Burma’s people demand both rice and rationality

Commentary

Burma’s people demand both rice and rationality

November 7, 2007 04:15:00 pm

Edited by:

Awzar Thi [Member, Asian Human Rights Commission, Hong Kong]: "The renewal of protests in Burma during recent days should come as no surprise to anyone other than those persons who have written foolish articles making out that what happened in September was somehow not the doing of the people there themselves but rather a consequence of covert American foreign policy.

Every society has its threshold, the point after which it will no longer tolerate things going on as before. The threshold for people in Burma is much higher than that of many other societies today, and thus they have put up with a lot more for a lot longer than might otherwise have been expected. This does not mean that they have not fought back, but rather that their forms of resistance have not attracted much outside interest, nor seriously threatened the army's hold on power. Rather, many have served to keep the country back from the threshold for so long.

But it is no longer possible for people there to use ordinary methods of defiance to alleviate their problems. The conditions under which they are being forced to live have become intolerable. The protests are a consequence of the threshold being reached, not engineering from the outside. The struggle that is on now in Burma is ultimately a struggle for desperate survival. There is no other way.

Once this is understood, it is also not surprising to find that monks have come out to play a lead role. In the past a Burmese pun ran that "school students eat well, monastic students are beggars" (they go to collect alms with the monks). In recent years, that pun has been ironically inverted: now monastic students eat well; school students are beggars. The monks get their food and living needs from the general population. When they see that others are going without in order to feed them, this is not something they can ignore: they must protect their adherents, as they have done for centuries.

The struggle for survival of Burma's people is by corollary a struggle for survival of its dictators, whose response to the protests has throughout been characterised by lawlessness: the complete departure from not only international law but also from those domestic standards to which they pretend to subscribe.

Although the international media have referred to thousands of persons being "arrested," according to the authorities themselves they have only "called, investigated and interrogated" them, without regard to criminal procedure or any other established regulations. People are still being taken from their houses with no warning or explanation. Others are being pulled off the streets. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, have not been located and must be treated as forcibly disappeared until proven otherwise. The inability of the International Committee of the Red Cross to access prisons and other places of confinement, despite its best efforts, has greatly hampered attempts to account for the missing.

Against this backdrop, the struggle for survival of Burma's people can also be seen as a struggle against the un-rule of law. Their demands are for both rice and rationality: each depends upon an end to the arbitrary rule under which they have been needlessly obliged to subsist for over four decades. And justice – both in the legal and social sense – will come to their country no other way."

(Awzar Thi is the pen name of a member of the Asian Human Rights Commission with over 15 years of experience as an advocate of human rights and the rule of law in Thailand and Burma. His Rule of Lords blog can be read at http://ratchasima.net)

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Martin Luther King Jr. wrote his Letter from Birmingham Jail

On April 16, 1963, an incarcerated Martin Luther King, Jr. (arrested for demonstrating in defiance of a court order) wrote his Letter from Birmingham Jail in response to a published statement by eight fellow clergymen from Alabama.

Part of the letter read: We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God-given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we stiff creep at horse-and-buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging dark of segregation to say, "Wait." But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son who is asking: "Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?"; when you take a cross-county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading "white" and "colored"; when your first name becomes "nigger," your middle name becomes "boy" (however old you are) and your last name becomes "John," and your wife and mother are never given the respected title "Mrs."; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness" then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience. Read the full text of the Letter.