Myanmar to release US prisoner

Poor Jim Webb, always living in Bill Clinton’s shadow. Clinton got to go to big bad North Korea and take home two hot Asian journalists, but Webb had to settle for a second-rate dictatorship like Myanmar and negotiate the release of some crazy old guy convicted of “illegal swimming.”

I’m sorry, what?

“[John] Yettaw, a diabetic and epileptic former military veteran, is being held at Yangon’s Insein prison. He was convicted along with Aung San Suu Kyi, a pro-democracy leader, after swimming uninvited to the Nobel laureate’s lakeside home.“

Unlike the women Clinton saved from North Korea and the hikers being held in Iran, who in both cases were jailed for illegal border crossings, John Yettaw was arrested for swimming across a lake in Rangoon and pretty much breaking into Aung San Suu Kyi’s house. She didn’t want anything to do with him, but the junta thought it’d be a great excuse to extend her house arrest.

John Yettaw, you have to understand, has had a hard life. Born in Detroit, his father abandoned him at age two and left him with his alcoholic mother and four siblings. He lost three of them to suicide, drowning and poor treatment in a mental hospital. He’s been married four times and had seven kids, one of whom died in 2007 after crashing a motorcycle. Yettaw has also diabetes, asthma and epilepsy, and his third wife Yvonne claims he’s an alcoholic with untreated bipolar disorder and PTSD.

Last year he spent six months backpacking through Asia (he had a travel blog here, but unfortunately there’s only one post), settling in a crappy little Thai border town called Mae Sot. He did what most fifty-something white guys in Thailand do – bought a motorcycle, picked up a Thai girlfriend and started receiving messages from God that he was a “champion of the downtrodden” and must save Aung San Suu Kyi. Sometime in October he skipped town without paying any of his bills, got a Burmese visa in Bangkok and went to Rangoon.

Somehow, Yettaw managed to avoid the dozens of MPs and patrol boats ‘guarding’ Suu Kyi’s house and sneak in to the compound through a culvert (nearest I can figure, this is the place). Suu Kyi, obviously, wanted nothing to do with him and told her assistants to send him away. He was caught by police and questioned at gunpoint, but apparently he managed to convince them that he was fishing and they let him go.

The visions kept coming and Yettaw became more and more convinced that he had to meet Suu Kyi. This time, he saw her assassinated by terrorists and knew that he had to return to her home in Rangoon to warn her. So, one year later, he did it again.

Suu Kyi agreed to meet Yettaw this time, but only to tell him to piss off in person. She let him stay in the basement for a while, owing to his illnesses, but when he’d gathered enough strength he once again left the compound. This time, though, the police were waiting for him and he was thrown in Insein prison on a litany of charges (“being crazy” isn’t in the Burmese legal code). Suu Kyi, on the other hand, was given another year and a half of house arrest that will keep her out of the running during elections the junta has scheduled for next year.

Now, the entire Burmese democracy movement is blaming this naive old man for derailing their efforts to create a free Burma. Kyi Win, Aung San Suu Kyi’s lawyer, said, “Everyone is very angry with this wretched American. He is the cause of all these problems. He’s a fool.” That’s all a bunch of BS, of course – the military would have found some way to keep her in prison for the elections either way – but the dire consequences of John Yettaw’s midnight swim make this story all the weirder. Jim Webb convinced the government to release him on Sunday morning, so he’s probably home already, but I’m curious to know what the Americans plan to do with him.

“I had a dream that Aung San Suu Kyi would be assassinated so I came to warn her, so I am not guilty [...] I can’t walk on the water so I swam.”