Living Silence in Burma (12 page)

Then, on 30 August, Foreign Ministry personnel in Rangoon put out a statement saying that the BSPP policy had ‘tarnished Burma’s pride and prestige in international fora. We’ve lost face implementing policies which lack essence.’ They also called for free and fair elections under a multiparty system. Following this statement, letters of support were issued by staff members at many Burmese embassies, including the embassy in Canberra.

Not surprisingly, given the lack of respect for the law under the BSPP regime, lawyers were also active. The Bar Council drafted a statement critiquing the BSPP’s disastrous monetary policies and abuse of the legal system. Selected lawyers simultaneously read out the statement all over the country.

While citizens were enjoying the freedom to organize into groups, maintaining law and order became a serious concern. The student unions had called for a nationwide strike on 26 August but, in what appears to have been an effort to disrupt the strike, the authorities opened most of the country’s prisons that morning. Mi Mi, a lawyer living in a town in the delta, remembered how terrified people were that anarchy would break out. Her township strike committee was able to resolve the problem by convincing the prisoners to stay in prison under the protection of Buddhist monks. Each prisoner’s case would be reviewed by the town’s lawyers and anyone who had been unjustly imprisoned or convicted of a minor crime would be released. Both the prisoners and the townspeople accepted the arrangement.

In Rangoon, the YMCA took care of young people who had been released from juvenile prison. They also joined with other religious leaders to set up an interfaith council of Buddhists, Christians, Hindus and Muslims which provided rice to some of the most needy people in the city.

In other areas, though, tensions began to rise because of the food shortages and widespread looting of government property. The strikes had caused a total breakdown in the transportation infrastructure, all work stopped, and getting food became increasingly difficult for many people. Many families feared that the mobs would not stop at the government warehouses but would raid their shops and houses too.

In most towns, local committees were set up to handle daily affairs; in particular, security and food distribution. These committees were usually
run by teachers, lawyers, doctors and intellectuals, but in many places monks played the leading role. They provided shelter at their monasteries for those who could not return home, they restrained protesters who wanted to kill captured military men, and they settled disputes.

In parts of Mandalay and many surrounding villages, local people asked the monks to take charge until peace was restored. Several groups of monks did so. At night, young monks in some towns armed themselves with sticks and patrolled the streets, watching not only for soldiers but also for criminals hoping to take advantage of the breakdown of order.

While the monks often tried to prevent killings, in many places they encouraged people to demonstrate their disapproval of BSPP rule. Linking the struggle against the regime to a need for spiritual purification, in Mandalay a group of monks led Burmese residents in evening rituals usually reserved for the last day of the new year celebrations. Gathering on street corners, monks asked the crowds three times, ‘Do you want evil spirits, who make people suffer in all kinds of ways, to stay around here?’ The people responded, ‘No, we don’t want that!’, as they beat gongs and pots and pans to drive the bad spirits away. In this case, they were referring not to ghosts of the deceased but to living members of the regime.

Monks also indirectly supported popular participation by giving demonstrators protective charms and tattoos. As in the days of the Saya San rebellion in the 1930s, many people still believed such charms could protect them and thus were emboldened to take to the streets. The deaths of those who had such protections were explained by the assumption that they must have broken one of the rules that must be followed for the charm to work. Some monks were believed to have supernatural powers which allowed them to see the future and travel from place to place invisibly. Many demonstrators drew strength from the presence of the monks in the demonstrations.

The need for leadership

In the early days of the demonstrations, General Aung San’s daughter, Aung San Suu Kyi, played no role. Her father had died when she was two, and she had lived outside Burma since she was a teenager. Her mother was appointed ambassador to India, so the family moved to Delhi. Then she attended university in England and married Michael Aris, a British scholar of Tibet. Although she often returned to Burma for visits, she was settled in England, where she and her husband were raising their two sons. She had written to Michael Aris before their marriage saying
that if her country ever needed her, she would have to go, but such a scenario had appeared unlikely.

In 1988, Aung San Suu Kyi happened to be in Rangoon taking care of her ailing mother when the demonstrations broke out. At first she stayed at home but, at the urging of others, she put out a statement calling for the establishment of an independent committee to oversee multiparty elections. Then she decided to make a speech on the field beneath Shwedagon Pagoda on 26 August, the day student organizers had called for a nationwide strike. That morning, the area filled with over half a million people, curious to see the daughter of their beloved national leader. Her eloquence and poise captivated the audience as she urged people not to turn on the army but to seek democracy in a peaceful and unified way.
⁹
She immediately became a key figure in the movement, although she was not affiliated with any particular group.

While the demonstrations drew widespread participation, the lack of a unified leadership became a problem. Block, neighbourhood and village organizations emerged to handle local affairs, but there was still no recognized national organization. Student groups took the lead in organizing demonstrations, but they were not capable of establishing a new administration. Veteran politicians and retired military leaders were out making speeches but none had total support. In early September, rumours started to spread that the army was going to stage a coup. Pressure was increasing on the leading activists and politicians to try to establish an interim government.

On 9 September, former prime minister U Nu, who had returned to Burma under amnesty in 1980, released a press statement announcing that he had formed a government himself. Most people had lost faith in him and were dismayed by his cabinet appointees, many of whom were old cronies or his relatives.

Two days later, BSPP leaders announced that they would hold an election for a new multiparty parliament. Although they had dropped their original plan to first hold a referendum on one-party versus multiparty rule, many people still doubted whether the BSPP could be trusted to hold multiparty elections. As a result, the demonstrations continued.

Meanwhile, student representatives and veteran politicians went to a number of embassies to enquire whether they would support an interim government. After receiving positive feedback from a few of the embassies, they held meetings on 13 and 14 September. Aung San Suu Kyi, U Nu, Bo Yan Naing (one of the Thirty Comrades), Tin Oo (the army chief of staff sacked in 1976) and Brigadier Aung Gyi (who had written the open
letters to General Ne Win) participated. Moe Thee Zun was selected to represent the 100 leading student activists who attended, and he urged the five politicians to agree with the students’ plan to form an interim government within forty-eight hours.

The meeting was held inside Medical Institute No. 1 in Rangoon, and loudspeakers had been set up on the street so that the thousands of people outside could listen. Moe Thee Zun remembered: ‘We told the politicians, “Please forget your problems and form the interim government.”’ But U Nu insisted that everyone should support his government, and the others were unwilling to do so. The meeting ended without any agreement on how to proceed.

There were still many unresolved differences of opinion between the politicians, and some of the senior leaders felt that it was better to wait and see whether the BSPP would follow through on its election promise. Meanwhile, student activists continued to try to build support for an interim government, meeting with representatives of the various professional unions and compiling a list of nominees, including Aung San Suu Kyi. But on 18 September the military staged a coup, and their opportunity had gone.

The afternoon of the coup, troops appeared on the streets all over the country and began clearing out strike centres and breaking down the protective barriers that residents had erected at many crossroads. Those who resisted were shot. After two days and several hundred killings, especially of young students, the military re-established control.

Why didn’t the 1988 demonstrations succeed? First, the demonstrations had broken out spontaneously, and while there was a fair amount of quick coordinating at the local level, there was no national leadership that could unite the strike committees. As the strikes continued, food shortages worsened, public services stopped and people grew tired, giving the military an opportunity to retake control.

Another factor was the marked lack of participation of the armed ethnic organizations. None of their armies came into the towns, although small groups ventured in to see what was happening and handed over a few weapons to individual contacts. The KNU and NMSP were actually fighting each other over contested territory at the time. While many of the ethnic minorities living in the cities and towns in the heartland of Burma participated, the leaders of the armed ethnic organizations felt this was not their struggle. They saw it as a battle between Burmans, so they remained on the sidelines. As General Mya, the head of the KNU at the time, was quoted as saying in
Asiaweek
: ‘The recent uprisings were
good for the people, but we cannot yet say it will be directly beneficial to the revolutionaries.’
¹⁰

Another group that did not send its army into the cities was the Communist Party of Burma.
¹¹
As Myat Hla, who had contacts in the CPB, put it, ‘Many slogans were introduced by the CPB’s underground movement members, but sometimes these UGs [underground operatives] did not consult the party. The SLORC scapegoated them, but they played only a limited role. Even one of the senior leaders in the CPB admitted that.’

Most importantly, the regime was able to regain control because the generals could command the obedience of enough of their officers and soldiers. Although some soldiers did join the movement, or refused to shoot, there were plenty who did not desert but stayed to pull the trigger as they were told. Still, the movement had a profound psychological effect on its participants. Before 1988, the police and intelligence agents had been widely disliked, but after the troops’ killings of students and monks, the military itself became hated. People who had grown up assuming authoritarian rule would continue indefinitely now believed that the country’s politics could be different. Activists from different generations had been able to link up and present a new vision for the country. As a result, people’s hopes were raised that democracy would be restored, and the coup organizers were compelled to offer the promise of change.

General Ne Win’s name did not appear in the new ruling junta, which called itself the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC). But General Saw Maung, the chairman, and the other top leaders in the SLORC were known to be loyal to him. Meanwhile, General Ne Win was widely believed to be calling the shots from behind the scenes.

At that time, rumours began circulating of guns and ammunition at the Thai–Burma border. Students who were determined to continue the fight, and felt that armed struggle was their only alternative, streamed out of the cities. Others left to escape arrest. Moe Thee Zun recalled that he and some other students who still believed in the need for a continued mass movement inside the country urged students not to leave, insisting, ‘This is not a Rambo movie.’ Nevertheless, as many as 10,000 students made their way to the Thai, Chinese, Indian and Bangladesh borders. While it was a frightening journey for the students, who had never been in the jungle, not many were chased by
tatmadaw
troops. The military regime was eager for the students to move out of the cities, recognizing that as successful as the students had been in organizing people in urban areas, they were no match for the battle-hardened
tatmadaw
troops in the jungle.

The election campaign

Just days after the coup, General Saw Maung announced that political parties could begin registering. The National League for Democracy (NLD), led by Aung San Suu Kyi, Tin Oo and Aung Gyi, was one of the first to do so, on 27 September 1988. The day before, the National Unity Party (NUP) announced its formation. Former military men and BSPP loyalists made up the bulk of the NUP, which was quickly characterized as representing a continuation of the old order. The party had a distinct financial advantage because it was able to take over many of the BSPP offices and its equipment for free. It soon became clear that the regime hoped to engineer the election so that the NUP would win an outright victory or at least become the leading member of a coalition government.

How did the SLORC think the NUP could win when so many citizens had been in the streets demanding change? First, the regime, like most authoritarian governments, tended to see and hear only what it wanted to believe. Thus, it overestimated its support, particularly among soldiers and former active BSPP members. Second, it encouraged the formation of a plethora of parties which would divide pro-democracy voters. Third, as the campaign went on, it tried to weaken the other parties by arresting particularly popular and capable challengers. And fourth, it severely limited campaigning opportunities in direct and indirect ways.

Political parties were allowed to open offices and given telephone lines and extra rations of petrol at the subsidized government price. Most people believe that at least one of the reasons the SLORC provided these incentives was so that a large number of parties would register, people would feel utterly confused, and the vote would be split in a thousand directions. Indeed, over two hundred parties were established in all, set up by former politicians, intellectuals, ethnic minority representatives and students. Some of these so-called parties, however, were nothing more than groups of friends who wanted a place to meet and access to the perks that were being offered. Others were formed by students who did not want to compete in the elections but needed a cover for continuing their political activities.