- Amy Kazmin
Financial Times
In 1994 a visionary American appeared on the Thai-Burmese border, preaching non-violence to students from Burma who more than five years before had fled a crackdown on a pro-democracy uprising and were committed to armed struggle against their country’s military rulers.
Gene Sharp, the Oxford-educated, Harvard-affiliated theoretician on peaceful resistance to repression, urged the rebels to embrace non-violent means to fight the junta. His acolyte, retired colonel Robert Helvey, a US military attaché in Rangoon in the 1980s, expounded on how to use military-style planning and strategising for peaceful dissent.
Initially, few of the students paid heed. But, as the futility of combat against the powerful Burmese army grew more apparent in the late 1990s, the dissidents turned to alternative ways to fight for democracy – including Mr Sharp’s teachings on undermining the pillars of a repressive regime.
Over the last three years, activists from the exile movement’s “political defiance committee” have trained an estimated 3,000 fellow-Burmese from all walks of life – including several hundred Buddhist monks – in philosophies and strategies of non-violent resistance and community organising. These workshops, held in border areas and drawing people from all over Burma, were seen as “training the trainers”, who would go home and share these ideas with others yearning for change.
That preparation – along with material support such as mobile phones – helped lay the groundwork for dissident Buddhist monks in September to call for a religious boycott of the junta, precipitating the biggest anti-government protests in two decades. For 10 dramatic days, monks and lay citizens, infuriated by deepening impoverishment and pervasive repression, poured into the streets in numbers that peaked at around 100,000 before the regime crushed the demonstrations, killing at least 15 and arresting thousands.
Since then, the generals – citing exiled opposition groups’ western connections, including foreign funding – have fulminated about what they describe as a CIA plot to instigate mass unrest and overthrow them. This week, Brig Gen Kyaw Hsan, the information minister, called protests a western plot to install a “puppet government” in Burma – a theme echoed by some critics of Washington, who have called the protesters a “human stage prop” in a US play for geostrategic control in Asia.
Burmese opposition activists acknowledge receiving technical and financial help for their cause but insist that the mass protests were an indigenous response to intolerable hardship – and that the most crucial ingredient was not foreign money but Burmese protesters’ willingness to risk harsh punishment in order to make their voices heard.
“This is completely a Burmese movement – people are joining because of their daily life difficulties,” says Nyo Ohn Myint, a Thailand-based activist with Burma’s National League for Democracy, the political party led by Aung San Suu Kyi, the detained Nobel peace prize-winning democracy advocate.
Burmese exiles say the generals’ obsessive focus on opposition groups’ modest foreign assistance reflects their unwillingness to admit their own governance failures, which have fuelled the intense resentment against them. “If they recognise it’s a Burmese movement, they have to admit that people are very unhappy with them,” says Nyo Ohn Myint. “So they have to use a scapegoat.”
Other dissidents suggest junta propaganda is aimed mainly at army rank-and-file and mid-level officers, who are unhappy with worsening hardships but would rally against a foreign threat. “They want them to believe it’s a foreign plot so they can justify their atrocities,” says one exiled activist who has led political defiance training sessions on the border.
Indeed, while the generals accuse most dissidents of being traitorous “axe-handles” and stooges of foreign paymasters, they themselves have acquired around $2bn (£1bn, €1.4bn) worth of military hardware from China over the past two decades and are now buying other weapons, using resources that critics say are desperately needed for the welfare of the population. “They are taking the natural wealth of the country and using it to buy the tools of repression,” says David Mathieson, a researcher with Human Rights Watch.
Burmese exiles also say international assistance for the Burmese democracy cause is paltry compared to the help received by South Africans to battle against apartheid or to east European dissidents for their so-called “colour revolutions” in countries such as Ukraine. Serbian opposition groups received around $40m worth of US assistance, including the advice and guidance of experienced US political consultants, in the two years before the election and mass street protests that undid Slobodan Milosevic, the late Yugoslav president.
International donors and activists figure Burmese opposition groups received $8m-$10m in 2006 and again in 2007 from American and European funders for pro-democracy activities inside and outside Burma, including health and education projects. The political defiance trainer – asking not to be identified due to concerns about his security – likens western support for the opposition movement as a protective “shield” for dissidents struggling against a regime that monopolises profits from Burma’s rich natural resources, including natural gas, to shore up its own power. “It’s not a secret – its open assistance,” he says. “Of course, we use this to support our colleagues inside the country.”
Two months after the crackdown, the junta seems to have regained control over Burma, with many leading activists in prison and despair settling over the population. The generals have made no meaningful concessions, even expelling Charles Petrie, the top United Nations official in Burma, for saying the protests reflected public frustration at worsening economic hardships. This week, the regime also rejected calls for Ms Suu Kyi to have a say on a new constitution as part of a reconciliation dialogue.
Yet exiled opposition activists still see the uprising as a partial success that focused unprecedented global attention on the Burmese people’s plight and their yearning to be freed from military misrule. Far from defeated, activist exiles say they are determined to carry on the struggle and have a stream of new recruits. “We won politically and the regime lost in this battle,” says Nyo Ohn Myint. “But it’s just a first episode.”
In the first years after the 1988 exodus to the Thai border, the student rebels struggled to survive, subsisting on food handouts for refugees, tiny amounts of cash and the help of relatively affluent, and far better armed, ethnic insurgent groups that had been fighting the regime for decades.
But the aspiring revolutionaries were confronted with the reality that even the better-equipped and battle-hardened ethnic insurgents were already on the defensive against the military. Gradually, many former students abandoned talk of armed struggle and sought other ways to fight the military’s grip on power.
As they did, they began to receive western help – from the Washington-based National Endowment for Democracy, George Soros’ Open Society Institute and several European countries – for initiatives such as documenting and publicising the regime’s human rights abuses, developing outlets to counter the state-controlled media and networking with disaffected Burmese inside to plan peaceful protests.
In 2006 and 2007, the congressionally funded NED, the largest financial supporter of the democracy movement, spent around $3.7m a year on its Burmese programme – up from $1.2m in 1996 and a mere $290,000 in 1994. These funds were used to support opposition media including the Democratic Voice of Burma, a radio station and satellite television channel, to bolster dissidents’ information technology skills and to help the exiles’ training of Buddhist monks and other dissidents in techniques of peaceful political resistance.
The inspiration for the training was Mr Sharp, whose From Dictatorship to Democracy – a short, theoretical handbook for non-violent struggle against repressive regimes – was published in Burmese in 1994 and began circulating among exiles and surreptitiously among dissidents inside the country. Some were imprisoned for years for possessing it. The book suggests activities to chip away at the pervasive fear that he identifies as a tool repressive regimes use to keep disgruntled populations under control.
Yet even after years of strategising, exiled dissidents admit they were caught off guard by the intensity of the public fury that followed the regime’s abrupt increase in the price of subsidised fuel. The first small protests against the price rises were led by the “88 Generation” students – former student leaders in the 1988 uprising who spent long periods in prison and more recently organised more modest forms of opposition, such as encouraging people to write letters to the junta expressing their discontent.
The fuel protests seemed to fizzle after 13 top 88 Generation leaders were arrested in midnight raids on their homes in late August. But on September 5, armed soldiers in Pokkoku, a traditional centre of Buddhist learning, roughed up monks marching against high prices. Days later, around 30 monks – some of them graduates of the political defiance committee’s training – gathered secretly and formed the All Burma Monks’ Alliance, demanding that the junta apologise for mistreating the holy men, as well as reduce prices, free political prisoners and begin a dialogue with the opposition led by Ms Suu Kyi.
The alliance’s demands – and its threat to impose a “spiritual boycott” against the regime if the generals refused – were relayed in interviews set up by their exile contacts with the Burmese-language services of the BBC, Voice of America, Radio Free Asia and the dissident broadcaster DVB. After the deadline passed for the apology that never came, the demonstrations began, escalating rapidly before they were suppressed in a crackdown that Mr Petrie calls “extraordinarily far-reaching and repressive.”
For many Burmese both inside and outside the country, the regime’s use of force to quell the protests was a devastating – even if not totally unexpected – blow, as they had hoped they were witnessing a final push that would force the military to relinquish its total control. Yet despite the repression, small groups of activists in Burma are still carrying out small, sporadic acts of defiance, such as destroying copies of state newspapers and posting placards mocking the junta.
Many trained activists are lying low inside, awaiting another chance to act, say exiles, who themselves are continuing their defiance training on the border. Since September, they say, they have been overwhelmed with requests for help from Burmese who want the momentum of the struggle maintained.
Although opposition activists clearly face formidable difficulties, such as replacing the leaders who were rounded up, they insist the drive for change is not over. “Every revolution, and every transition, doesn’t happen all neat-and-tidy,” says the Burmese political defiance trainer, who is working closely with dissidents inside. “This is the beginning of the end of military rule. We are dreaming – and we are acting on our dreams.”
Source:Financial Times
