Page 2 of
2 Myanmar's 88 Generation comes of
age By Bertil Lintner
prominent speakers at the rallies,
Min Ko Naing went underground on September 18,
1988.
In March 1989, he was tracked down
and arrested by military intelligence and spent
nearly 16 years in solitary confinement. When Min
Ko Naing was released in November 2004, the
once-youthful demonstrator was middle-aged and the
years in abysmal prison conditions had left harsh
marks on the 42-year-old's body and face.
Nonetheless, the long years in detention have
clearly
failed to extinguish the
pro-democracy activist's fighting spirit.
"The people of Myanmar must have the
courage to say no to injustice and yes to the
truth," he said at the first 88 Generation meeting
last August. "They must also work to correct their
own wrongdoing that hurt society."
Min Ko
Naing was among those arrested in September and
then released this month. So, too, was Ko Ko Gyi,
another former student leader who in March 2005
was the first of the 88 Generation to be set free
after nearly 14 years in detention. A third member
of the 88 Generation who was released this month
after serving a long prison term was Min Zeya, a
law student who was a prominent figure in the 1988
pro-democracy movement. Two other prominent
network members are Pyone Cho and Htay Kywe, who
were among the five who were rounded up last
September. Together, they represent the core of
the network's leadership.
With estimated
thousands of followers, the 88 Generation is an
entirely new phenomenon in Myanmar, and one that
clearly has the junta unnerved. Many other Asian
countries have certain "generations" that fought
against military rule and sacrificed themselves
for democracy. In South Korea, for instance, the
term "386 Generation" was coined in the 1990s to
describe students born in the 1960s who fought for
democracy throughout the 1980s. Now in their 40s,
many of them are university lecturers, lawyers,
newspaper columnists, and even government
ministers. In short, they are the country's new
political elite, widely admired by the general
public for their past sacrifices in pushing the
country toward more democracy.
In
Thailand, too, people often refer to the "1970s
Generation" of pro-democracy activists who took to
the streets in October 1973 and forced the
military government then led by Field Marshal
Thanom Kittikachorn into exile. Three years later,
Thanom and some of his associates returned to
Thailand - which caused a new wave of student-led
protests. These, however, were crushed by the
military, and thousands of students, teachers and
labor activists took to the jungle, where they
joined the Chinese-backed insurgent Communist
Party of Thailand (CPT).
Few of them were
actually communists, and before long they had
fallen out with the CPT's diehard doctrinaire
leadership. After a general amnesty in 1980,
almost all of them returned to Bangkok and
provincial cities, where they too went on to
become prominent politicians and literary figures.
Nowadays, to have been with the CPT in the 1970s
bears no stigma and many from the generation are
widely respected because of the hardships they
endured in their struggle for democracy.
Now Myanmar's 88 Generation has come of
age, and its recent rise significantly comes at a
time when the erstwhile pro-democracy NLD
political party has accomplished little more than
its mere survival. Back in 1988, the NLD was a
mass movement, and it won a landslide victory in
the May 1990 election, a result the military soon
annulled. After years of military harassment of
its members, the NLD is now only a shadow of its
late-1980s and early-1990s self.
Most if
its young members have been arrested, forced into
exile or cowed into submission, and all its top
leaders - including Nobel Peace Prize laureate
Aung San Suu Kyi and former party chairman Tin Oo
- are incarcerated, either under house arrest or
in prison. Only a handful of mostly elderly
spokespeople remain, and none of them has the
strength and charisma to carry the party forward.
That serves the interests of the ,junta since the
NLD increasingly appears to the outside world a
less viable alternative to the present military
order.
The 88 Generation, on the other
hand, has suddenly become a force to be reckoned
with, although at the moment it has no proper
leadership or organizational structure. And with
the junta's still-strict restrictions on freedom
of association and assembly, it probably won't
morph into a full-blown political movement any
time soon. But therein, perhaps, lies the nascent
movement's strength: the junta has shown it is
easy to squash a political party, but it will be
considerably more difficult to crush an entire
generation.
Bertil Lintner is a
former correspondent with the Far Eastern Economic
Review and the author of several books on
Myanmar's politics, including Outrage: Burma's
Struggle for Democracy. He is currently a
writer with Asia-Pacific Media Services.
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