BBC-East Asia Today-Living in the S

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East Asia Today
September 18th 1998

Living in the Shadow of the Junta

It's ten years since troops were sent in to crush pro-democracy protests in
Burma. On that day - September the eighteenth, 1988 - martial law was
declared and a military council known as the State Law and Order
Restoration Council, or SLORC, was formed. A decade on, the generals are
still in power, though younger faces are in evidence, and the junta is now
known as the State Peace and Development Council.

A decade of international engagement with the Burmese military regime, has
produced little, in terms of dialogue with the democratic opposition. The
National League for Democracy, led by Aung San Suu Kyi, is still isolated -
over seven hundred of its members and hundreds of its MP, elected in 1990,
have been detained. 

But what of ordinary people, say in the run of the mill coffee shops, in
rural areas? Have political developments in the capital really touched
their lives? East Asia Today presenter, Christopher Gunness, asked the
Burma scholar at Rutgers University in the United States, Joe Silverstein:

Joe Silverstein: I think it has affected it in a number of ways. If I were
a young person looking forward to some kind of education, I would have been
in great difficulty because the universities have been closed for most of
this period. When they have opened, they haven't been opened on a regular
basis so that a student could actually get involved and it has dipped down
into secondary schools. So Burmese young people have lost a half a
generation of education. Secondly, if I were a person living under the
military, I would certainly see that I am not able to live an ordinary
life. The fact that we are sitting in a teashop and talking, we will both
look over our shoulders to see who is listening. If anyone is listening we
will be very cautious if we are going to go down the road, especially if we
are in a rural area, that there could be a military patrol about. They
might stop us, they might demand money from us, they might attack us
because they would assume that we were somebody preparing underground
activity. So life would be very dangerous for us.

Christopher Gunness: But a lot of human rights abuses took place where
there was a lot of ethnic insurgency going on. Arguably because we have
seen cease-fires in these areas there are fewer human rights violations in
these places. Is that true?

Joe Silverstein: Not necessarily. This doesn't mean that the military
hasn't pressganged men, picked up young people at night, put them into army
trucks and taken them away for military service. More importantly in the
Burma area as opposed to the minority area, the military is much more
dubious about people because they believe they are better able to organise
resistance and are essentially the enemy that has to be controlled.

Christopher Gunness: The army argues that particularly in the ethnic
minority areas, they have brought some stability. Is there some truth in
that argument?

Joe Silverstein: I can't imagine what they are proving except the stability
of the dead, or the absolute dominance of people so they cower in their
presence. The military has no security, it has no money and it is therefore
making constant demands on the farmer to provide food, to provide labour
for the soldiers. If they can't pay for it, they are forced to raise money
and buy their way out of service. The urban population, which is seen as
much more revolutionary and dangerous, is in far greater danger from being
informed upon or under surveillance and thus their lives have been
interfered with.