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2 Myanmar's 88 Generation comes of
age By Bertil Lintner
Myanmar's military government may have
narrowly escaped United Nations Security Council
sanction, but it is facing an unprecedented
political challenge at home, not by the crippled
opposition National League for Democracy (NLD) but
by an emerging network of dissidents who refer to
themselves as the 88 Generation Students' Group.
Unlike the NLD, the 88 Generation is not a
political party, but rather a movement comprising
a generation of students who were active during
the 1988 pro-democracy uprising. The military
crushed that movement and later sentenced many of the
demonstrators to prison for
various anti-state crimes. Nearly two decades
later, many of those activists are now coming of
age and in recent months they have launched a
series of civil-disobedience campaigns that have
openly challenged the ruling junta.
The
pro-democracy veterans started to meet and discuss
politics in Yangon teashops about two years ago.
Many of them had spent long years in prison and
were "plucked from their families, from their
studies", according to one foreign observer who
recently met with the network's members. "At last
free, they still live in a kind of captivity,
locked out from the universities and colleges
which once offered them the promise of relatively
rewarding academic careers," he said.
Last
August, the 88 Generation informal network was
established. Not surprisingly, the group's most
prominent leaders were arrested the following
month, but in October other members launched a
nationwide petition calling for the release of the
estimated 1,100 political prisoners - including
the detained leaders of the group - and a start to
a genuine national-reconciliation process. Dressed
symbolically in white, the group's members
traveled around the country and by October 23 had
collected 535,580 signatures, which were
subsequently sent to the ruling State Peace and
Development Council (SPDC), as well as various UN
organizations.
In November, the 88
Generation initiated a mass multi-religious prayer
campaign. Participants were urged to wear white
clothing and hold candlelight vigils in Buddhist,
Christian, Hindu and Muslim places of worship.
Tens of thousands heeded the network's call and
offered prayers for a peaceful resolution to
Myanmar's political impasse, freedom for all
political prisoners, and help for victims of
floods that at the time had devastated many areas
of the country.
On January 4, Myanmar's
Independence Day, the 88 Generation network
launched yet another audacious campaign dubbed
"Open Heart", entailing a letter-writing campaign
encouraging Myanmar citizens across the country to
write about their everyday complaints and
grievances with military rule. The organizers have
said that by February 4, the campaign's scheduled
last day, they expect more then 25,000 letters to
be sent to SPDC chairman Senior General Than Shwe.
The SPDC has no doubt been taken aback by
these massive, but entirely peaceful, expressions
of dissent. The junta has released the five 88
Generation leaders who were arrested in September,
an unprecedented response to political dissidence
from the historically heavy-handed junta.
Some political analysts read the move as a
concession to the movement, but more likely the
junta's decision was influenced by an upcoming
Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN)
meeting, where the junta was keen not to further
alienate the grouping's member states with the UN
resolution already on the table. Certain ASEAN
member states have expressed their concerns about
the ruling junta's lack of progress toward a
democratic solution to its political crisis, and
have privately lamented the frequent international
embarrassment Myanmar has caused the grouping
since its admission in 1997.
Yet the
reason for the reclusive junta's so-far-tepid
response to the 88 Generation's activities is
still difficult to gauge. One prevailing theory is
that the generals sense the new group's moral
authority among the public as former longtime
political prisoners and fear a popular backlash if
they move too aggressively against its senior
members. Another interpretation is that the
generals are concentrated on building facilities
around their new capital at Naypyidaw and as a
result have neglected security measures for the
old capital, Yangon.
Recent travelers to
Yangon suggest that control mechanisms for the old
capital appear less effective since the move to
Naypyidaw in November 2005. Whatever the case, the
dramatic rise of the 88 Generation is bound to
complicate the junta's plans to move toward
so-called "military democracy", as there is now a
credible, albeit amorphous, civilian alternative
to the generals' rule.
Moral
alternative The most prominent 88
Generation member is Paw Oo Tun, alias Min Ko
Naing, a nom de guerre that translates from
the Burmese into "Conqueror of Kings". In August
1988, he was a 26-year-old zoology student who was
eloquently addressing tens of thousands of
pro-democracy demonstrators on the streets of
Yangon, or Rangoon as it was then known (the junta
officially renamed the capital and the country in
1989). After the military cracked down bloodily on
the demonstrations and rounded up
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