Burma's Agony

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Other nations, most of whom greeted the '88 crackdown with silence, are keeping a much closer watch this time on the unfolding drama in Burma. On Wednesday, the U.N. Security Council convened an emergency meeting to discuss the turmoil in the country. A day before in his address to the U.N General Assembly in New York City, U.S. President George W. Bush criticized the "reign of fear" in Burma; he unveiled further restrictions on the regime, including travel bans to the U.S. for members of the junta and their families, extending sanctions that have been in place for a decade. The same day, Britain's Foreign Secretary David Miliband spoke of how "brilliant" it was to see monks march on Saturday to the home of Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, the daughter of the independence hero who led Burma's struggle against the British. Suu Kyi has spent much of the past 18 years under house arrest. Her National League for Democracy (NLD) won elections back in 1990, but the generals refused to honor the results. "It will be a hundred times better," said Miliband, "when she takes her rightful place as the elected leader of a free and democratic Burma."

That sentiment echoes the wishes of many in the Buddhist clergy, who through the newly formed All-Burma Monks Alliance, have called for Suu Kyi's release and, even more dramatically, the junta's expulsion "from Burmese soil forever." "We must not retreat," vows a 23-year-old monk in Rangoon. "If we retreat, we fail." Historically, Buddhist clerics have been a key element of resistance in Burma, from British colonial days through the democracy rallies in 1988. But this time, the monks are not simply adding their moral authority to the movement; they are leading the protests. The shift is significant, particularly for a junta that has tried to burnish its influence by linking itself to Buddhism. Burma's government-run newspapers regularly display generals lavishing money on building new pagodas and monasteries. "The junta has bent over backwards to show how good Buddhists they are," says Josef Silverstein, a Burma expert at Rutgers University in New Jersey. "For them to legitimize a crackdown, they will have to prove that the protests are being led by misguided monks who are actually misusing Buddhism."

Burma's generals will have a tough time convincing the public they hold more spiritual suasion than the monks. Holed up in Naypyidaw, a city that was constructed out of jungle in 2005 to replace Rangoon as the national capital, the military leaders have virtually barricaded themselves from their subjects. While ordinary Burmese get ever poorer because of the junta's economic mismanagement, the generals live in swanky mansions and drive fancy cars. The government has signed lucrative gas-pipeline and timber deals with other nations, but little of the money trickles down to ordinary people. The steep fuel hikes in August only heightened the economic disparity, as some formerly white-collar workers could no longer afford to take the bus to the office. Buddhist clerics are experiencing privation, too, since their lives depend on offerings from the people. "The monks are an economic barometer in Burma," says Sunai Phasuk, a consultant for Human Rights Watch in Bangkok. "They feel the deterioration of the economy and the hardship of their followers."

The ruling class' isolation stands in contrast to the increased connectivity of the Burmese people. Technology has revolutionized dissent. Cell phones can now be rented for $50 a month, and a click of a button sends pictures of protests to the outside world. Aung Zaw, an exiled student activist who edits the Irrawaddy, a Thailand-based publication that covers Burmese affairs, recalls how it took nearly a month for word of student protests in the early 1990s to reach Thailand. "Now we get information about protests almost instantly," he says, "and it's then sent back to people in Burma so they know what's going on across the country." The flow of information has even spawned a group of Burmese bloggers, some of whom operate out of Rangoon's 200-plus Internet cafés. (Just four years ago, there were fewer than 30 such Web cafés.) On Sept. 1, as protests against the fuel hikes were gathering momentum, 600 people showed up at the inaugural meeting of the Myanmar Bloggers Society in Rangoon. One member, a computer instructor who later witnessed Suu Kyi's Saturday meeting with the monks, uploaded a grainy digital photo she took of the momentous event. A few hours later, the picture had traveled across the globe.