BURMA: Solidarity

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BURMA Solidarity

Early last month, the gates of a sequestered compound in the northwest suburbs of sticky, sprawling Rangoon creaked open and 68 men & women filed out. They straggled the short distance to Kyandaw Cemetery, the city's common burial ground for Burmese Buddhists, camped there. They had not come to die; they were lepers who had caught the strike fever. Their bargaining power rested on the notion which Burmese share with other Asiatics that leprosy is a highly contagious disease.

To leprosarium authorities, leper leader Maung Kyaw Thu laid down demands to be met "immediately": 1) improve the wretched diet; 2) reduce working hours of inmates (now six hours daily); 3) step up injection treatments of chaulmoogra oil to the prewar level of two a day.

Until the authorities acted, the lepers could afford to wait. In Burma, social outcasts help each other. The lepers were being fed with rice donated by cemetery workers, who occupy the lowest rank in Burmese society.