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Wednesday 3 December 2008

The sweet contagion of freedom

The sweet contagion of freedom will outlast the bloodshed in Burma

Burma is awakening from a nightmare of greed and repression. 

Fergal Keane meets a family on the Thai-Burma border whose tragic story is Burma's story but remains optimistic about the chances of the Burmese desire for freedom ultimately triumphing over the junta. 

The poor got poorer and the prices went up. Until one fateful day six weeks ago when the Generals jacked up the price of fuel and the long-suffering population revolted. It began with 400 people marching in a rural town on 19 August. From there things escalated, with the country’s Buddhist clergy at the head of the demonstrations. There is a precedent for such spiritually guided rebellions in Asia. Remember the self-immolating monks in President Diem’s Vietnam? Then as now the protest was against a corrupt and brutal regime. A contemporary observer wrote: ‘The city people who had for years remained passive in the face of the Diemist police crowded into the pagodas to kneel and weep.’

In the Philippines the moral force of the Roman Catholic church gave courage to the hundreds of thousands who joined the ‘People Power’ revolution against the odious dictator Ferdinand Marcos. In the increasingly secularised West we find it hard to imagine how a population could invest such hope in spiritual leaders. On the streets of Rangoon and Mandalay, they were the only ones able to give an example of courage.

What has kept the Burmese quiet for nearly two decades is a system of internal repression that would do credit to the excesses of Stalin. I will always remember Burma as a country where the fear of betrayal haunts every conversation. The telltales and spies are everywhere.

Yet there are still those brave enough to speak out. All week they have been calling the BBC Burmese Service — a great lifeline of free expression that makes all the difference in the world to the oppressed of Burma. One pro-democracy activist who has gone into hiding called a colleague to say she would keep on fighting. ‘For as long as it takes,’ she said.

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