Living Silence in Burma (9 page)

Also, General Aung San’s name still carried tremendous meaning for Burmese people, and General Ne Win claimed to represent Aung San’s legacy. Both members of the Thirty Comrades, they had fought for independence together, and General Ne Win sought to play up this connection. General Ne Win presented his regime as carrying out the
socialist policies General Aung San would have wanted to implement, and portrayed the army, founded by General Aung San, as continuing to sacrifice for the people in order to maintain the country’s integrity.

At the time, few Burmese could travel outside the country, and foreign journalists could not easily come in. Even tourists could obtain only seven-day visas to Burma. Lacking information about how other countries were developing, most Burmese took military-backed, one-party rule as a given and tried to make the best of their situation. In many cases this meant joining the party or at least trying to benefit from connections to government officials. Becoming a military officer was also enticing, as higher-ranking officers could obtain cars (models assigned by rank) at a time when most people got around by oxcart or bicycle.

Resistance in the cities

Despite the general population’s overall passivity, the BSPP regime under General Ne Win did face occasional resistance from monks, students and urban workers. It was generally only the most idealistic and brave members of each of these groups, however, who initiated such activities, for they risked torture and imprisonment if they were caught. Each demonstration started with a specific grievance, and although the protests sometimes widened into calls for the overthrow of Ne Win’s government, there was little consensus on what kind of government should replace it.

University students in Rangoon, Mandalay and Moulmein took to the streets on several occasions between 1962 and the late 1970s. Inspired by the role students had played in leading resistance protests against the colonial regime, and also because they were young and generally free of financial responsibilities, they saw themselves as having a moral duty to speak out. Most students were motivated by anger at the injustices they witnessed around them.

Once a demonstration started, the military feared, it could spread quickly. Thus, the military and riot police usually responded immediately to isolate and arrest the protesters. In the 1960s and 1970s, each spate of demonstrations was easily contained but, not long after, another crop of students volunteered to put themselves at risk again.

In 1969, a riot broke out at the South-East Asian Peninsular Games, held at a university campus in Rangoon. Students who couldn’t get tickets to see the boxing matches pushed their way in. Soldiers shot into the crowd to disperse them, leading to more protests and university closures. In 1970, some university students organized a fiftieth anniversary
commemoration of the founding of Rangoon University. The regime ordered teachers to prevent students from politicizing the event, but a history of the July 1962 killings was distributed and students at some other universities also handed out anti-government pamphlets. Students and teachers were punished, and universities around the country were shut for a month.
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In 1974, much larger demonstrations broke out in May and June, this time led by workers in state-owned factories. The authorities had recently cut rations in half, and the workers demanded more subsidized rice and better pay. When the number of workers taking to the streets increased, the military responded by firing into the crowds. The government reported twenty-two deaths, although other witnesses cited much higher figures. The military sentenced more than one hundred workers to lengthy imprisonment and immediately closed the universities, fearing escalating protests.

In December 1974, university student protests broke out over the government’s handling of U Thant’s funeral. This time the protesters’ anger was clearly directed towards General Ne Win, and speech-makers called for his removal. General Ne Win had been jealous of U Thant, a Burmese diplomat who became secretary-general of the United Nations in the 1960s. While General Ne Win was leading his country into isolation and economic ruin, U Thant was receiving international accolades for his level-headed handling of numerous crises during the escalating cold war period. After U Thant died in New York, his body was flown back to Rangoon, but General Ne Win ordered that no state official should meet the body, and he would be buried like any other ordinary person. But when his body was unceremoniously laid out at Kyaikkasan grounds, the old racetrack, thousands of Burmese came to place wreaths and pay their last respects.
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Incensed at the regime’s disregard for the senior statesman, a group of university students decided to take matters into their own hands. Amassing a large number of students from various campuses in Rangoon, they marched to Kyaikkasan grounds on 5 December. Once there, they persuaded the officiating monks to give them the body, which they took on a decorated truck to Rangoon University and then placed on a platform in the Convocation Hall.

One participant, Thein San, explained what happened next. The students began building a mausoleum for U Thant on the site of the old student union. Supporters outside the university donated money and food packets to the students inside, and thousands of people, including
monks, came into the university compound in the evenings to pay their respects and to listen to the students’ speeches. Many of the speeches dealt with the economic crisis, while others had a more explicit anti-government theme. Thein San said: ‘I don’t know whether it was out of love and respect for U Thant or to do anything against Ne Win and the way things were, but ordinary people were just taking off their pieces of gold jewellery and donating them.’ The value of the donations was estimated to be as high as $42,000.
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Meanwhile, the military brought in troops to prepare for an assault on the university. The government announced the closure of all universities and ordered all students from outside Rangoon to return home. As the numbers of people on campus diminished, troops cordoned off the area and, in the middle of the night, soldiers and riot police stormed the campus. They arrested almost three thousand people, including a number of monks, who were forced to take off their outer robes and sit like criminals before being taken to the interrogation centre. The regime reported that eighteen people were killed, but student estimates were as high as one hundred.
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Outrage at way the monks in particular were treated led to riots in Rangoon, with people targeting police stations, BSPP offices and especially the hated Ministry of Cooperatives. The regime was able to put a stop to this in a day, but had to declare martial law and nightly curfews to restore order.

Then in June 1975, students and workers held a joint demonstration marking the anniversary of the 1974 workers’ strike. As they marched down a main thoroughfare in Rangoon, more and more people began to join in. The authorities quickly crushed the protest and shut the universities again.

In March 1976, students in Rangoon, Mandalay, Taunggyi, Moulmein and Bassein honoured the centenary of Thakin Kodaw Hmaing’s birth. Thakin Kodaw Hmaing was a famous writer, nationalist and key supporter of the 1963 peace talks between the government and armed resistance groups. The commemoration turned into a demonstration and the universities were closed, with over one hundred students in Rangoon alone arrested and sentenced from five to fifteen years’ imprisonment. Tin Maung Oo, a prominent student leader of Chin ethnicity, was hanged.

One student group tried to launch a ‘7-7-77 movement’ to begin on 7 July 1977. Besides being a lucky number, 7/7/77 was also the anniversary of the military crackdown on the 1962 student demonstrations. Students handed out pamphlets in Rangoon, but the campaign did not take off and the organizers were arrested. There were more arrests at the
Rangoon Institute of Technology in August and September 1978 after students were caught distributing an underground history of the student movement in Burma.

Despite all these protests, the activists did not succeed in creating an organization or leadership that could maintain momentum. While the military intelligence could not prevent small protests from breaking out, they were adept at identifying emergent student leaders and getting them quickly into prison. Even in the planning stages, activists found it difficult to link up with each other because of fears that intelligence agents had penetrated their circles. Once activists were released from prison, they were always under surveillance, making it nearly impossible for them to resume political organizing. Thus, individuals became known for their heroic speeches or actions during strikes, but they were never able to translate these into sustainable movements.

The BSPP regime tried to stamp out resistance by increasing surveillance and limiting contact between students. First, professors were held responsible for the political activities of their students. Thus, professors could not just look the other way but, in order to protect their jobs, had to try to stop students from engaging in anti-government activities. Second, it increased the number of MI among the students. And third, in the mid-1970s, the regime sought to separate university students by setting up regional colleges. University students from rural areas would spend their first two years at a regional college and come to campuses in Rangoon or Mandalay only for their final two years, when they were thinking more about their future careers and were less likely to be politically active. Political ideology classes were also made required subjects for all majors, and students were encouraged to join the BSPP.

The often spontaneous and uncoordinated actions of students, monks and workers can be compared with those of General Ne Win, who was in a position to implement long-range plans for maintaining power. One story that circulated among the writers’ community at the time was that Ne Win, who loved horse-racing and gambling, once bought a horse and sent it to the best trainer. At every race, he told the jockey to hold the horse back, so that no one would think it had much potential. One day, he bet his entire fortune on that horse, and to everyone else’s utter amazement, it beat all the other horses. Even in horse-racing, the story concluded, General Ne Win planned for the long run.

More worrying to General Ne Win than the student- and monk-led protests was the uncovering of a coup plot by some junior officers in 1976. Within the military, some officers were also dissatisfied with the
regime’s failed economic policies and the increasing corruption among party members, and a small group sought to remove General Ne Win from power. Lieutenant General Tin Oo (sometimes spelled Tin U), who later became a senior leader in the National League for Democracy, was serving as General Ne Win’s chief of staff at the time, and he was widely respected for having urged restraint in dealing with the demonstrators in 1974 and 1975. The junior officers plotting the coup were reportedly considering asking Lieutenant General Tin Oo to take over. When their plot was uncovered, both they and Lieutenant General Tin Oo were imprisoned, although there was no evidence that he had prior knowledge of the plot. Nevertheless, many of Lieutenant General Tin Oo’s supporters were questioned and a number of the better-educated army officers were transferred or retired. General Ne Win also sought to reconsolidate his hold over the BSPP by dismissing more than 50,000 party members.

Outside the ‘legal fold’

Besides occasional political challenges in urban areas, General Ne Win and his regime also had to contend with the armed groups headquartered in the mountainous areas ringing the plains. In Burma, armed groups who fight against the government are referred to as living outside the legal fold. When these groups or their members surrender, they are said to have returned to the legal fold or ‘re-entered the light’. In the Revolutionary Council and BSPP periods, the Communist Party of Burma (CPB) was the largest ideologically oriented organization outside the legal fold.

Some students who became politicized through campus protests, prison experiences or rough treatment from the authorities, and wanted to continue their political work, headed for the Communist Party. Many of them did not have a firm grasp of communist theory, but they believed that the communists were committed to a struggle for justice. As Aung Zeya, who grew up in Rangoon and joined the CPB at their headquarters on the China border in the mid-1970s, put it: ‘What sent me to the border was not an admiration of communist ideology but the inspiration I got from communists who sacrificed for the country.’

In some intellectual circles, capitalism and democracy had been thoroughly discredited by the colonial experience and the actions of certain pro-West politicians in the 1950s who were seen as manipulative and self-serving. Aung Zeya, who now supports the democracy movement, says: ‘We believed that democrats were traitors. There was only one way to sacrifice for the people, and the way was to become a communist.’ As in other colonized countries in Asia, communism had been popular with
Burmese intellectuals. General Aung San had even helped to found the Communist Party in Burma, although he later moved away from it. After independence, communism continued to have an appeal, in part because of communist-led victories against the West in countries like Vietnam and the apparent relevance of Mao Zedong’s theories about protracted guerrilla warfare in peasant-based societies.

In the late 1940s, members of the two armed branches of the Communist Party occupied territory in lower and central Burma, but by 1975 the
tatmadaw
had driven them out of these areas. The CPB regained strength, however, after establishing its headquarters in a mountainous region on the Chinese border. It was able to recruit thousands of local Was and other minority peoples as soldiers, and until the mid-1980s it received support in the form of money, advisers, soldiers, weapons and other equipment from the Chinese government.
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The
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lost thousands of soldiers fighting the CPB and blamed the communists for every political protest that broke out in central Burma. In fact, the Communist Party devoted little energy to the political struggles in the cities and was unable to rally support in the lowland rural areas. While it continued to hold its ground in northern Burma, it could not reoccupy territory in the heartland of the country. Eventually, the Chinese government realized that the CPB was never going to capture Rangoon. It stopped supplying the CPB and gradually improved its relations with General Ne Win. Ultimately the Chinese leadership was not so concerned about whether the government of Burma was communist as long as it was willing to cooperate with Beijing.