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MAE SOT,
Thailand—This bustling border town has long been a magnet
for refugees fleeing Myanmar’s repressive military
government and searching for a better life. But many
arriving now, on the run from authorities for their role
in organizing prodemocracy rallies last month, are not
looking to settle here. They are preparing for their
return.
“We are
living for democracy and human rights, not for ourselves,”
said Hlaing Moe Than, 37, as he sat on the tile floor of
an empty apartment where he lives here, a single
fluorescent bulb buzzing over his head.
Chain-smoking from a plastic bag of cigarettes on the
floor beside him, Moe Than described days filled with
media interviews since he arrived on October 7 and calls
from his contacts still in Myanmar who have so far eluded
capture. “We cannot allow any kind of dictatorship inside
Myanmar” to continue, he said. “We have to increase our
struggle.”
Revolutionary fervor, not despair, has gripped this town,
which for years has been a base for prodemocracy forces.
At the office of the National League for Democracy, the
Myanmar opposition party led by Nobel Peace laureate Aung
San Suu Kyi, staff work around the clock providing
services for refugees and organizing media interviews to
help keep international attention on the situation in
Myanmar.
An
organization of former political prisoners also has an
office here, where it documents and distributes lists of
people arrested by the ruling junta of Myanmar, also known
as Burma. Its network of contacts is strong, forged over
20 years by people who all have been jailed—many more than
once—for their political activities, activists say.
“They are
all my best friends,” said Moe Than, who has been jailed
twice. “They all are also my leaders.”
During the
protests in September, his job was to organize
demonstrations in his home town, Kyauk Padaung, near
Mandalay,
Myanmar’s
second-largest city. He was the group’s “hidden fruit,” he
said, explaining that if “most of them were arrested, I
should try to carry on their ways.”
Myanmar’s
ruling junta, meanwhile, continues to hunt down and arrest
not only those connected with the protests but also those
associated with prodemocracy movements in the past.
“The
prodemocracy forces are very weak. I don’t imagine they
are going to topple the government,” said Dominic Faulder,
a British journalist who was based in Myanmar during an
uprising in 1988 that was crushed by government troops,
resulting in the deaths of thousands of people nationwide.
But the
military junta, Faulder said, has repeated mistakes made
20 years ago by allowing the country to grind to a halt.
That, combined with assaults against the country’s revered
Buddhist monks, may have “lit a slow-burning fuse.”
“The
military is twice as big now as it was then,” Faulder
said. “It’s a mistake to assume all members are happy and
well taken care of. They’re not. There are elements that
are corrosive and that could tilt the balance.”
Activists
are now waiting to see what, if anything, comes from
various diplomatic efforts. United Nations envoy Ibrahim
Gambari is on a six-nation mission in the region. The
government might be using the meetings to buy time,
experts say, hoping that world attention will move
elsewhere.
For those
fighting the government, the protests were important not
only because of the leadership role taken by the monks,
who drew hundreds of thousands to the demonstrations, but
also because of the number of teenagers who participated,
especially in the latter days after the government
crackdown on September 26 and 27.
Until
then, much of the antigovernment activity in Myanmar had
been organized by 88 Generation, a group of activists who
helped lead the 1988 protests.
“I feel
for the teenagers. They want to be free from the
oppressive life,” said an opposition activist who arrived
here from Myanmar on October 21 and spoke on condition of
anonymity because she fears for her family.
The woman,
who marched with students on September 27 and 28 in
downtown Yangon, said she saw teenagers being beaten and
dragged into trucks. But she also noted that other young
people quickly joined the remaining marchers. “I thought,
‘This time we can finish the movement,’” meaning force the
generals to turn over power.
Her own
19-year-old daughter was not involved in the protests but
was busy finishing school exams, she said. Despite her own
involvement in the protests, the woman believed her
daughter had nothing to fear. She was wrong.
When
police could not find the woman after days of searching,
they went to her house on October 10 at 1 a.m. and
arrested her daughter, she said. The woman, who had
severed contact with her family to protect them and had
been staying in different houses every night, learned of
the arrest the following afternoon from another opposition
member. She does not know where her daughter is.
She wept
as she told the story. “I thought she would be fine,” she
said.
The woman
said she fled for
Thailand
only after realizing that she was endangering friends who
had taken her in. She noticed they would not sleep for
fear she would be discovered in their house. Police trucks
had rolled through Yangon neighborhoods broadcasting from
loudspeakers that if anyone was found harboring a
protester, they, too, would be arrested.
She came
out of hiding and left for Thailand with a sense of
fatalism, she recalled. She gave her real name when she
bought her bus ticket and carried her ID card. “If they
know me, I don’t care if I’m arrested,” she said.
Now in Mae
Sot, she has only two goals. The first is to find out what
has happened to her daughter. The second, “I’ll continue
the movement.” |
