'I feared I would simply disappear'

In some ways, it sounds comical. But when these acts of torture are being committed by one of the cruellest regimes in the world - a junta which has killed thousands of women and children and bayoneted pacifist monks - laughing was the last thing on James Mawdsley's mind.

"When you are being tortured, it's not so much the pain that beats you down as your own fear," the 26-year-old recalls in his book - The Heart Must Break - the first time he has talked so openly about his experiences in Burma. "I began to wonder, what if they stub out a cigarette on my eye? What if they light a candle under my scrotum?"

They didn't, but the suffering he endured was every bit as torturous.

From the moment he was arrested in the market place of Tachilek, a small town on the Thai-Burma border in 1999, to the minute he was released last October, he feared for his life, feared he would be killed like eight of his friends, whose deaths he was there to protest against. His imprisonment also brought heart-ache to his mother Diana, who campaigned stoically for his release from her home at Brancepeth, near Durham, and also in Burma itself.

"I was frog-marched away, trying to smile bravely, but gulping in apprehension," James recalls. "Now it was just the junta and me and I did not feel brave at all."

At the hands of Burma's infamous military intelligence, his bold statements of political rhetoric gave way to thoughts of surviving abominable conditions and treatment. Stark, stinking and sinister, the jails he inhabited for the next 14 months added to the physical and psychological torture he was forced to endure.

"I was taken to a cell in prison. It was 8ft by 15ft and perhaps 20ft high. There were no windows so my isolation was complete. There was a wooden pallet to sleep on, a pot for a toilet and a jar of water. The heat was unbearable, the dirt and smell more than uncomfortable."

Algae would grow in his drinking water in days, the food was meagre and barely edible; it was a combination which was to leave him collapsing with malnutrition, while bed bugs and mosquitoes feasted heartily on his body.

Then there were the days of questioning and physical abuse, excruciatingly tight handcuffs, petrol-soaked blindfolds. "I heard a voice shouting 'torture', following it with a sinister laugh. I have never been so terrified.

"One of the men twisted a towel into a rope and started flicking it at my cheeks, my stomach, then my genitals. Blindfolded and with my hands behind my back, I felt totally vulnerable. I was not allowed to sit, eat or drink. I began to get dizzy. I wondered what would happen if I fell and soon found out - fists and feet came from everywhere and I was hauled back up.

"One guard took a pen and forced it between my knuckles, then gripped my fingers in his hand and began slowly to squeeze them together. It was excruciating. I passed out but was brought round by kicks and more blows in the genitals. The guard with the pen kept prodding it between my knuckles to remind me what he could do. Later, he would just click it near my ear so I would not forget."

A favourite among the guards was the "iron road". "An iron rod is rolled up and down the victim's shins with increasing pressure. Done long enough it will strip your skin from the bone. After that - ridiculously - they tickled my feet. Here was the brutal and heartless military intelligence torturing their victim...by tickling his feet. But, as sleep deprivation, it was completely effective."

However his biggest fear was that he would simply disappear, like countless victims before him. But then he heard that he was the talk of Rangoon and his story had been picked up by the BBC.

"This was a massive relief. It was too late for the junta to pretend I did not exist or to claim I had disappeared in the jungle. It meant they now had to keep me alive." From then on, it was a case of survival; eating every scrap of food proffered, licking the last juices off his hands, right up to the wrist and beyond to the forearm.

"It was an animal-like compulsion which I was almost unable to stop. It reminded me of my dogs at home who would sometimes lick our hands in a similar way, apparently to get salt. And so, there was I, taking back the salt from my own sweat. Licking myself like a dog, my arms and even, I confess, my knees. It was bizarre. You do it without quite knowing why but underneath your consciousness, your body is screaming for salt. The body knows what it needs and will hijack the rational part of our being to get it."

Looking back at his incarceration, James has had time to reflect on what was so terrifying about prison.

"It goes beyond the unpleasantness and discomfort described. It's because the military intelligence can do whatever they like to you and nobody will help you. Time and time again they have tortured, raped and killed, with no apparent comeback, so fear grows. And in my case, it was not even that they would come to do terrible or brutal things. Just that they would leave you to rot and that they did not conceive of you as a human being, as something which could suffer, and which had a right to dignity and autonomy.

"I thought about westerners doing time in Third World prisons for smuggling drugs. Though they might, at first, have cursed their stupidity in taking such risks, I had heard of many who had come to terms with their awful predicament by recognising the wrong of their crime. Well, I did not even have that comfort. My incarceration was my own fault, just as theirs was, but I had no excuse at all - I was in from the purest stupidity."

l The Heart Must Break: The Fight for Democracy and Truth in Burma, is published on September 6 (Century, £17.99).

The book is available from The Northern Echo Bookshop, freephone 0800 01500552. Payment can be made with a credit card by by cheque made payable to the Northern Echo Bookshop.