Yangon: On August 8, 1988, Jimmy led a group of thousands of students and activists on a march through Myanmar’s then-capital Yangon that ended outside city hall, where he addressed the crowds. He demanded the establishment of a multi-party system and the end of a military government that had ruled Myanmar with an iron fist since a 1962 coup while crippling the economy.
“At about 11 pm, the soldiers began shooting,” said Jimmy, who took this pseudonym from comic book heroes to confuse the Myanmar military’s secret police. Over the next few days, hundreds of students and protesters were shot dead on the streets of Yangon, then still known as Rangoon, and across the country.
The generals promised reforms but after activists took control of local administrations they launched a brutal military coup in which thousands were killed. They established a military junta that would rule the country for the next 22 years. Activists established political parties, went underground or headed to the jungle to take up arms against the new government. Some spent decades behind bars.
On the 30th anniversary of the bloody uprising, one of Jimmy’s fellow 1988 activists, Myint Aung, is busy forming a new political party to challenge the ruling National League of Democracy (NLD), established by Aung San Suu Kyi after she emerged as a figurehead in 1988.
“We supported the NLD in 2012 and 2015 [elections], but now we see democracy is going down,” said Myint Aung, part of the same anti-junta group as Jimmy, called Generation 88. “We have lost our voice.”
Though Suu Kyi led the NLD to a landslide victory in the first democratic elections in decades in 2015, half-way through her first term Myanmar people are frustrated by sluggish economic growth, a faltering peace process to end civil war and a failure to rein in the still-powerful military and bring about full democracy.
“It is wrong to describe recent developments in Burma [Myanmar] as democratization,’” said Myanmar expert Bertil Lintner.
“People are enjoying certain freedoms which would have been unthinkable until 2011, but actual power remains with the military,” he said. Suu Kyi’s election pledge to change Myanmar’s 2008 constitution — which gives the military control of three security ministries and enough seats in parliament to veto constitutional changes — has proved a tough challenge.
She has failed to bring about change either through parliament or through back-door meetings with the generals.
“We are living in a hybrid regime, where power is shared between the democratic government and the military,” said Bo Kyi, a 1988 student protester and joint-secretary of the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners, which provides help for an estimated 5,000 political prisoners who have been locked up since 1988.
Myanmar’s military boasts not only political power but control of some of Myanmar’s largest companies and natural resources. It continues to wage wars on the country’s ethnic groups, frustrating Suu Kyi’s attempts to make good on another election promise of peace. The generals continue to act with impunity, including in Rakhine State, where their “clearance operations” in 2017 killed at least 7,000 minority Rohingya, sent 700,000 across the border to Bangladesh and were labelled ethnic cleansing by the UN.
“The civil war goes on, torture remains widespread and gross human rights violations still exist. We have come a long way, but we have much further to go and the government has a lot more to do,” said BoKyi.
Myint Aung’s new party, to be named People’s Party, will work with ethnic groups and other parties to change the 2008 constitution, he said.
“Some of the sections we can change in parliament, without the 75 per cent [majority]. We will also work together with ethnic groups and our other alliances outside of the parliament to change,” said Myint Aung.
The military has forced Suu Kyi to balance the interests of liberalisation and maintaining stability, argued Min Zaw Oo, who after 1988 fought for a student armed group in the east before eventually returning to Myanmar as a peace negotiator.
“Suu Kyi was an icon of the movement and she kept the movement alive,” he said.
Former political prisoner and Myanmar analyst Khin Zaw Win said both the NLD and the People’s Party, which he called a “limp party with little prospects,” have ignored young people, who could effect real change.
“Outdated organisations and methods no longer work, Myanmar has to rely on real innovation, but this is not forthcoming,” he said. — dpa
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