Myanmar, I hardly know ye

Tsunami warning for Burma's generals

A few days ago I received a call from the student newspaper wanting to interview me about the current situation in Burma. While I agreed to meet with student, I thought "I don't know anything about Burma. Nobody knows anything about Burma!" Fortunately, I have lots of experience with pretending to be more capable and knowledgable than I really am. Just in case, I spent the next hour reading all the press articles I could find about Burma. I even re-watched the Seinfeld episode where J. Peterman abandons his catalog and heads off to Myanmar just to see if I could pick up anything special.

Thankfully, my anxiety was all for naught. When the studenr reporter arrived at my office her first question was "What is a junta?" After that, I realized I was probably in the clear. We talked for about twenty minutes and I provided come very general background concerning the 1988 student massacre, Ang-San Suu Kyi, the Myanmar-Burma controvery, and the military dictatorship that has ruled for forty years. The next edition of the student paper comes out next Wednesday, and I'm very interested to see how she quotes me. I hope I sound smart.

The protests in Burma started in early September after the military decided to raise fuel prices for consumers. A few days later it really gathered momentum when the Buddhist monks began rallying support and speaking out against the government. This made things much more complicated. You can't just shoot hundreds or thousands of monks the way you would shoot university students. People really get upset. Nevertheless, this hasn't stopped the army from killing a few monks here or there when they thought no one was looking. There's even been video footage of a Japanese journalist being shot. The speed of the protests caught the government off guard, and at the beginning there were photos and video footage broadcast on the internet. But now the government has tighter control over the media and is preventing the export of information. No one is really sure what is happening in Burma.

All my student are asking me what will happen. Right now it appears that the military has locked everything down, including the monsteries, and is prepared to ride this thing out. It's difficult for the internation community to put pressure on Burma, because the country is so isolated. Popular protests like this only succeed because the strain of shooting civilians causes the army command the splinter, refuse to follow orders, and eventually back down. Burma's army has never shown any such signs of conscience. It is likely this situation will end just like the protests of 1988.






"Cornered but unbeaten: the true leader"