Myanmar's Long Road to National Reconciliation (48 page)

Before the advent of the Internet, foreign radio stations like the BBC and VOA had played an important role in getting news to people inside Burma.
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The military regime controlled all internal news media, whether TV, radio, or print, and used them for propaganda. Only foreign broadcasts provided “real” news about Burma — information that was absent from the state-regulated media.
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In this context, the Internet boosted the resourcefulness of old technology in two significant ways. First, BurmaNet was able to multiply vastly the number of stories being “published”, and rapidly gained credibility as a unique source of Burmese news. It helped
to certify other “unpublished” news that was directly fed to it by Burmese activists, and this news was in turn rebroadcast by the foreign radio stations. Second, the introduction of web-based multimedia radio instantly transformed the role of foreign radio broadcasts from mere short-wave broadcasts that could not be picked up easily outside Asia into a truly global medium that found another important audience outside Burma — thousands of the diaspora living outside the region. In this way the combination of Internet and radio connects homeland and diaspora, and nowadays people can interactively be aware of what is going on in relation to Burmese people and communities all around the globe.

Scholars of international politics such as Keck and Sikkink have long noted the importance of “transnational networks” that emerge at times when aggrieved domestic societal actors are denied access to the political process at home.
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When the local actors have by-passed recalcitrant local states and have reached foreign and international NGOs, foreign governments, and international organizations, they may be able to enlist a transnational effort to bring international pressure upon the regime in power — in other words, to “boomerang” back on local authority. Only when BurmaNet established its services in 1995 could this crucial boomerang effect, working through transnational advocacy networks, be applied against Burma. The boomerang effect also has an important domestic component: various isolated local groups inside Burma can learn at greater speed than before, through BurmaNet and the various foreign radio stations, about the experiences of local groups in different parts of the country or about events within the country, all accounts of which are systematically suppressed by the military regime.

The cost and speed of email, its ease of use, and the access it provides are well suited to the needs of Burmese dissidents. With a relatively short period of training and some seed money, the under-funded Burmese activist organizations are able to make good use of what email offers, especially since email connections can be made with a minimum amount of time on-line and even in areas with unreliable telephone lines.
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Many local human rights organizations were set up in remote parts of the Thai-Burma border by taking advantage of available Internet connectivity up to the border areas inside Thailand. Groups such as the Association for Assisting Political Prisoners (AAPP), the Human Rights Education Institute of Burma (HREIB), and the Human Rights Documentation Unit (HRDU) all used emails to feed regular reports on political prisoners, forced labour
situations, and other pressing human rights conditions in the country to international organizations and United Nations (UN) bodies that monitor the situation in Burma.

Energized and angered by the tragic news of repression and human-rights violations in Burma, a group of Burmese students and concerned Americans began to organize a network of activists who were willing to mobilize collective action in support of freedom in Burma. The first activities were somewhat similar to actions Burmese themselves had tried inside the country when they staged non-violent protests against the Socialist regime during the 1988 pro-democracy uprisings. It was Zarni, a Burmese PhD student from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, who initially wanted to organize an indefinite hunger strike to protest the human rights situation in Burma, but who later, with a group of concerned American students, used the Internet to launch, instead, a national protest against Northwestern University officials with various ties to American corporations doing business in Burma.
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He gathered support for a National Day of Action, an idea he borrowed from fellow “spiders” outside the United States, and many students in seventy-five campuses around the world joined the action on 27 October 1995. Email-based networking transformed the National Day of Action into the “International Day of Action”, and within seven weeks of starting preparations this lone activist in Madison inspired a truly global action against the military regime in Burma.
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Amazed by such an impressive response from cyber-networking, in November 1995 Zarni set up a Free Burma email list server through the University of Wisconsin. Burmese students who previously had only had experience of organizing street-level activism benefited greatly from the efficient and quick diffusion of ideas about protest and tactics across national borders through the Free Burma list server. Several protest ideas on petitions, demonstrations, and consumer boycotts were being discussed on the Net before a more effective action plan was drawn up to maximize the impact on the regime. From 1995 to 1998, when the activism of the Free Burma adherents reached its peak level, Zarni and his fellow activists launched several successful campaigns that were planned entirely through the Internet. The most successful of these
included the Pepsi Boycott Campaign and the facilitation of the passage of Selective Purchasing Laws. The campaigns culminated in 1996 in the historic adoption by the State of Massachusetts of the “Burma Law”, which event had a deep impact not only on Burma but also on the constitutional discourse of American federalism.

The impact of international boycott campaigns on the military regime is tremendous. By 1997, twelve American cities, including New York, had passed Free Burma selective purchasing laws that banned city governments from concluding contracts with any companies doing business in Burma. The Internet was a very effective tool, not only for connecting different communities across the United States that from a variety of perspectives had some interest in Burma, but also in setting a “rights” agenda for action. Without the campaigns, these communities could have acted differently on Burma, and the disparate actions might have lost momentum as time passed.

Instead, the Internet allowed different groups to brainstorm, debate, and choose tactics that would have the most effect in their anti-SPDC campaigns. Veteran campaigners who had prior experience mobilizing campaigns for South Africa knew exactly how a crescendo of local actions would finally influence the US Congress to take a stand on Burma, but there was no strong support base — no Burma constituency — in the United States to mobilize such a course of action. Under these circumstances, the Internet-based networks amplified local actions to affect sentiment at the national level.

In the case of the Harvard students’ boycott campaign against Pepsi, an important campaign for Burma, only a handful of students interested in Burma was available to organize the action. The aim was to influence the powerful student government body to reverse a decision to sign a contract with PepsiCo, which had a growing business in Burma. Emails could be used to multiply the numbers, and they became an effective lobbying tool for promoting awareness and identifying sympathetic key individuals. Not only did Harvard’s student government drop the contract with Pepsi, their actions inspired a shareholder resolution at the Pepsi board meeting. News about the boycott was picked up by the mainstream media, which spread the campaign all over the world.
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The success of the Free Burma Coalition in America inspired many other Burma “spiders” around the world to stage similarly successful campaigns in their localities. “Think globally, act locally” was a
predominant strategy of the emerging transnational movement for Free Burma, and the Internet was the key that connected every local group to a global movement for planning, prioritizing, and targeting the best attainable goals. As a result, two popular European beer-makers, Heineken and Carlsberg, were forced by local Dutch and Danish activists groups to withdraw their investments from Burma.
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A year after the beer companies’ withdrawal, another European giant, the Ericsson company, decided to withdraw its bid for mobile phone operations in Burma.
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In 2002, the joint actions taken by many Europe-based Burma groups forced Zurich-based lingerie giant Triumph International to close down its manufacturing factories in Burma.
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Under the slogan “Support Breasts — Not Dictators”, cyber-activists in the United Kingdom and other countries urged European consumers to boycott the firm until its Rangoon factory was closed.
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In the meantime, more traditional political organizations such as the National Coalition Government of the Union of Burma (NCGUB), the exile government constituted by elected parliamentarians, began to recognize the power of the Internet as an organizational tool. On one occasion, it mounted an Internet campaign to reach out to thousands of fellow parliamentarians to support the convening of parliament in Burma.
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The appeal, carried out by local friends of Burma, was aided by a webbased kiosk that served as both an information resource and a motivational source for the campaign. As a result, the Global Parliamentary Solidarity Campaign received over two thousand signatures from parliamentarians around the world in support of elected MPs from Burma and their call for democratic changes in the country.
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Although the majority of Free Burma campaigns have affected political developments in Burma only indirectly, through actions against the regime’s business partners, some have had a more direct effect on the regime. One such campaign was the boycott of “Visit Myanmar Year” in 1996, a much celebrated tourism promotion launched by the regime. The direct impact of cyber campaigns discouraged many Western tourists from visiting Burma, and the promotion, which had targeted one million tourist entries for that year, was an abysmal failure, with actual tourist arrivals being only a fraction of the desired number. The campaign had a measurable, and some believe lasting, impact. Burma never became the popular tourist destination the generals had hoped for. Barely 200,000 tourists visited in 2000, far short of the 500,000–1 million target that had
been set by the generals during “Visit Myanmar Year” in 1996. Since 2000, arrivals have trickled in at about the same glacial pace.
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It was a big slap in the face for some top generals who had personally promoted the campaign. Perhaps this campaign sent a strong signal to the regime, which itself then turned to the Internet for launching counter-campaigns against the exile movement and opposition groups. To some extent, the regime’s reaction to the Free Burma campaigns has demonstrated the impact these activities have had. Significantly, the campaigns deprived the regime of critical income from outside investors. They also provided a broad platform for sustaining international policies on Burma, some of which had an important deterrent effect in preventing further abuses by the regime and protecting domestic populations.

The Internet has proved a powerful instrument for exiled Burmese activists: while it has altered the dynamics of cyber-activism and transformed the impact of democracy promotion in Burma, the target of these campaigns was primarily criticism of the military regime itself and its international friends (that is, multinational corporations, business firms, and apologist authoritarian governments). Another benefit of the Internet cannot be underestimated: it has lowered the transaction and organizational costs for the exiled activists and their trans-national networks. Not only has this enabled them to deliver a formidable protest campaign against the military regime in power, but it has also facilitated a learning process that has allowed the development of communication and networking among many groups within the Burmese diaspora, some of which had previously been passively quiet on the democratic cause in Burma.

In the beginning, cyber-activism was mostly organized and staged by politically active exiles and refugees who represented, in a sense, personified consequences of their violent and tragic flight from Burma following the 1988 political uprisings and their subsequent years of opposition to rule by the current military regime. These late-arriving additions to the Burmese diaspora tend to view themselves as “kidnap victims”, and have an inherent and direct interest in the process of democratization in Burma. Their perspectives have often provoked them to respond strongly to other Burmese who had arrived in Western
countries much earlier (sometimes as much as thirty years earlier) and who were better integrated into these societies and relatively insulated in their lives, and thus generally not as keenly interested in the current politics of Burma.

The present regime in Burma recognized this split within the Burmese diaspora and began to exploit it, trying to drive a wedge between the different generations of exiles. It reversed its thirty-year-old policy of outright visa-bans against foreign citizens of Burmese origin. This policy had been a very effective tool to manipulate people who had been separated from their kin for many years so they would acquiesce and keep silent about the regime’s policies in order to be able to return for family reunions. The regime even went so far as to invite a select number of prominent Burmese expatriates to visit Burma and treated them as honoured guests, as a way of trying to enhance the regime’s legitimacy at home and abroad.
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