TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/111990/1119004.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 7.7 KB | 167 lines

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                                                            WORLD, Page 55

BURMA

A People Under Siege


The generals crack down, but neither opponents at home nor
critics abroad seem able to do anything about it

By SANDRA BURTON/RANGOON


    Just beyond the gaze of the golden Buddha in the Eindawya
pagoda in Mandalay, the spiritual heart of Burma, dozens of
soldiers slouched around the courtyard, propping their rifles
against the stone balustrades. Outside the temple gates, more
troops manned barbed-wire barricades. "Please leave," an army
captain shouted last week to a group of tourists trying to
photograph the Buddha. "You may come back when our security
situation is right."

    Burma's brief experiment with multiparty politics is over,
and the country is reverting to the xenophobia and isolation of
its past. In a nationwide crackdown on its opposition, the
military junta led by Senior General Saw Maung has arrested at
least 40 officials of the National League for Democracy,
including 16 members of parliament, and some 200 rebel monks,
many of them activists of the Young Monks Association. Hundreds
more monks have slipped out of their monasteries and returned to
their homes in the countryside. Six months after the League won
a surprise electoral victory, the army has effectively canceled
the results at gunpoint.

    As the glimmer of democracy is snuffed out, tentative moves
toward a more open economy that Burma began in 1989 are likely
to go with it. Sometimes called the world's richest basket case
because of its wealth of such natural resources as teak and
minerals, Burma needs foreign aid and investment to modernize.
In the wake of the elections last May, international lending
agencies were lining up to welcome Burma, and foreign
businessmen were studying the country's new, liberal economic
policies, but many investors are pulling back. "No one will lend
money to Burma until it sorts out its political situation," says
a visiting World Bank official.

    Just as the crackdown was reaching its peak last week,
Amnesty International made public another indictment of the
army's brutal rule. In a 72-page special report, the
London-based human-rights organization accused Burma's junta of
"silencing the democratic movement" with systematic terror and
torture.

    To dramatize their plight, four Burmese hijacked a Thai
Airways jetliner on Saturday and demanded the release of
imprisoned dissidents. After diverting the Bangkok-to-Rangoon
flight to Calcutta, the hijackers said they wanted to make the
world "hear our pleas for justice and human rights." They
surrendered peaceably to Indian authorities.

    Silencing democracy describes Burma's standard operating
procedure since 1962, when General Ne Win seized power from an
ineffectual civilian government. His iron hand at home and
suspicion of foreigners turned Burma into a hermit state. At the
same time, his bizarre form of socialism reduced the once
prosperous former British colony to penury while more backward
neighbors were performing miracles of economic growth.

    After 26 years of decline, pressures for change finally
pushed Ne Win into retirement in July 1988. Decades of anger
erupted in bloody riots in the streets of Rangoon a month later
and continued on and off for six weeks, leaving more than 3,000
dead. General Saw Maung, the armed forces chief of staff, seized
power as chairman of the authoritarian State Law and Order
Restoration Council, which was to govern until elections.

    To worldwide amazement, the May 1990 elections in Burma,
renamed Myanmar last year, were generally free and fair. The
League, under the leadership of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the
daughter of Burma's national hero, won a huge majority in
parliament. The military showed its true colors by keeping her
under house arrest and calling for a convention to draw up a new
constitution, a process that could take years.

    The inevitable clash occurred Aug. 8, the second
anniversary of the 1988 massacre. Students and monks
demonstrated in Mandalay. When riot police leveled their rifles
at rock throwers, a monk tried to intercede. He was hit by a
bullet, and 14 other protesters were injured, though the army
denies that anyone was killed.

    In protest, activist monks declared a boycott against
military men and their families, refusing to accept the alms
from them that earn the donor merit in a future life, or to
participate in weddings and funerals. The boycott stirred
anxiety among the troops. "Most of the young soldiers come from
villages where monks are held in high respect," says Omar
Farouk, a Burmese Muslim living in Bangkok.

    The high command retaliated by ringing rebellious
monasteries with troops and buzzing them with helicopters. This
led to a very Burmese conflict: a slingshot war. Monks pelted
the army patrols with stones fired from slingshots. The soldiers
asked for permission to shoot back, but their commander refused,
ordering them to return fire only with slingshots of their own.

    Meanwhile, Saw Maung was preparing his counterattack. After a
pious prayer to the Buddha, he outlawed then abolished some
Buddhist sects. Saw Maung then sent his troops into Mandalay's
monasteries "to clean out unlawful organizations."

    "The political movement that began in 1988 is effectively
over now," says an Asian diplomat. Says a Western official: "One
by one they have knocked off the challenges to the regime, from
the League to the monks." The consensus in Rangoon is that the
junta can survive any sanctions its Western critics may impose
for as long as the military leaders are determined to do so.

    When Japanese professor Sadako Ogata arrived in Burma last
week as a special envoy of the United Nations Commission on
Human Rights, Saw Maung expressed his contempt for the very
notion. "I will not give the kind of rights demanded by the
Voice of America," he said in a speech. "I will not give the
students the right to stage demonstrations. I won't let the
people emulate the incidents in Eastern Europe."

    Until he does so, he can expect little or no help for his
free-falling economy, with an inflation rate of more than 75%, a
gaping balance of payments deficit and a budget that devotes 40%
of its resources to the military. The cutoff of U.S. aid after
the 1988 riots has had no discernible effect, leading some
American policymakers to ponder whether to try some limited
involvement with the Burmese government once again. Burton
Levin, the former U.S. ambassador to Burma, says no. "To think
you can sit down and talk to these people would be to ignore the
history of the last 28 years," he says. "If these people remain
in power, there will be no change."

    Many Burmese who hate the regime also lament their
inability to change it. "We are rubbish," says a student in
Mandalay. "Our tradition and our religion prevent us from
getting things done," says a Rangoon intellectual. The pacific
teachings of Theravada Buddhism do not, for example, allow
self-immolation of the sort practiced by protesting Vietnamese
monks in the 1960s.

    Unable to remake their nation or count on rescue from
abroad, large numbers of Burmese seek solace in the ghostly
world of nats, the pantheon of spirits whose influence predates
Buddhism. Despite the military siege, thousands of pilgrims
entered monasteries all over the country last week. They prayed,
tucking money into the clothing on figures of the nats. Then
they sought out the astrologers who line the covered walkways
around the temples. Questioned about Burma's future, one
astrologer in Mandalay cast a wary glance over his shoulder to
see if anyone might be listening. Then he whispered, "Burma is
waiting."