting of internet version of the Test for English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) in Myanmar by substituting the test with paper for the time being, a local press media reported Tuesday.

The conducting of internet version of the TOEFL was originally scheduled for April in Myanmar, according to the American Center in Yangon. However, due to unreadiness in the country technically, the TOEFL test is to be replaced by paper test temporarily with the date reset for Aug. 19, an announcement of the ETS was quoted by the Weekly Eleven News as saying.

The internet version of the TOEFL includes a speaking test in addition to paper test.

TOEFL is conducted for students seeking education in international schools such as those in the United States and Singapore and such test is being changed to use internet internationally instead of paper.

In the wake of such change, Myanmar's domestic information technology industry and the education industry are striving to be qualified for conducting TOEFL internet version test in the country.

Meanwhile, the U.S. is offering a one-year Humphery Scholarship for university students in Myanmar to study in that country, according to US Information Service in Yangon.