by Charlie McDonald-Gibson
AFP - Thursday, August 7
BANGKOK (AFP) - On the day now stamped in his memory as 8.8.88, Nyo Ohn Myint was certain that change was finally within reach in his military-ruled homeland of Myanmar.
Women and men, old and young, rich and poor, were flooding the streets, a tide of anger against the dictatorship that ran their country into the ground and condemned millions to poverty and fear.
Students had been protesting for almost a year against military strongman Ne Win. He had finally stepped down; revolution was in the air on August 8, 1988.
"People were marching toward the downtown area. I had never seen that in my life. There were people from all walks of life," Nyo Ohn Myint told AFP.
"They had like some kind of anger, and were unified. They had a common goal. They expressed their total denial of the government."
Like many swept up in the fervour, the 25-year-old history teacher never planned to become a political dissident, underground activist, and eventual exile.
Nyo Ohn Myint, now 45, just believed it was his duty to speak out against the brutality of the dictatorship that had run the country -- then known as Burma -- since 1962.
Sitting today in a Bangkok office -- dapper in a smart dark grey suit, tieless blue shirt, and close-cropped hair -- he recalls the moment in 1988 when he realised that not everyone was living his cosy middle-class existence.
Returning from a trip upcountry to the then-capital Rangoon, he was shocked by the destitution in the railway slums.
"Something was wrong. We knew that the whole world was developing except our country," he says. "This was the point when I woke up from my dream."
Over the course of 1988 he saw his students hauled away by military intelligence, his university shut down, and on the night of August 8, soldiers opened fire on the crowds. His naivete was finally swept away.
At least 3,000 people are believed to have died over six weeks as the army reasserted control of anarchic streets.
"I saw dead bodies and shootings. One young girl was shot in the head. It seemed like there was no control at all," Nyo Ohn Myint says.
Not far from his home, Aung San Suu Kyi, daughter of liberation hero Aung San, was also grappling with her destiny.
She had returned home in 1988 after years of comfortable expatriate life in Britain, and was shocked by the state of her country.
Nyo Ohn Myint, who had now formed a teachers union, was called to her house in mid-August as the crackdown rumbled on, and the young teacher agreed to join her push for democracy, at first as driver and body guard, eventually as her spokesman.
On September 18, the army seized control in a coup, crushing hopes of the hundreds of thousands of people who rallied on 8.8.88.
Aung San Suu Kyi and her circle soon formed the National League for Democracy (NLD), and campaigned across Myanmar for peaceful change.
That was a time of dread for Nyo Ohn Myint. Authorities tried to arrest him three times; he escaped by hiding in monasteries while fearing for his family's safety.
"No one trusts no one. We were in a dilemma. Were they going to kill us? You never know what's really going on," he says.
He also began to question whether a non-violent struggle could succeed, and in June 1989 he fled to Thailand to join more radical groups.
Just a month later, the army put Aung San Suu Kyi under house arrest, where she has now spent most of the years since, and threw many other NLD members behind bars.
"All my colleagues were gone. One friend committed suicide because he was tortured. He used a bed sheet and hanged himself," Nyo Ohn Myint says.
And so the former history teacher's long exile began, first as a liaison between the NLD and ethnic Karen rebels along the border, and then as a refugee living in the United States.
In 2002, he returned to Thailand, unable to bear the distance from his beloved homeland, even through the prospect of returning to live under the junta is unthinkable.
Nyo Ohn Myint now works with a group of NLD exiles on the border, and laments the failure of what he saw as Myanmar's golden opportunity.
"We used a very black and white game. We didn't know how to lead the people from anger to energy, and from energy to power," he says. "We could not control the sentiment."
