Burma Critic, 24 Others Are Reported Held

Burmese authorities have arrested up to 25 people, including a prominent critic of the authoritarian government and a Burmese correspondent for an American news agency, U.S. officials and other diplomats said Saturday.

The arrests--apparently a crackdown on government critics--came less than a week after Sein Lwin, a former army general known for ruthless suppression of dissidents, replaced Ne Win as president and chairman of Burma’s sole political party.

In Washington, State Department spokeswoman Nancy Beck said U.S. officials in Burma “understand that perhaps as many as 25 people have been arrested within the last 24 hours.” A diplomat based in the Burmese capital of Rangoon said by telephone, “The lowest number I have heard is 11 people arrested, but other reports say it could be 20.”

Beck said those arrested included retired Brig. Gen. Aung Gyi, a long-time critic of Ne Win’s authoritarian regime, and Associated Press correspondent Sein Win.

In a brief message telexed to the Associated Press bureau in Bangkok, the journalist’s family said: “Daddy has been taken away. He won’t be available to answer your queries.”

The former owner and publisher of Rangoon’s Guardian newspaper, Sein Win, 66, had been arrested and jailed in the last years of the elected government of U Nu, overthrown in 1962, and in the first year under the military rule of Ne Win.

The 70-year-old Aung Gyi, a former colleague of Ne Win, recently wrote a series of letters attacking economic and political conditions in Burma as well as the new leader, Sein Lwin.

Aung Gyi, who sided with the former leader during the 1962 military coup, quarreled with Ne Win’s more radically socialist supporters. He later was jailed.

His open letters were widely circulated and--according to one source--”sold like hot cakes.”

Aung Gyi refrained from attacking his former superior personally, but he sharply criticized the general state of the country.

“That the country has gone from bad to worse (26) years after the seizure of power is evident to anyone not living in a fool’s paradise,” Aung Gyi wrote in a letter May 12. “The country has plunged to the bottom politically, economically and socially.”