Burma Redux: Global Justice and the Quest for Political Reform in Myanmar (13 page)

At the end of the decade there were increased aid flows, fresh exploitation of oil fields, and in October 1979 official blessing for English to return as a medium of instruction alongside Burmese.
¹¹⁹
In June 1979, a European diplomat sardonically remarked that “the economy has now improved to the point of mere stagnation.”
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In August 1981, Ne Win announced his intention to step down from the state presidency, but said he would remain head of the BSPP, now a mass organization with 1.5 million members.
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Putting everything together, it looked as if transition would be the theme of the 1980s, and it was clear that it might not be smooth.
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However, the middle years of the decade turned out to be rather quiet.
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Although annual reviews in
Asian Survey
convey a sense of calm before the storm, they give no indication of where turbulence might come from.

Across the years hints of reform were occasionally noted by Burma watchers. In 1971, Badgley argued that modernization belied the common emphasis on economic malaise: “the sense of historic movement [is] powerful.”
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In 1980, Scully and Trager held that “While prophets of doom still apparently prevail, particularly among journalists covering the Burma scene, there were increasingly favorable reports in 1979 indicating not only that substantive improvements have been recorded, but also that a general reversal of past stagnating trends may well be materializing.” They noted “an encouraging developmental outlook.”
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In 1981, Silverstein maintained that “prospects for the future are painted brightly against dark clouds.”
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Throughout, however, what Trager called “Burma’s chronic insurrectionary activity” continued. “Each day the Burmese press published some item of rebel activity, as it has for almost twenty years. A day’s news in 1967 was like that of 1957.”
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Butwell made much the same point: “If secessionist tendencies were contained in the years 1962–72, the extent of government control of the country was probably no greater on March 2, 1972 than it had been on that morning 10 years earlier when Ne Win ousted U Nu as Burma’s constitutionally chosen leader.”
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In 1980, the government did attempt to entice dissidents back to legality. However, while its amnesty policy “succeeded in winning back individuals, it failed to end insurgent movements.”
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Still the underlying economic performance was weak. In the early 1970s, some reform of the rice sector boosted production, notably through a large increase in government procurement prices from 172
kyats
per ton in 1971–72 to 431
kyats
per ton in 1973–74.
¹³⁰
Later in the decade, a growing adoption of modern high yield varieties and limited liberalization measures enabling the sector to be “unleashed from a sluggish state” generated further improvement.
¹³¹
A Whole Township Special Rice Production Programme implemented in the late 1970s bore some fruit through close government supervision and application of modern methods. When a Green Revolution was then belatedly introduced from 1979 to 1986, exports experienced a resurgence. While a dramatic jump from less than 0.2 million tons in 1978–79 to more than 1.7 million tons in 1979–80 looks anomalous, an average export tonnage of 0.7 million tons was sustained for seven years from 1980–81 to 1986–87.
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More generally growth rates from 1970 to 1982, though of dubious validity, were among the best in Asia.
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In the end, however, enhanced performance was unsustainable. The Green Revolution tailed off when export markets shrank and foreign exchange earnings collapsed.
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Public confidence dissipated as economic crisis spread in the mid-1980s, presaging the beginning of the end for Ne Win. “There was no bread, but there was also little circus,” writes Thant Myint-U.
¹³⁵
Genuine liberalization of the rice sector in September 1987 removed many government regulations, allowing farmers to select which crops to grow and to sell most of their produce in the market rather than to the state. However, the reform arrived too late. Furthermore, broad-based material hardship was dramatized by a September 5, 1987 demonetization exercise, the third and most severe of the period. At a stroke, 25, 45 and 75
kyat
notes were withdrawn without compensation, and 90
kyat
notes were issued in their place. Some 70 percent of all currency disappeared from circulation, and many life savings were obliterated. In December 1987, “the Burma Road to poverty” registered the humiliation of least developed country designation by the UN General Assembly.
¹³⁶

Burma in revolt

The revolt, when it came, was the product of economic discontent spreading across the land at the end of 1987 and finding a political vehicle in student protest. Soon after the 1962 coup, when dissent was brutally suppressed, Josef Silverstein and Julian Wohl held that “With the nation’s political leaders either in jail or unwilling to lead any active opposition to the military government of General Ne Win, and with the Revolutionary Council bent on administering the country without the aid of the other élites, the students remain as a potential force to fill the political vacuum.”
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A quarter-century on, the prescience of the remark was revealed when, on March 12, 1988, a fracas in a Rangoon teashop spilled over 24 hours into provocative and bloody repression by riot police, and the death of one student, Maung Phone Maw. During the following week, further student protest was met with more brutality. In a scandalous March 16 White Bridge incident by Rangoon’s Inya Lake, hundreds died, thousands were arrested, and allegations of gang rape of female students surfaced. On March 18, all schools and universities were closed.

After campuses reopened on May 30, further clashes between protestors and riot police led in mid-June to the imposition of fierce emergency restrictions. At this time, though the focal point of dissent remained Rangoon, open rebellion was also starting to spread to other urban centers. In addition, disorder was beginning to develop a racial tinge as communal violence was directed against the country’s Muslim population, almost certainly at the instigation of the government. However, when these measures failed to deflect attention from the long record of failure and stark instances of naked brutality on the part of Ne Win’s regime, an announcement was made that an extraordinary congress of the BSPP would convene on July 23. In his authoritative account of the 1988 uprising,
Outrage: Burma’s Struggle for Democracy
, Lintner writes that “Burma by the end of July was so tense that any minor incident could be the spark that started a blaze.”
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At the BSPP congress, Ne Win in his opening speech made a number of dramatic announcements, proposing a referendum on a multiparty system, tendering his resignation from the party chairmanship and indeed the party, and reporting the resignations of several other top leaders, including San Yu who was both state president and BSPP vice-chairman. Ne Win also closed his address by issuing a warning: “I want the entire nation, the people, to know that if in future there are mob disturbances, if the army shoots, it hits—there is no firing into the air to scare.”
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In a subsequent speech delivered by a senior member of his inner circle, thoroughgoing economic reform was promised. While the congress declined to endorse the referendum proposal or Ne Win’s resignation from the BSPP, it did accept his resignation from the party chairmanship and San Yu’s resignation from the state presidency.
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The choice to fill both positions, announced on July 26, was former Brigadier General Sein Lwin, widely reviled as the Butcher of Rangoon for his role in bloody crackdowns on Rangoon University students in both July 1962 and March 1988.

Despite its rejection, Ne Win’s referendum proposal was significant as it provided a set of rather inchoate student protests with a clear rallying point. Lintner quotes the later comment of a western diplomat: “Up to then, the student movement and the sympathetic reaction of the masses was completely unfocused. It was in essence anti-government; protest against brutality, a frustrated reaction against the inane policies, the demonetisation, the hopelessness of the students, the lack of any future… Ne Win, unwittingly, provides a focus by calling for a multi-party system, and from there on in, the student cry is for democracy.”
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The subsequent culmination of many months of unrest was the four eights uprising bringing students, workers and ordinary people to the streets to call for democracy. “At 8 minutes past 8 on 8.8.88,” writes Lintner, “the dockworkers in Rangoon port had walked out. That was the auspicious moment, and as soon as the word spread that the strike was on, people began marching towards the city centre.”
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Parallel events took place elsewhere. In
From the Land of Green Ghosts
, Pascal Khoo Thwe, working in a Mandalay restaurant in 1988, tells the story from a second-city perspective.
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The
tatmadaw
started firing at 11:30 or 11:45 on the night of August 8 in Rangoon, and did not stop until 3:00 in the morning. It continued to shoot demonstrators on August 9, 10 and 11, and even targeted nurses at Rangoon General Hospital. Deaths at the hands of soldiers were also recorded in other cities, notably Sagaing to the west of Mandalay. On August 12, however, the resignation of Sein Lwin prompted a lull in the violence. One week later, on August 19, he was replaced by Ne Win’s confidant Maung Maung, who pledged to organize multiparty elections within three months. This offer was rejected by the emergent opposition leadership.
¹⁴⁴
In a festive setting laced with uncertainty and tension, strikes, demonstrations and protest meetings continued and gradually much of the nation was consumed by a pro-democracy movement spreading from Rangoon to distant parts. “On the 22
^nd
, a nationwide general strike was proclaimed to press the demands for the formation of a new, interim government that could rule the country pending general elections,” writes Lintner. “The entire country ground to a halt.”
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It was in a context of daily strikes and mass meetings that Aung San Suu Kyi took to the political stage.
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Having spent the whole of her adult life in exile, Suu Kyi returned to the family home at 54 University Avenue, Rangoon at the start of April 1988 to care for her ailing mother, Khin Kyi. Turning 43 in June, she had no prior experience of active political engagement, but as the daughter of Aung San was a figure to whom many looked for leadership. Her first public response came on August 24 in a brief address at Rangoon General Hospital, the focal point for many rallies. However, there she merely announced that a more important speech would follow two days later at Shwedagon Pagoda, Rangoon’s major landmark. On the morning of August 26, hundreds of thousands were present on open ground to the west of the temple to witness her call repeatedly for unity and discipline, and articulate the emphatic demands of the people: “namely that we have no desire at all for a referendum, that the one-party system should be dismantled, that a multiparty system of government should be established, and we call for free and fair elections to be arranged as quickly as possible.”
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Throughout these weeks, opposition figures reinforced the demand for an interim government, but to no avail. Instead,
tatmadaw
leaders started to implement a successful strategy of fomenting civil disorder and confronting the mass of the population with a stark choice: dictatorship or anarchy. Jails were emptied, protests turned violent through rioting, pillage and destruction aided and abetted by government forces, lynchings and public executions took place, and water supplies were tainted.
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Lintner writes that a “carnival atmosphere” gave way to “fear, paranoia, and anger.”
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In effect, military leaders set before the Burmese people what Federico Ferrara terms Hobbes’s dilemma. In a late-twentieth-century state of nature created by government suspension of a key public good, maintenance of social order, citizens were “compelled to choose between anarchy and an inept, obtrusive, and hideously repressive Leviathan.”
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The bulk of the population opted to defect from an opposition movement that sought but failed to impose its own form of order through general strike committees of senior community figures, monks and students. While a defiant sense still hung in the air that things really might change for the better, increasingly mixed with it was a desperate fear that they could readily change for the worse.