Military resorts to bloody repression of mass movement
MASSACRE is the response to the mass anti-dictatorial movement that the military has finally opted for. A London
Sunday Times journalist has reported that the crematoria in country's main cities are running at full blast to dispose of the army's victims. The official death toll in Rangoon is 200, but unofficial estimates put it at over a thousand. Perhaps even bloodier repression is underway in the provincial cities, but little is yet known about this. GERRY FOLEY
T HE REAL MEANING of the di-
Erect military takeover was simply a decision to try to beat back the mass movement by force. The military had never withdrawn from power. No one doubted that dictator Ne Win continued to pull the strings from his retreat.
The decision to crackdown apparently offered two advantages for the military. It has momentarily at least dispersed the mass movement, and probably halted the erosion of army discipline. But it has also widened the river of blood between the active opposition and the rulers, especially the student vanguard of the demonstrations.
Summary executions of students have been reported. Several hundred young Burmese have reportedly gone to join the Karen guerrillas. A flourishing black market in hand grenades is developing in Rangoon. Immediately following the military crackdown some police stations were overrun and weapons taken.
At the same time as the bloody repression got underway in Rangoon, reports began to come out about the massacres carried out by the military in provincial cities in August, where the army is estimated to have killed 3,000 people. For example, a British traveller has reported that in Sagaing, a town near Mandalay, the army opened fire on a demonstration, killing 300 people. Given this precedent, there is reason to fear that the slaughter in the provinces may be worse than in the capital, in particular since alternative governments were set up in a number of provincial towns.
It is unlikely that the military's new massacres can halt the breakdown of the dictatorship. The mass rejection of the regime has been building up for a long time, fueled by the decay of an economy bled white in the grip of corrupt and incompetent military rulers. The disastrous economic decline has been steadily undermining the ability of the military chiefs to maintain the loyalty of their subordinates.
Furthermore, the regime has been exhausted by decades of warfare against nationalist and Communist guerrillas who are reportedly able to keep 26,000 fighters in the field against a Burmese army of about 180,000. That is a favorable ratio for insurgent forces. With an actively hostile population at their back and an extension of the guerrilla organization into the Burmese cities, the army's morale and military position could deteriorate rapidly.
Ne Win risks destroying the army
In effect, a military dictatorship unable or unwilling to recognize its political defeat and make a strategic withdrawal from the political scene has gone for double or nothing. It risks destroying the armed forces in a civil war, and opening up the way for an uncontrollable radicalization. It was probably this possibility that the bourgeois opposition leaders had in mind when they accused the military of creating anarchy rather than order.
The bourgeois opposition is anxious, in fact, to prevent any breakup of the army. Aung San Suu Kyi, daughter of one of the historic Burmese nationalist leaders and a leading bourgeois opposition personality,
"My father, General Aung San, created the Burmese army under extremely difficult circumstances, unity must be maintained within the army."
The Guardian's Bangkok correspondent from the bourgeois forces anxious to preserve the "unity of the army." It can only come from those who are prepared to fight to break up the army by all available means, that is apparently the rebel student movement and the insurgent forces in the peripheral regions. The scattered information that comes out of the country indicates that at least sections of the student movement are determined to fight. What remains to be seen is whether the various militant opposition forces can combine effectively behind a program that can rally the urban masses against the regime.
The stakes in Burma are high, and have been decisively upped by Ne Win's desperate gamble. This is a major country between China and India and bordering on Thailand, international capitalism's last great fortress in South-east Asia. The collapse of capitalist order in Burma could substantially change the regional and even the world relationship of forces.
That is why the authoritative capitalist press has been taking an understanding attitude toward the new military regime, despite its bloody repression. For example, the British Economist wrote in its September 24 issue, "General Saw Maung [the new military premier] cracked down fast, and to some extent understandably: anarchy was at hand, as demonstrators armed themselves with jinglees, darts made from sharpened bicycle spokes." In fact, the demonstrators were only responding to the military takeover.
For some time, in the best of circumstances, the anti-dictatorial opposition is likely to remain on the defensive. It is essential to focus attention on the military's outrages and to build protests against the connivance of the imperialist media and authorities with the bloody dictatorship. This is particularly important given the long isolation of Burma and the Burmese opposition.
It will also be important for the international workers' and democratic movement to offer concrete, material support to representatives, in particular, of the militant stu-l 27 dent movement in exile. * October 3, 1988 d #148 international Viewpoint
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BURMA has the task of sweeping away the corrup one-party state and creating the framework Protests needed agains! the massacres In a decisive confrontation with the mili-