Headlines

BURMA: Defiant Public Blitzes Junta with Letters

Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK, Jan 8 2007 (IPS) - A handwritten letter to a military dictator may sound like an ineffective and risky way of conveying defiance especially in this Internet age, where e-mails, blogs and websites have combined to threaten political authority in a number of countries.

A handwritten letter to a military dictator may sound like an ineffective and risky way of conveying defiance especially in this Internet age, where e-mails, blogs and websites have combined to threaten political authority in a number of countries.

But in Burma, where a strict censorship regime is in force, and where access to information technology is limited, the good, old-fashioned letter is taken recourse to by the country’s long-suffering people to express growing dissatisfaction with Rangoon’s junta.

A letter-writing campaign, launched in the first week of the new year, saw tens of thousands of people in and around Rangoon seeking the special envelopes and sheets of paper meant for this drive, say the organisers, a highly respected group of former university students, known as the ‘88-Generation Students’.

”This is an effort to break the silence. To get people to openly write about their grievances to the military government,” adds Naing Aung, secretary-general of the Forum for Democracy in Burma, a group of Burmese political exiles who work closely with the 88-Generation. ‘’It is not enough to just complain. This is to get people to show their courage by standing up and openly identifying themselves as critics.”

The month-long letter-writing drive, known as the ‘Open Heart’ campaign, is the latest effort by the 88-Generation to ‘’raise the people’s voices,” Naing Aung explained in an interview. ‘’It is a peaceful way of expressing the public’s views, because protests are banned, the media is censored, and there are no elections.”

Yet this effort, where the people are encouraged to directly address Burma’s strongman, Than Shwe, with the problems they face, comes with a high personal risk, including a jail term, if it provokes the ire of the junta. The State Peace and Development Council (SPDC), as the junta is officially known, currently holds over 1,100 people in jails for expressing their thoughts on a range of subjects. These political prisoners include opposition parliamentarians, Buddhist monks, journalists, writers, students and political activists.

The 88-Generation, who derive their name from being the students who led a pro-democracy protest in 1988, which was brutally crushed by the military regime, mounted this effort on the success of three other campaigns conducted last year. The first was a signature campaign in October, calling for the public to endorse a plea for the SPDC to release all the political prisoners, including detained opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi. An estimated 60,000 people signed that petition.

Such a rare sign of public dissent in a climate of increasing oppression was followed by an equally impressive show of public support when the 88-Generation resorted to two more creative ways to register discontent. One was the ‘White Expression’ campaign, where members of the public were asked to wear white clothes as a mark of honesty and purity. The other: a multiple religious prayer meeting, where people were encouraged to hold silent prayers, including candle light vigils, in temples, churches and mosques.

Burmese political activists are welcoming this shift in the public mood as a further indicator of the deepening frustration across the South-east Asian nation that is run by a regime that is seen as incompetent, corrupt and oppressive.

Last year saw the price of rice, a staple dish in the Burmese diet, rise by 30 percent. Yet at the same time Than Shwe’s daughter was married in a lavish event where champagne flowed, the bride was decked in diamonds and pearls and the newly wed reportedly receiving gifts worth millions of dollars.

‘’The people want to cooperate in this campaign because of the growing suffering. Some people don’t care what will happen to them because they are just angry,” Zaw Min, spokesman for the Democratic Party for a New Society, an opposition party banned by the SPDC, told IPS. ‘’People are increasingly identifying themselves as they express their opinion.”

It is an emerging political undercurrent that has also struck journalists working for the Democratic Voice of Burma (DVB), a radio and television station that has its headquarters in Oslo and is run by Burmese political exiles. ‘’More and more people inside Burma are voicing their anger through our programmes,” Than Win Htut, a DVB senior reporter told IPS. ‘’Some have even walked for half a day to get to a telephone from their village to criticise the SPDC?s inefficiency or abuse of power.”

Such momentum has been taking shape over the past two to three years, he adds. ‘’The people are feeling more confident to complain about the SPDC unlike earlier. There is clearly a change in attitudes.”

Among the factors that have triggered this rising tide of discontent is the arrest of the country’s former intelligence chief and prime minister Gen. Khin Nyunt and his allies within the regime, say Burma analysts. Khin Nyunt, who received a 44-year suspended sentence in July 2005, had close contacts with the country’s business community and was viewed by some quarters inside Burma and by South-east Asian governments as a moderate.

‘’The economy has shrunk noticeably since the purge of Khin Nyunt,” Debbie Stothard of the Alternate ASEAN (Association of South-east Asian Nations) Network on Burma, a regional human rights lobby, told IPS. ”The business people who had benefited lost out. And the sense of dissatisfaction grew wider, with many becoming fed up with Than Shwe, who has diverted money to his own small clique.”

‘’The sense of outrage and anger is growing,” she added. ”There is a feeling that change is very possible and that is why more and more people are taking risks to speak out,” she said.