subter » The Saffron Revoltion

The Saffron Revoltion

P. Bradley Robb

The latest headline (1 Oct 2007) from inside Myanmar is that injured protestors are being burned alive in crematoriums. Meanwhile, the latest headlines carried by the major news outlets all focus on the UN envoy, Ibrahim Gambri. Mr. Gambri has met with Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi and the site of her house arrest, yet was denied access, for the second day running, to the country’s junta leader, Senior General Than Shwe. This news piles on top of the numerous unconfirmed reports of monks being held in “temporary detention centers” located in the Yangon Institute of Technology and General Institute of Technology. These detained monks have been forced into a hunger strike as they refuse to accept food alms from the military, and the military refusing lay persons to donate. And even this story is merely the latest edition in the recent spat of peaceful protests in nation formerly known as Burma, all stemming from something dubbed “The Saffron Revolution.”

A Nation of Two Names

The country, roughly the size of Texas, home to nearly fifty-million people, and bordering both India and China, has been a source of numerous news reports easily discoverable to those who know where to look. Yet, the story remains unseen and on the periphery of the mainstream news, all too often relegated to mere ticker space on CNN. It seems that everything within Myanmar is a source of contention, down to and including the nation’s name.

Like many other nations in the region, Burma was once a British colony. After gaining independence in 1948, the nation suffered under vying insurgent groups before falling to a military coup in 1962 and ending up under the rule of Ne Win. Ne Win’s rule was marked by paranoia and brutality, erecting an insular state which existed largely in brutality as it marched towards financial disaster. Under the guiding hand of Ne Win, Burma was saddled with the “Least Developed Nation” title by the U.N. in the 1980s.

Ne Win, who started his rule with the killing of 100 students at the University of Rangoon (Yangon) in 1962, ended it with the slaying of an undetermined number of protesters in August and September of 1988. Reports of the incident vary; the government’s claims of “a few hundred communist dissidents” to Reuters “as many as three thousand” to the BBC’s “up to 10,000” death in what has been known as the 8888 uprising (the uprising started on the 8th of August, 1988). Yes, it seems that as bad as Ne Win was, the group of Generals that replaced him was worse.

The Junta Years

It was in this summer of 1988 when Aung San Suu Kyi returned to Burma from London to take care of a ailing relative. Aung San was swept up in the pro-democratic protests and following the non-violent protest doctrines of both Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., the woman became one of the National League for Democracy’s key leaders. Her rise to fame lead to several brushes with the junta’s rule, but eventually paid off in 1990, when free and open multi-party elections were held for the first time in decades. Aung San Suu Kyi received a landslide 82% of the vote, and her democratic party accounted for a majority of the nation’s parliamentary seats.

This newly elected government was never to be, though. The junta, now firmly established as the leaders of Myanmar, refused to honor the results of the elections that they, themselves, had proposed. While Aung San was being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts to allow democracy to flourish, the junta was locking her away.

This is but a brief overview of Myanmar, a nation formerly known as Burma, a nation where a people have, overwhelmingly, been in favor of democratic rule for decades, where the world’s only imprisoned Nobel Peace Prize winner lives, and where the military junta operates in a world of secrecy unrivaled by even that of Orwell’s imagination.

The Saffron Revolution

The most recent actions in Burma started in the middle of August as the ruling Generals doubled the price of diesel and raised the price of natural gas nearly 500%. This hike in prices sent shock waves throughout the impoverished nation and sent protesters marching in the streets. The government’s response was swift, within days of the first protest, thirteen of the organizers were branded as dissidents, rounded up, and now face twenty years in prison.

The threat of jail did little to stop the citizens of Burma, and the protests continued, eventually being led by the nation’s moral authority – the thousands of Buddhist monks that populate numerous monasteries throughout the nation. As the monks took to the streets, they themselves were met with a heightened government response – warning shots.

As the government rallied against the monks, the nation, and the world at large, is slowly acknowledging the Burmese plight. The same quotes can been seen in numerous articles – one million people forced into mandatory labor; one million more people displaced from their homes; 3000 villages razed; government campaigns of rape and torture; citizens kept in abject poverty with less than one telephone per thousand people, and nearly 70% of the nation reduced to sustenance farming.

Despite the government ratcheting up the violence, the protests continued, and they grew stronger, yet always remained peaceful. Early September saw video released of monks marching silently and by the middle of the month, the holiest shrines, Shwedagon Pagoda, was closed to Burmese monks no the 17th of September. The protest march of the 18th resulted in tear gas and warning shots. Reports of arrests and brutal slayings begin to filter out of the country thanks to a network of technologically enabled citizen journalists.

The Modern Revolutionary, in Burma and Abroad

The world sat up and took notice of the Saffron Revolution on the 27th of September, when between 10,000 and 100,000 marchers took to the streets of the nation’s former capital Yangon (Rangoon). The protest came to a dramatic and deadly end when Myanmar security forces opened fire on the crowd with automatic weapons. The Myanmar government claims that only 9 people were killed in the incident, while unconfirmed civilian reports claim upwards of 200 dead.

One confirmed fatality was that of Japanese photojournalist Kenji Nagoi. Nagio had been photographing the protest when he was killed, prompted Japan to threaten the nation with sanctions and a reduction in financial aid.

The killings also thrust the protests into the world’s attention thanks to countless citizen journalists. Often outfitted with nothing more than a camera-equipped cell phone and knowledge of how to access proxy servers in the nation’s few internet cafes, these Burmese citizens risked their lives to break through the black veil of Myanmar government censorship. They did not do so to ask the world for support, not to ask the world to send troops, but to show exactly what was happening. Their actions in attempting to report the news, to display the contradictions in the official governmental reports keep in line with the peaceful methodology of Aung San Suu Kyi and the nation’s Buddhist monks.

Far away from the streets of Yangon, Ko Htike became perhaps the most public face in the Burmese democratic movement. From London, Burmese-born Ko shifted the focus of his blog from poetry and prose to becoming a clearing house for many of the journalists behind the Myanmar curtain. Information slowly started showing up on Ko’s blog in every type of modern form available – text, photos, video, and audio. Ko’s blog is certainly not the only source for information, but he is an excellent example of how people around the world are rallying around the cause. Ko has told CNN that he sleeps for roughly two hours a night, trying to keep on Burmese time so that he can help spread the word, to continue the peaceful protest, if only digitally.

And then the internet went dark. On Friday the 28th of September, the day after the fatal and public protest march, the internet leaving Myanmar was cut off. Reports from inside the nation grew fewer, and further between, and sadly, they grew darker. Some say the monks were being arrested, yet reports smuggled out of the country via email, mobile phone calls, and text messages claim that the government was using lone-tein – riot police largely considered to be hired thugs, to beat to death the 190 of the 200 sitting monks of the Ngwe Kyar Yan monastery. Photos started to arrive of bodies floating in rivers. Reports of monk on de facto hunger strikes were slipping out of Yangon.

Saturday the 29th saw the internet returned briefly. It was off again hours later.
The International Problem

Google News just alerted me to another Myanmar story, this time carried by the New York Times. Another story just arrived, this time from Sylvester Stallone. The Old Gray Lady is reporting on the problems that Myanmar’s neighbors are faced with, the double-edged sword of witnessing first hand the travesties the junta is inflicting upon its own people, and the need for Burmese resources. Stallone has come forward to speak about the brutality he witnessed while in Thailand filming the fourth film in the Rambo franchise. His reports of landmine victims, of shootings, of inherent dangers at nearly every turn juxtapose brilliantly against the Times piece. Myanmar’s neighbors are willing to include the human suffering into the equation as long as it means cheaper gas, or wood, or minerals, or power. Burma is an untapped mine for Chinese goods, and their rivers and resources can go a long way to alleviating their neighbors’ need for power in order to modernize, to compete, to further distance themselves from the secretive and impoverished nation.

By the end of September, much of the world’s leaders had voiced some manner of opinion on the subject. President Bush even focused more on Myanmar than on Iraq when he addressed the United Nations. But the United States is as involved with Myanmar from a business perspective as the nation’s neighbors. The pipeline that carries natural gas from Burma to Thailand, and is responsible for much of the recent revenue spike the nation’s leadership has enjoyed, is owned in part by Chevron. According to the Wall Street Journal, Chevron seems to be making the same excuse as all of Myanmar’s neighbors, arguing that it these resources would go somewhere, and with better Chevron than someone like China, the largest supplier of weapons to Myanmar since 1988.

A World Apart

At the moment this article goes to press, thousands are reported missing. Most are believed to be in jail, though various groups are highlighting the difficulty in establishing a body count in a nation which cremates its dead. Reports are filtering in that the monestaries and temples around Yangon are empty. The streets are empty to. No one is driving. The shops are all closed. And no new news has left the country in some time.

The citizens of Burma have endured forty-five years of military dictatorships, have had their resources parceled away to neighboring nations, been victims of ethnic cleansing, injured by landmines, beaten and imprisoned by their own soldiers, ravaged by disease, and denied every basic human right imaginable. Through all of this, the Burmese have responded with peaceful protests. It is time for the rest of the world to turn our eyes to Burma, to look at the situation for what it is - a nation turned into a prison - and to praise the Burmese people for the diligence with the reward of a free and democratically elected government of their choosing. Burma has already paid the price for freedom, shouldn’t they be allowed to realize it?

Of course, the state run media in Myanmar is already claiming that the peace has been resorted.

Burma Online Resources

Ko Htike – started as a poetry blog, Ko Htike’s site has become a clearing house for photos and text messages sent from inside Burma.

Irrawaddy – online magazine chronicling the plight of Bruma.

Democratic Voice of Burma – a non-profit Burmese media organization.

US Campaign for Burma – a US-based group designed to help grassroots organizations help Burma.

Daw Aung San Suu Kyi – the website of Aung San Suu Kyi, the leader of the democratic movement in Burma.

Rebound88 – a clearing house for news stories about Burma.

This is by no means a complete list, but feel free to add others.