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 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.
