Democracy struggle explodes in Burma
International Viewpoint #147 • September 19, 1988
BURMA
"It is reasonable to doubt that the students, who are the vanguard of 'people's power' are enthusiastic about men whose only program seems to be a return to the period right after independence. At that time, U Nu already led a vague coalition, the People's Anti-fascist League for Freedom, which had no well defined program or
A COUNTRY that had got scant notice for decades from the international press has boiled over in a spectacular eruption. Mounting mass mobilizations reminiscent of the Iranian revolution have swept over every successive storm-breaker put in place by a military regime that had sought to establish an all-pervasive system of social control.
The well springs of this explosion clearly go very deep. For forty years, the regime has worn itself out in vain exertions to suppress armed rebellions based in minority peoples representing nearly half the population of the country.
Some minorities rebelled in the first years of the Burmese state. Others began to fight after the establishment of Ne Win's military dictatorship in
1962. The fight to suppress the insurgent minorities has been absorbing
40 per cent of the state budget.' Together the nationalist rebels have kept
16,000 fighters in the field, against the 180,000 strong Burmese army.
This includes 8,000 for the Kachin liberation movement and 4,000 for the
Karen National Union.
GERRY FOLEY
EN OF THE national liberation
T groups, including the major ones, joined together in 1975 in the National Democratic Front (NDF).
In 1986, the NDF made a limited agreement with the Communist Party of Burma, which maintains a guerrilla force reportedly numbering about 10,000. In the new rise of anti-government demonstrations in the cities, student leaders made contacts with the guerrillas, laying the foundations for an all-embracing front of the militant
The continuing decay of the economy, strangled and drained by military control, and the enticements of Japanese capitalist penetration undermined the last props of the dictatorship. For example, one of the major opposition figures, General Aung
Gyi, has claimed to speak in the name of
Japanese capitalists anxious to help devel-
Growth of independent administrations
Military statism and ultra-nationalist economic policies were undoubtedly a barrier to Japanese economic expansion into Burma. But it is hardly likely that Japanese capitalists take any comfort from seeing the mobilization of hundreds of thousands of people creating a situation in which power is in the melting pot. Some forty towns and cities are reportedly already under the control of opposition committees.
The growth of independent administrations seems to be continuing. In his speech
213 in connection with the government's promise over the weekend of September 10-11 to hold multi-party elections, according to the September 12 Herald Tribune, President Maung Maung issued a special warning about the independent local govemments, saying that they were creating "a grave and dangerous situation for those responsible," and that "it is essential to remove them immediately." Two leaderships claiming governmental authority
Similarly, while the idea of a free market may be attractive to masses who have seen the economy strangled by military control, the mobilization of large numbers of working people has always led toward the aspiration of democratic control of economic as well social and political life.
At the time of writing, there are at least two national leaderships that claim to be the government in Burma, the besieged regime of the "Socialist Programme Party" and the "Provisional Government" formed by U Nu, the country's last bourgeois-democratic premier, from the Peace and Democratic (Interim) League (PDIL). It is not clear to what extent the opposition movement is prepared to follow the lead of the old parliamentary personalities grouped around the octogenarian former premier.
"The strongman in the League seems to be General Tin U, 60 years old, who is no other than the former feared chief of the secret police, who seemed in line to be Ne Win's successor until he fell into disgrace in 1983," Libération's correspondent wrote in the September 11 issue of the Paris ideology. It rapidly disintegrated in factional struggles, opening the way to anarchy and then to the ethnic insurrections, which served as the justification for Ne Win's military putsch."
The student movement has a long history of fighting the dictatorship, and has played a central role in the present uprising. Immediately after Ne Win seized power, students went into the streets in Rangoon to demonstrate in protest. In 1974, the funeral of the Burmese secretary general of the UN was the occasion for big new student protests. In September 1987, students demonstrated to protest against the catastrophic economic Students' long fight against military dictatorship
Student demonstrations sparked the present upsurge. It started with protest demonstrations against the wounding of a student by goons of the ruling single party. It swelled after the killing of about a hundred students, 41 of whom were suffocated in a police wagon. In the course of the events, a new united student organization has been formed.
The students' long fight has been against a military dictatorship that covered itself with a socialist cloak. That has undoubtedly had an effect on the political consciousness of the movement. But nonetheless it has been a courageous struggle that has gone on for two decades. It is unlikely that the students' aspirations are limited to a return of the paradise of hucksterism recalled by Aye Saung in August 25 issue of the Far Eastern Economic Review ("Catchy slogans and jingles poured out of the radio, and in cinemas all over the country people goggled as a plane took off and then reversed back to all because I forgot my Brylcreem'.").
Ever since the start of the new upsurge, the government has made concessions too little and too late. Even the agreement over the weekend of September 10-11 to abolish the single party and to set up a so-called independent board of elders to supervise multi-party elections seems not to have halted the mobilizations. The Burmese struggle has been taking on the aspects of a full-scale revolution. It seems certain that it will deepen politically in the coming weeks and months. The process will have a great importance throughout the region, and perhaps beyond it. * 1. Rainer Hörig, "Birmas Diktator vereint die Opposition," Tageszeitung, Frankfurt, August 13, 1988.