Rangoon Memories

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Sept. 26, 2007, — -- It is with an eerie sense of déjà vu that I have been watching the Burmese military maneuvering to put down the swelling protests by monks on the streets of Rangoon over the past week.

I was in Rangoon, Burma, also known as Myanmar, in September 1988 when the military shot thousands of students demonstrating for democracy. And it looks as if their playbook has changed little since then.

As they did two decades ago, the military sat back and watched the demonstrations get bigger -- in 1988 they were initially sparked by a revaluation of the currency, just as these demonstrations were prompted by the government's decision to double fuel prices. Then as a political, anti-regime element came in, the generals decided they had to act. They declared a curfew, banned gatherings of more than five people and started to truck in the troops, some of them from units based in the jungle who knew little about life in the city.

When I saw those pictures of the dark green covered trucks with soldiers inside I knew this was going to get serious again.

In the 1988 coup there were five foreign reporters in Rangoon -- we were staying in the old Strand Hotel, and our only communication with the outside world was one old telex machine and a single telephone at the front desk that took many attempts to get an international line. When we arrived, the city was poised between giddy hopes of real reform and deep fears of a bloody crackdown.

There were bands of students all over the city carrying pro-democracy banners (they charmingly pronounced it "demo-crazy"), Aung San Suu Kyi had become their leadership figure, and there were daily rallies. But there were also strange stories of provocateurs beheading alleged spies in the streets and people poisoning water supplies. Something was brewing.

When the military announced on radio the following day that they were taking power, many older people knew that the shooting was going to start, and they tried to get their children to stay home. But on Monday a large group of students marched down the street outside the U.S. Embassy, thinking that there at least the military would not dare to attack them.

They were wrong.

Overnight the army had positioned men on the rooftops of the street, and that morning they started shooting from overhead at the students, who had nowhere to run to escape. Around the city there were other confrontations, and by nightfall hundreds were dead.

I remember going to Rangoon General Hospital and seeing a young student who had been shot in the torso dying on a gurney as his friend held his hand -- his friend had lost his shoes and was barefoot, and he was standing in a pool of dark red blood that was spilling off the gurney.

We spent a lot of time with Aung San Suu Kyi in her house on University Avenue by Inya Lake. We could hear the shooting outside, and yet she sat there, composed but furious, decrying the unnecessary loss of life. She was unshakeable, and has never wavered since, refusing all offers to leave Burma, knowing that if she does they will never let her back in. She sees her destiny as something similar to Nelson Mandela (they both have won the Nobel Peace Prize) -- sometime in the future her day will come to lead the country back into the light.

By the end of the week the military had reasserted control in Rangoon, but several thousand Burmese, mostly idealistic students, had been killed. Many more were jailed, and a lot fled to the Thai border seeking sanctuary.

Today, the generals are faced with a slightly different threat -- not students, but monks, who are deeply revered by the Burmese. They will be unwilling to shoot the monks, but at the same time they have consistently shown they will not tolerate any challenge to their absolute power. I have great fear for the immediate future in Burma.