Myanmar's Long Road to National Reconciliation (46 page)

Zaw Oo

During the prolonged rule of successive military regimes in Burma for the last fifty years, waves of people have left the country in protest against unjust authority. The largest wave of such exodus happened in 1988, when several thousand young Burmese students fled to the Thai-Burma border following a violent crackdown on popular uprisings they had peacefully organized. For good reason, the students dreamed of fighting back against the regime from the border areas, where resources and sanctuary for such a project were readily available. The existence in the neighbouring countries of exile groups who had left Burma in earlier struggles influenced the large exodus and attracted more to leave. The majority ended up staying in the Burmese border areas and took up arms to wage a guerrilla war against the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC). The SLORC, the name the military regime assumed when it took power in 1988, quickly became synonymous with brutal campaigns waged by the regime against the pro-democracy movement. Repression against the students (who at
that time arguably represented the voice of the people) in the form of arrests, torture, and long closures of the universities, was harsh and continuous. The chance of persecution exceeded by far the available civic space for organizing resistance inside the country. As a result, in the years following 1988 many more students joined the flight.

The students who arrived at the Thai-Burma border at the end of 1988 were highly loyal to the mission which they presumed they would accomplish in a relatively short time. However, their adventurous engagement in armed resistance under the banner of the All Burma Student Democratic Front collapsed within a few years in the face of the sheer military capability of the SLORC. Many students gave up being guerrillas and searched for an alternative means to change the authoritarian regime in Burma. Some settled in the United States, Canada, Australia, or Europe, and were able to continue their education there.

This group of dissident students was quickly drawn into the exciting culture of “globalization” and the “information revolution” of the early 1990s; a number got “wired” and launched a global awareness campaign on Burma. A new battleground had emerged: the Internet became another medium for the Burmese exiles to continue their fight against the regime from outside. Within a few years, information networks connected thousands of people in the Burmese diaspora, who were gradually empowered by the Internet to leverage democratic changes in Burma. Today, the most effective weapons against military rule in Burma are not the bands of revolutionary guerrillas.
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The opponents most feared by the regime are the hundreds and thousands of “netters” who organize numerous boycott campaigns, influence their host governments’ strategies and willingness to put pressure on the regime, and raise funds for the democrats and refugees.

This chapter has three central objectives. The first is to analyse the evolution of the political struggle of the Burmese exile community by borrowing and modifying Albert Hirschman’s popular construct of the “exit-voice-loyalty” model.
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The model provides a useful path for following the waves of exodus from Burma since its independence in 1948 and for examining the qualitative progress of the “voice” against the regime and the prospects for eventual return.

The second is to examine how dispersed and small actors among Burmese exiles in the vast arena of international politics overcome the obstacles to transnational collective actions. Theories of social network
predict that “any social movement in the absence of activists whose ties cross national boundaries on a regular basis and exhibit mutual trust and reciprocity” will find it very hard to link themselves in a network, let alone accomplish any intended goals.
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In fact, the Burmese exiles defied this conventional wisdom by building their diaspora network of activists with the purposeful goal of changing the political system of their home country. To most of the exiles, the changing of the political system in Burma is an absolute pre-requisite for their return to their homeland, and many believe that they will be able to achieve this only through a collective struggle.

Last but not least, this chapter also attempts to analyse one particular mechanism that the Burmese diaspora has used to overcome obstacles to accomplishing their goals: namely, drawing help from others. One political opportunity given to the Burmese diaspora is to enlist the power of their host countries, often powerful Western democracies, to support the democratic cause in Burma.
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However, given the small size of Burmese communities — even in countries where Burmese exiles have settled in large numbers — most political opportunity theorists would not predict that Burmese exiles would have much chance of gaining entrance to the foreign-policy-making process of the host governments.
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This article attempts to explain how a relatively marginal political force of Burmese exiles living in the Western democracies has championed its democratic cause by pushing a relatively little-known Burma agenda to the top of foreign policy considerations.

Popular leader and Nobel Peace laureate Daw Aung San Suu Kyi sees Burma as having experienced two important struggles for independence. The first struggle was spearheaded by General Aung San, a leader of the anti-colonial movement, who organized armed resistance movements against the British and the Japanese, and who was instrumental in Burma being given national independence in 1948, although he himself was assassinated in 1947. The second was led by thousands of young students in 1988, when they protested and brought down the dictatorial rule of General Ne Win. Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, daughter of General Aung San, became the leader of the second struggle for independence as the military continued to rule the country and denied freedom to its population.
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The struggle that General Aung San led to achieve independence in 1948 has certain features of “exit-voice-return” evolution. It is true that successive generations of Burmese people had resisted British colonial rule since Great Britain first occupied the lower half of Burma in 1824. However, it was the student and
Thakin
movement led by young leaders such as Aung San, Nu, and Kyaw Nyein from Rangoon University from 1935 onward that was the catalyst for national independence in the next decade. At the height of the struggle, the exit of General Aung San and his thirty comrades to seek foreign assistance and possible military training, first from the Communist Party of China and then from the fascist Japanese, fundamentally changed the nature of the liberation movement in Burma. The voice of the Thirty Comrades, expressed in their first declaration in Bangkok in 1944, had sent thunderous waves of patriotism across the country, as the thirty comrades marched across Thailand into Burma while recruiting able-bodied Burmese males into the new independence army. To many historians, the larger events of international politics and the movements of geo-strategic forces were key explanations for the relatively quick attainment of national independence by Burma after the Second World War. To millions of Burmese, it was General Aung San, with his masterful leadership of the Burmese Independence Army, subsequent mobilization of grand-coalition strategy through the Anti-Fascist People’s Freedom League, and tactical alliance with ethnic nationalities, who brought independence to Burma.

The myth of the Thirty Comrades — a story of successful resistance through “exit and return” — had a profound impact on the Burmese body politic for many years. The act of “exit” had become an acceptable mode of dissent, particularly when the institutions of governance were still nascent. Immediately following independence in 1948, several of the former Thirty Comrades joined the communist insurrections, whereas many units from the Burmese army defected to the revolt initiated by the Karen National Defense Organization.
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Since then, the examples of
taw-kho
(going into armed insurrections) and
pyi-pyay
(going into exile) have inspired several political groups and personalities to follow the route of exit and exile in their political struggle against the dominant powers in Burma.

Such precedents of “revolution from outside” continued throughout the fourteen years of the parliamentary democracy period between 1948
and 1962. The trend was unfortunate, given a relatively strong growth of civic associations and political freedom during that time. However, the fault seemed to lie within the dominant political party system that failed to accommodate “dissenting point of views” and channel elite competitions into “loyal opposition”.
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By 1958, elite conflicts at the apex of power structure had devastated the Anti-Fascist People’s Freedom League, the single political party that had dominated the liberation movement and post-independence multiparty system. It broke into two factions: the “clean” faction led by Prime Minister U Nu, and the “stable” faction, led by Deputy Prime Ministers U Kyaw Nyein and U Ba Swe. The split brought down military intervention, and an end to the democratic era in Burma.

The political divisions were further complicated by the ethnic diversity of the population. Several ethnic groups demanded greater autonomy from the central government. The country’s independent constitution tried to accommodate such demands under a quasi-federal structure, with some attempts to recruit elites from the nationality groups into central administration as cabinet ministers. However, from the perspectives of many ethnic nationalities, these measures were insufficient and largely ineffectual, with the result that a number of ethnic groups defected and organized anti-government insurrections along the border areas of Burma. According to Martin Smith, from the time of independence there were at least two dozen ethnic nationality groups fighting against the central government. Mainstream opposition groups, centred mainly on the Communist Party of Burma and the right-leaning Parliamentary Democracy Party, made up another dozen anti-government insurgent groups throughout the post-independence era.

Popular unrest, the result of multiple causes for dissent accumulated since 1962 under the oppressive dictatorship of Ne Win and the socialist policies of the Burma Socialist Programme Party, exploded in 1988 when hundreds of students protesting against police brutality drew thousands more people to come out and stage demonstrations on the streets throughout the country. Several months of prolonged demonstrations brought down the socialist government and changed three presidents, but without any resolution over the form and pace of post-socialist reform. The military, who had intervened violently on behalf of the socialist government in the months of March, July, and August, made a final
assault against the pro-democracy movement in September 1988, when it declared martial law and established the jurisdiction of state authority under the State Law and Order Restoration Council.
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Violent suppression of pro-democracy activists and the subsequent crackdown that followed the military takeover triggered a mass exodus, mostly of students, to the Thai-Burma border and other border regions.

In the remaining months of 1988, after the military coup, as many as 10,000 students arrived at the Thai-Burma border, while the areas bordering China, India, and Bangladesh received a few thousands. These student activists, who had witnessed the brutalities of the military on the streets of Burma’s major urban centres, felt that armed struggle was their only alternative. In spite of their relatively high social status in the urban communities where they originated, these students chose to form an umbrella front called the All Burma Student Democratic Front (ABSDF), with well-intentioned goals of mobilizing armed resistance movement inside Burma. They were inspired by revolutionaries such as Che Guevara, but their most vivid role model was their own local hero, General Aung San, who formed the Burma Independence Army in Bangkok and successfully invaded the country in 1943. Not surprisingly, the first Congress of the ABSDF celebrated a symbolic gesture of “blood comradeship”, the same ritual the Thirty Comrades had observed forty years earlier before they launched their invasion against the British colonial regime.

In the next fifteen years, several thousand more students, activists, and refugees fled from Burma. However, the impact of this exodus on the stability of the regime was negligible. In terms of numbers, the size of each exodus represented only a fraction of the total population of fifty million Burmese. On the one hand, the emigration rate, in the form of voluntary exit, was low compared to the size of population, and would remain so as long as the military regime strictly controlled the emigration process. On the other hand, the existence of alternative forms of internal resistance made the exodus of political activists from Burma largely ineffectual. Until the recent detentions of Aung San Suu Kyi under house arrest, the majority of democracy movement activists preferred to stay inside Burma under the leadership of the National League for Democracy (NLD). Ironically, the departure of the most active segments of the activist groups also helped the regime to control domestic political space more effectively. Last, but not least, the lack of political opportunities in neighbouring
countries, and the relatively harsh conditions for sanctuary there, inhibited a sustained outflow of political activists from Burma.