Living Silence in Burma (11 page)

Hoping to defuse the tension, the government announced on 7 July that all of the students who had been arrested would be released. But the next day, Min Ko Naing and his colleagues issued a statement urging the students to continue the struggle. The statement bore the seal of the All Burma Federation of Students’ Unions (ABFSU), the first time this name had appeared since the student union was destroyed in 1962. The ABFSU then put out four more statements asking various professional groups to consider how they had suffered under BSPP rule. By doing so, the ABFSU hoped to expand the protests to the general public.

Also circulating at the time were retired Brigadier Aung Gyi’s letters. Brigadier Aung Gyi, who had worked closely with General Ne Win in the late 1950s and early 1960s, had written an open letter to General Ne Win in July 1987 warning him that if he did not deal with the economic crisis, violent protests were likely. Aung Gyi had recently travelled abroad for the first time in over twenty-five years. He was stunned by the level of economic progress in other South-East Asian countries. In May and June 1988 he wrote two more open letters to General Ne Win and also sent a forty-page analysis of how the BSPP had misruled the country and brought about economic ruin. These letters were copied and distributed widely, and the public was amazed that a senior public figure was daring to speak out so openly.
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Meanwhile, in the towns of Prome and Taunggyi, communal violence between Buddhists and Muslims broke out. Many suspected the disturbances were started by the military authorities, who were trying to divert attention from political issues.
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Then the BSPP held an extraordinary conference starting on 23 July, and General Ne Win announced his resignation. He admitted that the people’s demonstrations reflected a lack of support for his regime, suggested holding a referendum on whether to maintain one-party rule or change to a multiparty system, and declared that he was stepping down. People were astounded but questioned his sincerity. Indeed, even though General Ne Win resigned, the idea of holding a referendum on whether to institute multiparty rule was shelved, and before the conference ended, General Sein Lwin, who had only four years of education, was selected as General Ne Win’s successor. General Sein Lwin was the head of the riot police and the orchestrator of the 16 March slaughter at Inya Lake. He was hardly a moderate choice.

Most parents doubted that change was imminent and tried to keep their children out of trouble. Some even sent their sons to monasteries so they would not be drawn into further political activities. Min Zaw was one of them. A student at Rangoon University in 1988, he and his close friends had become involved in literature circles and political discussions, and in June they wrote and distributed a couple of political pamphlets, mostly in the university bathrooms. After Min Zaw participated in the June 1988 demonstrations, the military intelligence tried to arrest him. His mother sent him to a monastery well outside the city. Although he did not want to become a monk, he felt that he could not refuse his mother and the abbot. Frustrated by his isolation at the monastery, every evening he walked for twenty minutes to a village where he could listen to the British Broadcasting Corporation’s evening news programme. During that period, more people than usual were tuning into BBC radio broadcasts (in Burmese and English) because it was one of the few ways to get news about what was happening in the rest of the country.

Towards the end of July, the BBC broadcast an interview with a student by Christopher Gunness, a correspondent visiting Rangoon. The student called for a nationwide demonstration on the numerologically significant date of 8 August 1988 (8888). Even people in the countryside started getting excited. Min Zaw remembers the abbot giving a religious speech to the community in which he told people that if they needed to do something, they should go ahead and do it. Min Zaw said it was his way of encouraging the people to organize. The abbot also gave Min Zaw a
gahta
, or incantation, telling him, ‘You have to practise saying it. It will protect you from arrest.’

When some local teachers organized a rally in early August, Min Zaw insisted on attending. A layman who had come to know Min Zaw at the temple and often gave him extra meals encouraged him to give a speech. After shouting nervously at the audience, ‘Do you think I am a monk?’, Min Zaw told them that he was actually a student from Rangoon University and explained everything he had witnessed during the demonstrations in March and June. The community had planned a protest for the next day, and Min Zaw decided he could no longer be a monk.
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The next morning, he changed into street clothes, and walked out of the monastery. When the abbot saw him, he smiled and said nothing.

Six weeks of nationwide protests

In Rangoon, following the walkout of the dock workers at 8.08 a.m. on 8 August, thousands of people took to the streets. Surprisingly, the soldiers just watched. Late that night, however, the killing began. Violence incited more anger, and people continued to come out on to the streets over the next few days. With the fearlessness of youth, high-school students led numerous demonstrations in their school uniforms. Many provocatively bared their chests in front of the troops, daring the soldiers to shoot or bayonet them. Although a number of soldiers refused, others obeyed orders to kill the young students. Many soldiers had been brought into the city from remote areas, having been told that the students were communists bent on destroying the country. Between 8 and 12 August, several hundred people were killed in Rangoon alone.
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In Rangoon students played the central role in organizing demonstrations. In Mandalay students and monks led together. Kyaw Tint, a student activist in Mandalay, remembers:

    We started on the morning of 8/8/88, but the monks had to eat their morning meal, so they asked us to please wait until after eleven. But some students couldn’t wait so they started. At that time one youth was shot and died. At eleven thirty the monks’ group started marching. And the next day, we started the boycott camps in monasteries and pagodas and some schools.

In medical student Ye Min’s township in the delta, students began their demonstration at the local high school. As they marched, they called for the release of two locally arrested students as well as for the end of one-party rule. As in many rural areas where there were no soldiers, only
local police, the atmosphere was not as frightening as it was in Rangoon or Mandalay. When the crowds poured into the police station, the police had no choice but to release the two students. In the following days, the students organized a strike committee camp at one of the monasteries with the full support of the monks. They formed a township student union including high-school and university students, and encouraged teachers to become involved. Later, teachers’ unions, workers’ unions, a health workers’ union and a lawyers’ union were also set up. Then the various unions joined together to select a township general strike committee. Other towns followed a similar pattern, with professional groups organizing themselves into impromptu unions and their leaders forming strike committees to coordinate demonstrations and later administrative affairs.

Back in Rangoon, Moe Thee Zun had become one of the leading speakers and strategists. He urged students to move their demonstrations out of the universities and into the markets and other centres of activity. Wherever the students began speaking, the troops attacked. Unable to tell who was a student and who a bystander, the soldiers beat everyone, and sometimes shot people. As a result, everyone automatically became involved. Moe Thee Zun also encouraged activists to hold demonstrations in the evenings, when people were on their way home. Such protests didn’t interrupt their work, and the protesters could more easily escape in the dark if soldiers came after them.

In every demonstration, students carried fighting-peacock student union flags, banned since 1962, and portraits of General Aung San. By doing so, they sought to convey that they represented General Aung San’s true legacy. Moreover, the protesters sought to remind the army that General Aung San’s vision had been of an army that defended the people’s interests, not one that killed its fellow citizens.

Nevertheless, during the demonstrations, as many as three thousand people in Rangoon and other towns were killed, most shot by the military while marching.
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There were also incidents when civilians surrounded and killed suspected military intelligence personnel and others. Some civilians also came out with swords, daggers and sharpened bicycle and umbrella spokes. After years of feeling frustrated and powerless, the desire for revenge was overwhelming.

The ABFSU in Rangoon set up a security department early on to manage the crowds during demonstrations. Ko Doe, a serious-looking young man who was a member of the security department, remembers how difficult it was to stop some of the violence, which included beheadings.
Those who carried out the beheadings didn’t have proof that the person was an intelligence agent, he said. ‘They just suspected or hated that person, so they killed him.’ Sometimes Ko Doe and his team received telephone calls telling them to rush to a scene where violence was breaking out, but by the time they arrived, it was too late. Ko Doe said: ‘We students didn’t want this kind of thing.’

Ko Doe explained that he and other student activists suspected two kinds of people were behind the killings: ordinary people who were angry and lost control and military people in plain clothes trying to create a chaotic situation so that the military would have a justification for clamping down. Although the students understood these problems, Ko Doe said they were too inexperienced to know how to prevent them.

Ko Doe came from a military family, so his primary duty was to collect information about the military’s activities. Through sympathetic military people, he learned what kind of guns and other equipment they had and, on some occasions, whether or not the soldiers had been given orders to shoot. Some of the military people told him they had to shoot because they were ordered to, but they didn’t want to. He said: ‘They felt really confused and found it difficult to understand. So they gave us all the information.’

Not only in Rangoon, but also in some rural towns and villages, there were soldiers, though rarely intelligence officers or higher-ranking army officers, who helped the demonstrators. One long-time activist, Myat Hla, who was in a town in central Burma at the time, said: ‘Some of the local army men defected to the demonstrators and even told me they would give training to the villagers when the time came.’

Myat Hla was helping villagers establish local strike committees, but he said that the situation in his area was chaotic. Mobs of villagers captured weapons from police stations, and it was very close to armed struggle. Although he urged the villagers to use non-violent methods, they laughed at him and said he was naive. Myat Hla said: ‘Ordinary people do not believe in non-violent methods. They were surprised that they shouldn’t do anything when the soldiers shot at them. At least they wanted to use swords.’ In Myat Hla’s area, local authorities apparently tried to stir up trouble by provoking clashes between Muslims and Burmese and allowing soldiers to steal rice and take all the money out of the local bank.

With demonstrations taking place all over the country, on 12 August 1988 General Sein Lwin was removed as president. On 19 August, Dr Maung Maung, a legal scholar with a senior position in the BSPP
government, was appointed as Sein Lwin’s successor. Five days later, troops were called back to their bases and the shooting stopped.

No longer afraid of being killed, numerous people who had originally hesitated to come out now took to the streets. Even in the ethnic states, the demonstrations drew huge crowds. Residents of Hsipaw, a market town in northern Shan State, reported that tens of thousands of villagers poured into their town to find out what was going on and to express their feelings. These villagers had suffered more under military rule than farmers in the plains. Shan nationalist armies operated in the region, and villagers were frequently forced to accompany the
tatmadaw
during their anti-insurgent operations, carrying their ammunition and supplies. Many had also experienced other forms of forced labour or had their property confiscated, and they were eager to see political change.

In Pa-an, the sleepy capital of Karen State, Karens, Burmans and others also came in from miles away to march around the central area for days. Like villagers in Shan State, they had been the victims of military campaigns and faced far greater difficulties than people living near or in the urban centres of Rangoon and Mandalay.

Civil society re-emerges

During this chaotic, often violent but also exciting time, independent organizations sprang up in the towns and cities. Artists, actors, civil servants and housewives organized unions and marched in the streets. Large groups of people resigned from the BSPP and other military-controlled organizations, holding ‘burn-ins’ where membership cards were thrown into fires in front of local BSPP offices. Several dozen newspapers, magazines and pamphlets appeared overnight.
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The budding free press provided information about what was going on as well as fresh ideas, while comedians critiqued the dictatorship in the streets. Zarganar, a dentist and comedian, became a famous regular at Rangoon demonstrations, using mime and satire to ridicule General Ne Win’s rule.

As more and more professionals joined the movement, even the foreign service members began organizing. Many had found representing Burma’s policies abroad humiliating. Maung Maung Nyo, a Canberra-based senior diplomat who eventually defected, talked about how he had usually taken what he called a ‘minimalist approach’ to dealing with foreign journalists and critics. He tried to avoid them, but if he absolutely had to meet with them, he would answer all their sensitive questions with ‘no comment’. In August, the staff at the Canberra embassy became consumed with discussions about what to do. They busily cabled back and forth to other
Burmese embassies to find out what steps they were taking. One staff member who had witnessed the killings in Rangoon insisted that they should do something, but others said that it would be better to minimize the risk to themselves by letting others take the lead.