Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, August 9, 2009
RANGOON, Burma -- Dreams of revolution die hard in the silences of this city's monsoon-soaked streets.
Under cover of night, on a wet, deserted strip of jetty, a young opposition activist gazed toward the ragged lights on the opposite bank of the Rangoon River and talked into the wind that blew through a pair of coconut trees.
"I am not afraid, but I do not want to be arrested, not at this time," said the activist, 27, who had fled Rangoon days earlier, trailed by an intelligence agent.
A flickering neon bar sign caught the contours of his disguise -- a baggy anorak, a pair of glasses, a hairnet to mask his thick, dark mane. "If I'm arrested, I cannot take part in demonstrations or campaigns."
On the run or under watch, Burma's semi-clandestine opposition activists have struggled to rouse action while their leader, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, languishes in Rangoon's Insein Prison. She is being tried on charges that she broke the terms of her house arrest when a U.S. citizen swam across a lake in May to visit her in the compound where she has been confined for 14 of the past 20 years.
For an issue as emotive as the fate of the leader whom Burmese refer to in whispers simply as the Lady, the general inaction has in many ways revealed the fragility of long-cherished visions of toppling the junta from the streets, born of memories from the mass pro-democracy protests of 1988. Some, such as the young activist, have ventured from remote village hideouts back into the cities to launch protests.
In the past two months, dozens have defied barriers and a heavy police presence to hold a vigil outside Insein Prison, where Suu Kyi is being held. Others have distributed pamphlets or photos of her, and some have tried to trigger spontaneous marches with what they call "flash strikes" -- unfurling banners in crowded markets in the hope that people will follow.
But the disparate networks of the opposition have tried in vain to forge a united strategy, and their attempts to prompt a mass movement have fizzled in a society frozen by decades of oppression and poverty.
From the ShadowsAlthough Suu Kyi's party, the National League for Democracy, won elections in a landslide in 1990, the ruling military junta invalidated the results, imprisoned opposition leaders and solidified its grip on power.
Two decades later, faith in the NLD's ability to bring the country closer to democracy has waned under its octogenarian caretakers. A few smaller groups have emerged from among groups of Buddhist monks, students or the aging leaders of the 1988 protests, with a shared goal of bringing change through nonviolent resistance to the one of the world's most repressive governments. But with many of their leaders arrested after the failed, monk-steered uprising in September 2007, the remaining activists operate illegally and from the shadows.
"All the organizations, they should be united. Some want to make strikes, some do not," said the deputy of a leading opposition network, a former political detainee who faces retaliation from authorities if his name is published. "We need more people; 100 to 200 people is not enough to make the whole country strike."
Wearing a starched shirt and longyi, the cloth wrap that substitutes for trousers, the leader sat in a downtown coffee shop, digging into a plate of fries. "I have so many different identity cards," he said with a grin. "Sometimes I am a teacher. Sometimes I am a student. Today, I am a teacher."
In the past year, 338 dissidents have been handed multi-decade sentences and have been scattered across Burma's network of prisons and detention camps, according to the Thai-based Assistance Association for Political Prisoners, which monitors the Burmese detention system. Many were celebrated figures in the 2007 protests.
Still, some remain undeterred. With his torn jeans, red-streaked hair and silver jewelry, Moe Thway, 28, blends easily into the crowd of young people sipping iced lattes at a Rangoon cafe. Thway is a founder of Generation Wave, one of the most shadowy of the country's underground opposition networks.
The trial of Suu Kyi prompted him to risk his first trip back to Burma from Thailand since security forces raided his house in March 2008. He stayed only a few days to meet with his members. Even his mother did not know he was in town, because he was afraid he would endanger her.
"We cannot push the people. We cannot pull. We must lead if we want success," he said.
His trip back to Rangoon in June, at the height of Suu Kyi's trial, proved disillusioning.
"I see the depression. The eyes -- they are hopeless," he said.
Since fleeing, Moe Thway has largely run the group's operations out of Mae Sot, a Thai border town. Two of his co-founders are behind bars. Another is in exile. Members still in Burma are subject to arrest at any moment. Authorities raided Thway's house in March 2008, arresting his younger brother and sentencing him to six months for charges that included illegal possession of "Rambo IV," a film that depicts Sylvester Stallone mowing down Burmese soldiers.
But working from Mae Sot allows Thway to coordinate operations in ways impossible inside Burma, also called Myanmar, where potential informers swarm, news is heavily curtailed and Internet cafes are ridden with spy software. Even with the widespread use of proxy servers to bypass censors, electricity regularly cuts out or the government shuts down the country's main Internet server as a tool of control. Land-line telephones are often tapped, and cellphones are used to track activists' movements.
Many opposition leaders say they see themselves as urban intellectuals with a duty to educate the wider population about civic engagement, particularly ahead of 2010 elections. The elections are nominally intended to implement a new constitution, but many critics have dismissed them as a sham. The opposition leader who poses as both teacher and student talked of his members melting into villages and factories, dressed as laborers and workers. "We talk to them about democracy. We talk to them about globalization, about human rights," he said.
Members of Generation Wave have encouraged friends and neighbors to head to workshops held on the Thai border that address issues such as human rights. The workshops, sponsored by foreign human rights groups or Burmese exiles, have yielded 1,000 graduates in the past five years, Moe Thway said. The challenge, he said, is getting graduates to overcome their fear and act back home on the lessons learned.
Patience Growing ThinOne night two weeks before he fled the city, the young activist on the jetty met with another activist in their usual spot -- a cubicle-size, lockable back room at a nightclub plastered with fluorescent planets.
The elder activist, 48, said he had spent the better part of 20 years posing as a fish farmer or rice-paddy laborer. All the while, he has been recruiting opposition activists, spreading ideas about political rights and, in recent months, encouraging a signature campaign against the junta.
"I go to where the people are oppressed," he said. "It is impossible for them to express themselves."
Wispy-thin, he sat stiffly in a large red anorak and railed about the need to educate the rural population.
He was back among the fish farmers when news of Suu Kyi's trial prompted him to travel 50 miles south to Rangoon. The young activist knew him from his teenage years as one of several regulars at a tea shop who would lend him books that eventually converted him into a professional activist.
The older man's patience is now growing thin. In next year's elections, he said, "we need to use an armed struggle. . . . They use violence, and they don't care about international pressure."
On another day, the young activist and three others from separate youth networks talked about sources of inspiration -- Czechoslovakia's Velvet Revolution, the anti-Slobodan Milosevic student movement in Serbia, South Africa's Nelson Mandela and India's Mahatma Gandhi. The conversation, which took place at a restaurant, quieted whenever a waiter hovered.
"To face a very powerful enemy, we need to be clever, we need to be peaceful and we need international support," said one, who introduced himself with a pseudonym.
Two weeks later, the activist returned to Rangoon smuggled in the cargo hold of a truck. He hoped to help coordinate the launch of a "yellow campaign," which aims to encourage Burmese to wear a color favored by Suu Kyi.
This time, he said, he was resolved.
"I won't leave," he said. "I will stay here and fight."
