The Times
INTERVIEW WITH DIANA MAWDSLEY, MOTHER OF JAMES MAWDSLEY, HUMAN RIGHTS CAMPAIGNER IN JAIL IN BURMA
By Sue Carpenter
As you read this, James Mawdsley will have sweated out his 350th day in solitary confinement in a remote prison in Burma. Depending on the guards’ whim, he may have been allowed one of the books his mother Diana brought him last November. He may even have had fresh fruit – provided the guards didn’t withhold it until it was rotten, as they often do.
Otherwise, under the 24-hour glare of a strip light, he will have got by on rice and fish paste, creating board games in his head, and his self-imposed workout of 2,100 repetitions of sit-ups, press-ups, stone water-bottle lifts and step-ups onto his sleep platform.
James, 27, a brilliant scholar and devout Catholic, has had almost no human contact since he was arrested on 31 August, 1999, and sentenced to 17 years for handing out ‘anti-government’ leaflets (he called for the re-opening of universities and for citizens not to obey orders they knew to be cruel and unjust). He was subsequently accused of entering he entered the country illegally (he didn’t – he has the stamp in his passport to prove it).
He is allowed out of his cell at Kengtung prison for about 20 minutes a day. All his family except his twin brother Jeremy, a commando-trained Army captain, has been allowed to visit, but finances are limited and they have to wait months for visas and permissions to come through. James’s lifeblood is the monthly visit from the British vice-consul, who flies the 400-mile trip from Rangoon to check on his welfare and relay messages (he is not allowed pen and paper).
What is remarkable about James’s case is that he is no naïve victim. Having been tortured, imprisoned and deported in 1998 after his second pro-democracy protest, he travelled for the third time to Burma last year in the full expectation that he would be arrested. What is remarkable about Diana Mawdsley is that she willingly let him go.
‘I could not bear the thought of him being in solitary, and thinking of me weeping or angry,’ she explains. ‘I wanted him to know we were with him every inch of the way. He says while we’re strong, he’s strong. It would be a lot more difficult for him if we weren’t.’
For the past year, Diana, a nursing sister, has quietly, consistently, campaigned for both James’s release and for the plight of the Burmese people, who, since 1988 (when thousands of peaceful demonstrators were shot and bayoneted, in an under-reported event that predated Tiananmen Square), have suffered oppression, forced labour, displacement, rape, torture and execution.
Significantly, Diana, her ex-husband David – they divorced in 1990 – and their three other children, Emma, 29, a Durham University lecturer, Jonathan, 28, a builder who lives in Australia with his wife and baby son, and Jeremy, have all espoused the Burmese cause.
Diana’s own conviction grew through her direct involvement in 1998, during James’s first imprisonment, in Rangoon’s notorious Insein jail. ‘I’m not a fanciful woman,’ she says, ‘but evil has entered the fabric of that building. I could not bear it when I went to bed. Every time I got between my clean sheets, I thought of his tiny 6ft x 8ft cell, and the heat and the stench and the mosquitoes. So I contacted Amnesty, to see if there was somewhere I could be of use. They found me work in a clinic, treating the internally displaced from refugee camps.
‘I saw first-hand what James was saying. I saw the amputees, blown up by land mines. Everybody had malaria, malnutrition, anaemia. The post-natal complications would make you shudder. How can you carry a baby when you’re on the run, living on berries, trying to avoid mines, in constant fear?’
Back at home, Diana has turned the second bedroom of her terraced cottage, near Durham, into an office. Reports, correspondence and legal documents are piled up. She spends hours responding by hand to supporters’ letters. Faxes fly to and from the Foreign Office, Christian Solidarity Worldwide (CSW), and Jubilee Campaign, the Christian human rights lobby group that James allied himself to before returning to Burma.
But, apart from sporadic reports, the media has been depressingly silent. When I first make contact with Diana, her relief is tangible. ‘Military Intelligence reads everything in the British papers,’ she says. ‘They need to know we are not complacent. It is also important to James, so that he knows that this wasn’t for nothing.’ She pauses. ‘It is a story of gallantry,’ she begins, and then falters. ‘I haven’t been able to cry,’ she adds, ‘except suddenly in the last week. I’m close to tears now...’
When we meet at her home, a few days later, she is composed and considered. But it is clear that the year has taken its toll. She hasn’t slept properly since James was arrested. ‘It’s very hard,’ she sighs. ‘I eat more than I should. Glass of wine. Have a wander. Read. I can’t do anything constructive though. By 5 o’clock I’m desperately tired. If I have to go to work early, it’s not easy.’
Some may say that James has acted selfishly, bringing such anguish upon his family, but they don’t see it that way. ‘As his mother I wish he was not there,’ says Diana. ‘But I understand. Pride isn’t the word for what I feel. It’s a quiet feeling that he’s doing something of worth. I admire his courage. I admire his staying power.’
Some may also say James is a fool, bringing this upon himself. But that is the point. He purposely brought it upon himself as an act of solidarity for the eight-million-strong Karen tribe, some 30,000 of whom have been killed – many pounded to death with a rice flayer in front of their families – and 300,000 of whom have been displaced within Burma.
‘The military scored an own goal when they overreacted by giving James 17 years,’ says Diana, her eyes lighting up. ‘Had they deported him as a foolish boy, this would have been over and forgotten. It has raised international pressure. I have had letters from all over the world. So James got what he wanted. He got publicity for the genocidal, wicked regime they run.
‘The junta wishes to take away hope from the people. Yet here is a young Englishman who is prepared to go to these extraordinary lengths for another creed, another race, another culture. That gives people who are suffering deeply, hope. I know this, through the underground. The Karen, who fought with the British during the Second World War, look upon James as ….’
‘A hero?’
She smiles and fetches a poem by a Karen poet in exile, Htoo Chit, which she received out of the blue last Christmas.
‘James Mawdsley is …a hero of human kindness…
He accepts others’ sufferings as his own…
He wears a laurel of sacrifice
He is a hero.’
According to his mother, however, James is no monk. ‘He loves his beer, his fags, he’s a handsome young lad, 6 ft 3in, a wow with the girls. He’s the laziest of the children, physically, but his intellect is powerful. He got 10 O-levels at A grade and 5 A-levels at A grade. He was tipped for a double first in physics at Bristol University, but he left the academic scene because he felt … a futility. I tried to persuade him to get his degree first, but no, he just could not.’
Instead, he went out to visit relatives in Australia, where Diana is originally from, and travelled on to New Zealand with his brother Jonathan. There he met a group of Burmese refugees who told him of the atrocities they had escaped. ‘We always brought the children up not to endorse what they heard until they have made their own investigations,’ says Diana. James decided to go to Burma to see for himself.
He arrived in early 1997 and ended up teaching English in a school for displaced Karen, who were hiding in the jungle. ‘Every spring, the Burmese army stages an offensive,’ says Diana. ‘The camp was torched, and they had to run. They drive these people like cattle to the Thai border. James had to cross a river with a baby in his arms. He said he was so frightened he was shaking.’
He made it to Thailand and stayed on the border helping in a refugee camp, haunted by what he had witnessed. In September, he returned to Burma to make his first protest. He spray-painted the word ‘metta’, friendship and love, on a school wall in Rangoon, and handed out pro-democracy pamphlets before handcuffing himself to a fence. He was arrested and deported the next day.
He returned home with just one aim in his mind. In April 1998, guided by the Karen, he crossed the jungle border from Thailand into Burma, walking at night, hiding in bushes by day. As he made his second protest, a crowd of some 300 people gathered before the police arrested him.
This time they were not so lenient. James was handcuffed, blindfolded and tortured for 15 hours. He pleaded guilty to entering the county illegally, and was sentenced to five years in Insein prison.
After 99 gruelling days, however, he was suddenly set free and deported, signing an undertaking not to return to Burma illegally. Back at home, he set to work writing a journal, Real Freedom, which he self-published in spring 1999. He’d intended to raise funds to rebuild the school that was burned down, but it flopped. Now he focused on returning to Burma.
‘Everybody tried to persuade him not to,’ says Diana. ‘But I don’t think we took on board the passion that was burning. By spring, we knew it was no good taking that path. He arranged meetings with Lord Alton from Jubilee, who is a leading human rights campaigner in the Lords, and Lady Cox from CSW. By the time he left for Burma he had worked out a strategy.’
The last time the Mawdsleys were all together was at Jeremy’s wedding in July 1999. Before that, says Diana, ‘James did a sort of royal tour of England to say goodbye. He didn’t want to leave anybody who cared for him in a state of suspension. Jeremy’s wedding was the happiest, happiest day, and yet we all knew that in four days, James would be off to Burma, with the inevitable consequences.’
James crossed the border at Tachilek on 31 August and began to distribute leaflets. He was arrested and tried on the same day. He was allowed no lawyer. He did not plead, as he denied the legitimacy of the court. He was sentenced to five years for ‘committing illegal acts’, plus seven for distributing ‘anti-government’ literature. Although he hadn’t broken the bond of his last release, his previous five-year term was reinstated, bringing the total to 17 years.
Diana spent a month in Kengtung, but managed to see James just four times. ‘I used to walk,’ she says. ‘It’s all I had to do. I went into a shop one day and gestured that I couldn’t sleep. The girl came out with a card of Diazapam. When I opened my purse, she put her arms around me and said, ‘Thank you, mem, thank you.’ They knew who I was.
‘Another amazing thing happened in Bangkok on my way back. I went to the Duty Free to buy a bottle of Scotch for my hosts, and there were a couple of Burmese refugees working there. When they saw my passport, they threw their arms round me and put another bottle of Scotch and a box of chocolates in my bag! So James is not unknown.’
Nevertheless, his solitary detention is intended to render him ineffectual in reaching the people. He is not allowed the radio his father brought him, nor his family’s letters. ‘They want to break his spirit,’ says Diana. ‘Particularly with the deprivation of letters. One consular report said he was “overwhelmed by stress”. I find that so sad… He had to be carried back to his cell.’
In the most recent report, however, he says he is ‘happy and healthy’. One of the books Diana sent, Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, had got through. ‘Marcus A is truly solid ground,’ read James’s message to her. ‘I’ll think of him and Buddha and Jesus to stop myself protesting and to try to regain my tolerance for these most dishonourable men. You know I can do it.’
Because James did not initially appeal, it has been wrongly assumed that he accepted his sentence. That is not the case. He has always maintained that his conviction was invalid. He has demanded an open court and access to an independent lawyer. In May, a report was submitted to the UN Commission on Human Rights, demanding his immediate release. In turn, the Commission submitted it to the Burmese authorities, requesting a response by August 7th. There has been none. In June, five US senators and 18 congressmen wrote direct to the Burmese government demanding James’s release. The government responded in a letter full of lies that has insensed the Mawdsleys.
Today, there will be a hearing to decide whether the appeal can go ahead at the High Court in Mandalay. Lord Brennan QC, a Catholic lawyer and new life peer who has worked with Jubilee Campaign on other issues, is ready to fly out to represent James.
Since James’s imprisonment, a donor has come forward to fund the rebuilding of the school that was burnt down. Public awareness of Burma’s plight has grown. ‘I am positive,’ says Diana, ‘that the junta could topple in a very short time, if there was political will, by withdrawing all trade investment and tourism. My husband and I have written to Robin Cook but he hasn’t replied.’
James’s dream is to see the junta fall and his heroine, Aung San Suu Kyi, whose National League for Democracy party was elected to power in 1990, take up her rightful post as prime minister. Until then, says Diana, ‘I can say with 99.9 per cent surety that James will never, ever, leave this cause.’
Extract from ‘Inside Insein Prison’, from James’s journal, Real Freedom
‘99 days in solitary confinement … to many outsiders seemed a high price to pay for a single hour of demonstrating. On the contrary, it was the most worthwhile action of my life…. If I spent the first few weeks in desolate terror then I spent the final weeks in uplifting contentment. The more they oppress us the stronger we become. I discovered this for real in prison. As the weeks passed I noticed I still wasn’t dead and in fact I could cope with all their little sadistic games… I thought about all those others in the revolution who had given more than me, and I thought about the future of the children of Pyo Pan Wai. And knowing that I was not wasting my life on materialism but using it to its ultimate purpose – serving his Will – occasionally put me in absolute rapture… In a prayer I said that I had absolutely no concern whether I had to stay there for another week or another year… Four hours later I was told that I was to be released but in fact I had already been free for weeks.’
INTERVIEW WITH DIANA MAWDSLEY, MOTHER OF JAMES MAWDSLEY, HUMAN RIGHTS CAMPAIGNER IN JAIL IN BURMA
By Sue Carpenter
As you read this, James Mawdsley will have sweated out his 350th day in solitary confinement in a remote prison in Burma. Depending on the guards’ whim, he may have been allowed one of the books his mother Diana brought him last November. He may even have had fresh fruit – provided the guards didn’t withhold it until it was rotten, as they often do.
Otherwise, under the 24-hour glare of a strip light, he will have got by on rice and fish paste, creating board games in his head, and his self-imposed workout of 2,100 repetitions of sit-ups, press-ups, stone water-bottle lifts and step-ups onto his sleep platform.
James, 27, a brilliant scholar and devout Catholic, has had almost no human contact since he was arrested on 31 August, 1999, and sentenced to 17 years for handing out ‘anti-government’ leaflets (he called for the re-opening of universities and for citizens not to obey orders they knew to be cruel and unjust). He was subsequently accused of entering he entered the country illegally (he didn’t – he has the stamp in his passport to prove it).
He is allowed out of his cell at Kengtung prison for about 20 minutes a day. All his family except his twin brother Jeremy, a commando-trained Army captain, has been allowed to visit, but finances are limited and they have to wait months for visas and permissions to come through. James’s lifeblood is the monthly visit from the British vice-consul, who flies the 400-mile trip from Rangoon to check on his welfare and relay messages (he is not allowed pen and paper).
What is remarkable about James’s case is that he is no naïve victim. Having been tortured, imprisoned and deported in 1998 after his second pro-democracy protest, he travelled for the third time to Burma last year in the full expectation that he would be arrested. What is remarkable about Diana Mawdsley is that she willingly let him go.
‘I could not bear the thought of him being in solitary, and thinking of me weeping or angry,’ she explains. ‘I wanted him to know we were with him every inch of the way. He says while we’re strong, he’s strong. It would be a lot more difficult for him if we weren’t.’
For the past year, Diana, a nursing sister, has quietly, consistently, campaigned for both James’s release and for the plight of the Burmese people, who, since 1988 (when thousands of peaceful demonstrators were shot and bayoneted, in an under-reported event that predated Tiananmen Square), have suffered oppression, forced labour, displacement, rape, torture and execution.
Significantly, Diana, her ex-husband David – they divorced in 1990 – and their three other children, Emma, 29, a Durham University lecturer, Jonathan, 28, a builder who lives in Australia with his wife and baby son, and Jeremy, have all espoused the Burmese cause.
Diana’s own conviction grew through her direct involvement in 1998, during James’s first imprisonment, in Rangoon’s notorious Insein jail. ‘I’m not a fanciful woman,’ she says, ‘but evil has entered the fabric of that building. I could not bear it when I went to bed. Every time I got between my clean sheets, I thought of his tiny 6ft x 8ft cell, and the heat and the stench and the mosquitoes. So I contacted Amnesty, to see if there was somewhere I could be of use. They found me work in a clinic, treating the internally displaced from refugee camps.
‘I saw first-hand what James was saying. I saw the amputees, blown up by land mines. Everybody had malaria, malnutrition, anaemia. The post-natal complications would make you shudder. How can you carry a baby when you’re on the run, living on berries, trying to avoid mines, in constant fear?’
Back at home, Diana has turned the second bedroom of her terraced cottage, near Durham, into an office. Reports, correspondence and legal documents are piled up. She spends hours responding by hand to supporters’ letters. Faxes fly to and from the Foreign Office, Christian Solidarity Worldwide (CSW), and Jubilee Campaign, the Christian human rights lobby group that James allied himself to before returning to Burma.
But, apart from sporadic reports, the media has been depressingly silent. When I first make contact with Diana, her relief is tangible. ‘Military Intelligence reads everything in the British papers,’ she says. ‘They need to know we are not complacent. It is also important to James, so that he knows that this wasn’t for nothing.’ She pauses. ‘It is a story of gallantry,’ she begins, and then falters. ‘I haven’t been able to cry,’ she adds, ‘except suddenly in the last week. I’m close to tears now...’
When we meet at her home, a few days later, she is composed and considered. But it is clear that the year has taken its toll. She hasn’t slept properly since James was arrested. ‘It’s very hard,’ she sighs. ‘I eat more than I should. Glass of wine. Have a wander. Read. I can’t do anything constructive though. By 5 o’clock I’m desperately tired. If I have to go to work early, it’s not easy.’
Some may say that James has acted selfishly, bringing such anguish upon his family, but they don’t see it that way. ‘As his mother I wish he was not there,’ says Diana. ‘But I understand. Pride isn’t the word for what I feel. It’s a quiet feeling that he’s doing something of worth. I admire his courage. I admire his staying power.’
Some may also say James is a fool, bringing this upon himself. But that is the point. He purposely brought it upon himself as an act of solidarity for the eight-million-strong Karen tribe, some 30,000 of whom have been killed – many pounded to death with a rice flayer in front of their families – and 300,000 of whom have been displaced within Burma.
‘The military scored an own goal when they overreacted by giving James 17 years,’ says Diana, her eyes lighting up. ‘Had they deported him as a foolish boy, this would have been over and forgotten. It has raised international pressure. I have had letters from all over the world. So James got what he wanted. He got publicity for the genocidal, wicked regime they run.
‘The junta wishes to take away hope from the people. Yet here is a young Englishman who is prepared to go to these extraordinary lengths for another creed, another race, another culture. That gives people who are suffering deeply, hope. I know this, through the underground. The Karen, who fought with the British during the Second World War, look upon James as ….’
‘A hero?’
She smiles and fetches a poem by a Karen poet in exile, Htoo Chit, which she received out of the blue last Christmas.
‘James Mawdsley is …a hero of human kindness…
He accepts others’ sufferings as his own…
He wears a laurel of sacrifice
He is a hero.’
According to his mother, however, James is no monk. ‘He loves his beer, his fags, he’s a handsome young lad, 6 ft 3in, a wow with the girls. He’s the laziest of the children, physically, but his intellect is powerful. He got 10 O-levels at A grade and 5 A-levels at A grade. He was tipped for a double first in physics at Bristol University, but he left the academic scene because he felt … a futility. I tried to persuade him to get his degree first, but no, he just could not.’
Instead, he went out to visit relatives in Australia, where Diana is originally from, and travelled on to New Zealand with his brother Jonathan. There he met a group of Burmese refugees who told him of the atrocities they had escaped. ‘We always brought the children up not to endorse what they heard until they have made their own investigations,’ says Diana. James decided to go to Burma to see for himself.
He arrived in early 1997 and ended up teaching English in a school for displaced Karen, who were hiding in the jungle. ‘Every spring, the Burmese army stages an offensive,’ says Diana. ‘The camp was torched, and they had to run. They drive these people like cattle to the Thai border. James had to cross a river with a baby in his arms. He said he was so frightened he was shaking.’
He made it to Thailand and stayed on the border helping in a refugee camp, haunted by what he had witnessed. In September, he returned to Burma to make his first protest. He spray-painted the word ‘metta’, friendship and love, on a school wall in Rangoon, and handed out pro-democracy pamphlets before handcuffing himself to a fence. He was arrested and deported the next day.
He returned home with just one aim in his mind. In April 1998, guided by the Karen, he crossed the jungle border from Thailand into Burma, walking at night, hiding in bushes by day. As he made his second protest, a crowd of some 300 people gathered before the police arrested him.
This time they were not so lenient. James was handcuffed, blindfolded and tortured for 15 hours. He pleaded guilty to entering the county illegally, and was sentenced to five years in Insein prison.
After 99 gruelling days, however, he was suddenly set free and deported, signing an undertaking not to return to Burma illegally. Back at home, he set to work writing a journal, Real Freedom, which he self-published in spring 1999. He’d intended to raise funds to rebuild the school that was burned down, but it flopped. Now he focused on returning to Burma.
‘Everybody tried to persuade him not to,’ says Diana. ‘But I don’t think we took on board the passion that was burning. By spring, we knew it was no good taking that path. He arranged meetings with Lord Alton from Jubilee, who is a leading human rights campaigner in the Lords, and Lady Cox from CSW. By the time he left for Burma he had worked out a strategy.’
The last time the Mawdsleys were all together was at Jeremy’s wedding in July 1999. Before that, says Diana, ‘James did a sort of royal tour of England to say goodbye. He didn’t want to leave anybody who cared for him in a state of suspension. Jeremy’s wedding was the happiest, happiest day, and yet we all knew that in four days, James would be off to Burma, with the inevitable consequences.’
James crossed the border at Tachilek on 31 August and began to distribute leaflets. He was arrested and tried on the same day. He was allowed no lawyer. He did not plead, as he denied the legitimacy of the court. He was sentenced to five years for ‘committing illegal acts’, plus seven for distributing ‘anti-government’ literature. Although he hadn’t broken the bond of his last release, his previous five-year term was reinstated, bringing the total to 17 years.
Diana spent a month in Kengtung, but managed to see James just four times. ‘I used to walk,’ she says. ‘It’s all I had to do. I went into a shop one day and gestured that I couldn’t sleep. The girl came out with a card of Diazapam. When I opened my purse, she put her arms around me and said, ‘Thank you, mem, thank you.’ They knew who I was.
‘Another amazing thing happened in Bangkok on my way back. I went to the Duty Free to buy a bottle of Scotch for my hosts, and there were a couple of Burmese refugees working there. When they saw my passport, they threw their arms round me and put another bottle of Scotch and a box of chocolates in my bag! So James is not unknown.’
Nevertheless, his solitary detention is intended to render him ineffectual in reaching the people. He is not allowed the radio his father brought him, nor his family’s letters. ‘They want to break his spirit,’ says Diana. ‘Particularly with the deprivation of letters. One consular report said he was “overwhelmed by stress”. I find that so sad… He had to be carried back to his cell.’
In the most recent report, however, he says he is ‘happy and healthy’. One of the books Diana sent, Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, had got through. ‘Marcus A is truly solid ground,’ read James’s message to her. ‘I’ll think of him and Buddha and Jesus to stop myself protesting and to try to regain my tolerance for these most dishonourable men. You know I can do it.’
Because James did not initially appeal, it has been wrongly assumed that he accepted his sentence. That is not the case. He has always maintained that his conviction was invalid. He has demanded an open court and access to an independent lawyer. In May, a report was submitted to the UN Commission on Human Rights, demanding his immediate release. In turn, the Commission submitted it to the Burmese authorities, requesting a response by August 7th. There has been none. In June, five US senators and 18 congressmen wrote direct to the Burmese government demanding James’s release. The government responded in a letter full of lies that has insensed the Mawdsleys.
Today, there will be a hearing to decide whether the appeal can go ahead at the High Court in Mandalay. Lord Brennan QC, a Catholic lawyer and new life peer who has worked with Jubilee Campaign on other issues, is ready to fly out to represent James.
Since James’s imprisonment, a donor has come forward to fund the rebuilding of the school that was burnt down. Public awareness of Burma’s plight has grown. ‘I am positive,’ says Diana, ‘that the junta could topple in a very short time, if there was political will, by withdrawing all trade investment and tourism. My husband and I have written to Robin Cook but he hasn’t replied.’
James’s dream is to see the junta fall and his heroine, Aung San Suu Kyi, whose National League for Democracy party was elected to power in 1990, take up her rightful post as prime minister. Until then, says Diana, ‘I can say with 99.9 per cent surety that James will never, ever, leave this cause.’
Extract from ‘Inside Insein Prison’, from James’s journal, Real Freedom
‘99 days in solitary confinement … to many outsiders seemed a high price to pay for a single hour of demonstrating. On the contrary, it was the most worthwhile action of my life…. If I spent the first few weeks in desolate terror then I spent the final weeks in uplifting contentment. The more they oppress us the stronger we become. I discovered this for real in prison. As the weeks passed I noticed I still wasn’t dead and in fact I could cope with all their little sadistic games… I thought about all those others in the revolution who had given more than me, and I thought about the future of the children of Pyo Pan Wai. And knowing that I was not wasting my life on materialism but using it to its ultimate purpose – serving his Will – occasionally put me in absolute rapture… In a prayer I said that I had absolutely no concern whether I had to stay there for another week or another year… Four hours later I was told that I was to be released but in fact I had already been free for weeks.’