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Still, Burma's dissidents keep up t



Subject: Still, Burma's dissidents keep up the fight

Myanmar: In Exile and Powerless
Still, Myanmar's dissidents keep up the fight 
By DOMINIC FAULDER Bangkok 
moreinfo: <A HREF="http://www.student.ipfw.edu/~soem01";>http://www.student.ipf
w.edu/~soem01</A>
<A 
HREF="http://cnn.com/ASIANOW/asiaweek/magazine/99/1008/nat_myanmar_dissidents.
html">http://cnn.com/ASIANOW/asiaweek/magazine/99/1008/nat_myanmar_dissidents.
html</A>
 "The military in Rangoon are in a state of high paranoia, and in some cases
near hysteria." So charged a political activist at a recent news conference in
Bangkok. Excitedly, she recited the usual mantra of Burmese dissidents:
spiraling food prices in Myanmar, discontented rank and file soldiers, a
seething populace. Foreign- based activists repeatedly claim that a "mass
movement" drawing from this deep well of grievances will finally push 
Myanmar's
widely reviled junta, the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC), from
power. 

Despite the clatter outside Myanmar's borders, the opposition-in-exile has 
been
pretty ineffective. Within the country, things have been relatively quiet, 
with
few signs that people are organizing a widespread revolt - let alone believing
it could actually happen. The military has a stranglehold and doesn't look 
like
it's about to make any concessions. If economic duress is an indicator for
social upheaval, something would have happened a long time ago. The country
remains bankrupt, with rice prices soaring in recent weeks and the kyat
plummeting to around 360 to the U.S. dollar. A news agency reported Bogyoke
Market in Yangon to be "virtually devoid of shoppers." Said one merchant:
"We're mostly sitting down and twiddling our thumbs. This has never happened
before." 

Yet, in recent weeks, junta spokesmen have been unusually feisty, blasting
their detractors in cyberspace with four-letter words, ruminating at the U.N.
General Assembly, wooing the Australians on human rights, and engaging in rare
public debates. "Democracy is a very delicate flower," Myanmar's ambassador to
Britain, Kyaw Win, explained to the British Broadcasting Corp. "It doesn't 
grow
easily anywhere, and is not easily transplantable." 

Back home, it's business as usual. Not a day passes without the junta
announcing "voluntary" resignations from Aung San Suu Kyi's opposition 
National
League for Democracy. Last week, it was 55 NLD members in Salin township in 
the
southern part of the country. Said one official:"They no longer wished to
participate in party politics of the NLD." The "proof" was their resignation
letters. If nothing else, tallying the daily purges proves the NLD still 
enjoys
remarkably strong support in great adversity. By an official account, 29 of 
the
392 NLD MPs have died, and 107 are imprisoned or detained. 

With the opposition inside Myanmar largely bottled up, much of the resistance
to the junta is expressed overseas. Thailand harbors hundreds of Myanmar's
political dissidents. A veritable alphabet soup of groups - concentrated in
Bangkok, Chiang Mai and Mae Sot - vie for the limelight in their battle for
democracy. Further complicating the picture is a slew of foreign and local
non-governmental organizations. The inability to create any change in Myanmar
suggests exiled activists have lost touch with the public mood back home.
However discontented with chronic misgovernment they might be, people are
simply unprepared to "go under the gun" to create change. "[The military] 
knows
their profession," says Tin Maung Win of the Democratic Alliance of Burma, one
of the exile groups. "They shoot to kill." Meanwhile, the political stalemate
continues to drag the country backward. 

The demands the dissidents abroad are making remain unchanged: primarily, to
release all political prisoners and engage in dialogue with the NLD, which won
a landslide in the 1990 election. However many of Myanmar's people might
support such a demand, events in the past few months have shown that they feel
safer to remain passive. Two British activists certainly paid heavily for
daring to protest. James Mawdsley, 26, a three-time "repeat offender," and
Rachel Goldwyn, 28, were slammed with stiff sentences last month. 

Still, it's not just foreigners who are active. In August, the Thailand-based
All Burma Students' Democratic Front (ABSDF) had announced that the 
numerically
significant "four-nines" day, 9/9/99, would mark "the beginning of a wave of
force that would topple the regime." Eleven years earlier on Aug. 8, 1988, or
8/8/88, mass demonstrations erupted that were eventually put down with the 
loss
of an estimated 3,000 lives. Little happened on this Sept. 9, however - at
least in Myanmar. The military made sure of that by deploying extra police in
the capital, shutting roads and arresting up to 500 people. Curfews and 
tourist
visa bans were imposed. In Thailand, dissidents held protests. "We never
expected people to come out on to the streets like in 1988," said the ABSDF's
Moe The Zun. "This was a good time to remind the Burmese people to continue
their struggle for democracy." But the struggle will need more than just a
reminder to succeed.