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NEWS & LETTERS, October - November 2007
Our Life and Times
Burma awakens
As we go to press, the military rulers of Burma (Myanmar) seem to have gained the upper hand over the democratic movement, which brought tens of thousands onto the streets in anti-regime protests in September. Not since 1988, when a mass uprising involving millions was bloodily suppressed, has the movement been able to mobilize this kind of numbers.
In August, the regime provoked the long-suffering working people with a sharp rise in the prices of fuel and cooking oil. Within days, student youth were taking to the streets, in the face of the government’s vigilantes. In September, young Buddhist monks took the lead, a group the regime hesitated to attack as forcefully as it had the students. It was at this point that tens of thousands came into the streets.
Some called openly for the military to step down, while others spoke quietly of "revolution." There have been scattered reports of rank-and-file soldiers refusing orders. It would take deep cracks inside the 400,000-strong military to topple a regime that has not hesitated to wage war on its own people.
Burma’s students, working people, and national minorities have a long history of struggle. They are working out new forms of resistance, using cellphones and the internet to contact each other and the outside world. Win or lose, they have written a new page in their country’s long and painful struggle for liberation.
--Oct. 1, 2007
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