This Just In

Student activists vow to keep pressure on the Junta

Burma

By TE-PING CHEN | October 10, 2007

Weeks after thousands of red-clad Burmese monks and civilians protesting in the streets rocked world headlines, students across the United States are determined not to let the spotlight on the issue slip.

Two weeks ago, a scarlet sea of 300 Brown students rallied to support the Burmese protesting the country’s military regime, which seized control nearly two decades ago and has ruled through force ever since. According to Thelma Young, grassroots coordinator for the DC-based US Campaign for Burma, more than 100 college campuses have hosted similar events, with more to come. (Brown’s gathering was among the first and largest.) Meanwhile this weekend, global demonstrations took place, from India and Thailand to France.

Momentum on Brown’s campus owes much to Andrew Lim, co-founder of Brown’s newly launched US Campaign for Burma chapter. Lim, whose parents emigrated from Burma 25 years ago, calls his first visit to Burma in 2001 an “eye-opener.” He remembers how government spies trailed his family, and how swaths of the city had gone unchanged for decades — it was like stepping into a timewarp. “Everything was so controlled,” he says.

For a brief window last month, it seemed the military junta’s control was finally crumbling. Burmese activists turned cellphones and Internet cafés into tools of international appeal, uploading footage of their resistance around the globe, including shots of unarmed protesters being beaten. Up to 100,000 Burmese took to the streets — a staggering display of defiance against a regime that Human Rights Watch has classified as among the most oppressive in the world.

Last week, however, the military shut down Burma’s Internet service providers as part of a concerted media clampdown. The last time the regime faced wide-scale resistance was in 1988, when troops killed more than 3000 civilians in retaliation. The same will happen, Lim fears, once the world is looking the other way.

Accordingly, organizers at Brown say they plan to maintain their pressure through petitions and educational outreach. While decades of sanctions against Burma have stripped the US of direct influence over the country, organizers are pushing the US to use its powerful moral leverage to embarrass China — a country with considerable material ties to Burma — into acting before the 2008 Beijing Olympics. (To date, every UN resolution in support of international action in Burma has died because of a Chinese veto.)

“A lot of times in today’s college culture, you forget how much power universities have,” says Brown senior Patrick Cook-Deegan, the Northeast Regional Coordinator for USCB. But he argues that students played an “integral role” in South Africa’s anti-apartheid movement and in reversing China’s opposition to peacekeepers in Darfur — and that the same influence can be wielded for Burma.

Lim says action is necessary, and that the world owes it to the monks who have put themselves on the line. “The protesters know the military is going to keep power at all costs,” says Lim. “They know they can’t change the regime.” What protesters are trying to do, he argues, is “galvanize the international community to act — however we can.”

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