Living Silence in Burma (38 page)

Professors and lecturers are also assigned to watch for students engaging in political activities. In the mid-1990s, most professors had to patrol three times a week, and on anniversary days of political events, professors were compelled to skip their classes if they conflicted with their patrol duty.

One woman, Nway Nway, who taught at Rangoon University in the mid-1990s, explained how each professor had to take responsibility for the behaviour of several assigned students. Nway Nway told her students to stay out of politics, because, she said, ‘If you get involved, we’ll both be in trouble.’ She said she didn’t feel good about saying this, because, as an educator, her real duty was supposed to be teaching, not policing. But the authorities hoped to take advantage of the students’ respect for their teachers to keep them in line. Nevertheless, Nway Nway and many of her friends refused to follow through on the regulation that their assigned students sign in at their offices every morning. She gave the students the sign-in sheets and told them to handle it by themselves.

The extent of the authorities’ nervousness is apparent in another example. A university professor in Rangoon who had to teach English to a class of several hundred students in the early 1990s was ordered to hold on to the microphone at all times, even when writing on the chalk board. The authorities were concerned that a student might jump on stage and use the microphone to make a political speech.

Control is the primary concern for the military regime. At some university campuses, only those with current student or staff identification cards are allowed to enter, meaning they are off limits to the general public. The main reason is to prevent alumni and other activists from stirring up the students. Surveillance is carried out by intelligence agents and informers, with student activists claiming they often take the guise of gardeners, cleaners and other university employees.

Over the years, successive military regimes have not hesitated to close down the universities for extended periods whenever political unrest broke out. Between 1962 and 1999, universities were shut down thirteen times, from periods of a month up to more than three years.
¹⁶
Between 1988 and 2000, the universities were open for only thirty-six months. Classes were cancelled from June 1988 to May 1991, from December 1991 to May 1992, and from December 1996 to July 2000. Besides the military institutes, only some of the master’s degree programmes in Rangoon and the smaller technical colleges, generally located far from Rangoon, continued classes during this period. When the main universities were reopened in 1991, one-year courses were shortened to four months in order to get the students out as quickly as possible.

Although the regime understands that the country will not be competitive without an educated workforce, its first priority is to prevent anti-government demonstrations from erupting. For that reason, some student activists argue, drug and alcohol use on campus has been widely tolerated. Alcoholic and drugged students have little interest in politics. While students engaged in even minor anti-government activities are quickly ferreted out, some students I interviewed complained that heroin was being sold out of dormitory rooms on campus.

In recent years some university-age students have decided taking diploma courses can be a better investment of time and money than attending a university. As one young man in his twenties put it, ‘we felt that we could get a job with a Microsoft course certificate but a university degree is pretty useless’. Accounting, computer, business and English courses have all become popular.

In the meantime, the regime has put its energy into upgrading the
educational qualifications of its own people. After 1988, the military established separate military medical and technology institutes, which never shut down. With more resources going to the military institutes, the regime is in effect creating a two-tier system where the best-quality education is available only to those who work for the military.

The military has also sent students abroad for higher studies, with the understanding that they would come back and work for the regime. Between 2001 and 2006, the authorities sent 1,500 carefully selected students to Russia, with many studying nuclear and computer technology.
¹⁷
Burma has been working with Russia on plans to build a nuclear research reactor, which the regime insists will be for purely peaceful purposes.

Many of the generals and other elites send their children to private international high schools in Rangoon and then abroad for a university education. Singapore is a particularly favoured destination. The generals are seeking to raise the educational achievements of the officer corps and their offspring while holding the civilian population’s education hostage to political quiescence.

Study groups and floating books

Unable to rework the existing education system, some students have taken their education into their own hands. Students have sought out private tutors and created secret study groups as they have searched for an understanding of what is wrong with their country and how to go about changing it.

The idea of developing an alternative education in Burma has its roots in the colonial period. During the 1920 student strike against the Rangoon University Act, older students tutored younger students at the strike centres, and this led to the formation of National Schools, where the primary language of instruction was Burmese rather than English, and Burmese subjects were emphasized. Later, the young Aung San and other friends set up a communist study group to read political literature and make plans about how to achieve independence. Many other students and intellectuals in the colonial period also looked to foreign literature for clues as to how to overthrow colonial rule. Since General Ne Win’s takeover in 1962, a small number of students have turned to private libraries, study groups and private teachers in order to study political developments in other countries and to learn more about resistance movements in Burma’s past.

Some anti-government intellectuals and former political prisoners have set up private tuition classes or initiated informal study and
discussion sessions at their homes. From time to time, they select students who demonstrate intelligence and an interest in politics and try to develop both their understanding of political history and their sense of responsibility to the community.

Mi Mi, a plucky female student who walked out alone to argue with the authorities during a tense student demonstration in the late 1990s, had studied with such a private teacher when the universities were closed between 1988 and 1991. Her teacher had been a student activist in 1974, and he believed in the importance of discipline as well as intellectual rigour. Mi Mi and his other students had to go for morning runs at four o’clock, with lessons beginning at nine. They spent the whole day reading and listening to his lectures about the history of Burma.

Htun Htun, a reflective young man, studied with another charismatic dissident in the early 1980s. A former communist, the tutor invited interested high-school-age students to his house, where he would lend them leftist-inspired novels and books on history and social analysis. Htun Htun started visiting the teacher when he was about fifteen and often spent the whole day there, cooking, eating and talking with his teacher and other students. The teacher sought to correct the students’ understanding of their country’s past as they had learned it in their school textbooks. He talked often about the independence struggle, emphasizing that it was not just the army, as the textbooks claimed, which had made independence possible. Political organizations and ordinary civilians had also played essential roles. By portraying the people as essentially passive, the regime was trying to make people believe that it was natural that the army should lead and the people should follow.

The tutor also insisted that his students spend a significant amount of their time doing social work, especially at the local monastery. Every holy day, his students were expected to circle the town with gongs, alms bowls and a Buddha image, collecting contributions for the monastery. Although the authorities knew this teacher was a dissident, he was also well respected in the community for his promotion of religious and social welfare activities.

After Htun Htun was arrested briefly in March 1988, he said, ‘My teacher was so happy I was arrested that he was jumping up and down.’ This teacher hoped his chosen students would become activists, and indeed Htun Htun did. Meanwhile, during the 1988 pro-democracy uprising and the election campaign, Htun Htun’s teacher became so involved that he sold virtually all his possessions to support the movement. Later he ended up in prison, leaving his family penniless.

Forming student-led study groups is another way inquisitive high-school and university students have sought to expand their knowledge and challenge their intellects. While ordinary Burmese readers find pleasure in romance novels and translated bestsellers, politically inspired students seek out the literature of oppression and resistance, political theory and the biographies of freedom fighters such as Nelson Mandela.

Some intellectuals have private libraries in their homes, which are the sources of books for young readers. When Moe Thee Zun, the student activist, was in junior high school, he began visiting a house in his neighbourhood where a Rangoon University lecturer lived. During school holidays, he would spend the entire day reading at her house. On the weekends, many people visited this house, including former political prisoners, teachers and songwriters. As the adults sat together discussing books and politics, Moe Thee Zun would quietly listen.

Around 1980, Moe Thee Zun formed a study group with some older students, and he began leading a Tuesday and Saturday literature discussion in his ward. ‘The group’s purpose’, he said, ‘was to use literature to educate people about the political situation and motivate them to consider taking action.’ The study groups provided students with an opportunity to question and discuss rather than merely listen and repeat. Much of what they read consisted of translations of great works by Tolstoy, Chekhov, Dostoyevsky, Camus, Sartre, Hemingway and Steinbeck. Because it was difficult to find these books, they took turns reading them. They also tried to obtain copies of
Time
and
Newsweek
, assigning one person to obtain back issues from the embassies. One member of the group would translate the articles into Burmese because most members were not fluent in English.

In 1986, the literature discussion groups expanded to several towns, and they were able to collect a number of books. The way the system worked was that no one could own a book permanently. Once a person had read it, he or she would write a short comment and the name of his or her home town in the back and pass it on to another member. In this way, books travelled all over Burma. Sometimes a book would return to the original owner six months or a year later. Moe Thee Zun remembers the excitement he felt when one of the books he had sent off months before was returned to him. ‘My book was running through Burma,’ he said, ‘floating through our network.’ For those who had developed political ideas, knowing they had similarly minded peers in other parts of the country was very important. They often felt isolated among their own schoolmates, most of whom thought it pointless to question military control.

Moreover, most parents did not want their children to become politicized, and teenagers who did begin independent political studies usually had to hide their activities from their parents. Aung Zin, for instance, had been a model high-school student who had written award-winning essays extolling the virtues of BSPP rule. His parents were thrilled when he was accepted at medical school and expected him to join the civil service as a doctor. Once he was at university, however, his interests changed. Rather than read his textbooks, he set himself a goal of reading one hundred key books in political science, literature and philosophy within a year. As a result of his reading, his ideas about his country’s political situation shifted dramatically. He participated in the 1988 student demonstrations, escaped to the Thai–Burma border, and has worked for pro-democracy groups based there ever since.

Tea shops and bathrooms

Despite successive regimes’ attempts to keep politics out of the classroom, daring students find ways to carry out underground political education activities in their schools and universities. Secret student groups write and distribute magazines on university campuses, with the goal of inspiring other students to recognize injustice. Such magazines contain fiction, poetry and other articles which have not been censored, and circulate among interested students.

Ethnic minority groups also organize government-recognized literature and culture committees on campus which produce annual magazines and calendars. While some members of these groups are interested only in social and cultural activities, the committees are also key recruiting grounds for ethnic minority political activists. Several ethnic minority university students who joined armed ethnic nationalist groups after the 1988 demonstrations had been active in university literature and culture committees, where they had become increasingly frustrated with the regime’s restrictions on the teaching of their languages and histories.

Tea shops on and near university campuses are favourite gathering places for students, whether to discuss romance or politics. Min Zaw, the university student whose mother made him become a monk in 1988, told me that for two years he never went to the classroom. ‘My classroom was the tea shop,’ he said. ‘We read poems and talked about what we should do, because at that time, we were all upset with the government.’

More politically aware students take it upon themselves to educate less aware friends through their discussions in tea shops and dormitory rooms.

Bathrooms have also been the site of alternative education, and even of minor political action. Many former students talked about learning of the destruction of the student union building in 1962 from pamphlets posted in the university bathroom stalls. Such pamphlets have also called for students to mark the anniversary each July by wearing black, which a varying number of students continue to do each year.