Zarganar is correct that national reconciliation through hostage taking is a fraud. The reason that he is correct is that national reconciliation through hostage taking rests implicitly on the notion that the victim, the hostage, is expected to be grateful to the perpetrator, the hostage-taker, for letting him go. It is premised upon the notion that the government in Burma, as a perpetrator of crimes, ought to be congratulated for acts of apparent generosity towards persons whom it has persecuted relentlessly.
Over the last few years, prisoner releases in which political detainees have also featured have been a regular event in Burma. Each release is an opportunity for the political leadership to temporarily pay the role of benefactor, and enjoy some praise for whatever largesse it has managed to generate through the freeing from detention of persons who should have never been detained in the first place, persons whose "crimes" constituted acts that in most other countries are taken for granted. It is for this reason that such releases of detainees are indicative not of a system operating according to rational law, but one operating according to feudal principles, in which a regal figure earns the gratitude of his subjects for the merciful exercise of arbitrary power.
But the method only works well when those released show the required deference to the powers that have released them. When, as in the case of Zarganar, they continue to show defiance and scorn, national reconciliation through hostage taking is, rather than being an effective political device, exposed as a fraud.
For this reason, the authorities in Burma are afraid to release many of the remaining political detainees. Since the method of national reconciliation through hostage taking requires the existence of a pool of hostages that can be drawn upon if and when the authorities see fit, the only way for this method to be brought to an end is through the release of all persons who constitute the pool of hostages.
2011.10.17 Asian Human Rights Commission, Hong Kong, China