Nonviolent acts won't alter Myanmar
Thursday, October 4, 2007 3:50 AM
By Gwynne Dyer
Monasteries are empty, telecommunications have been severed and a sullen silence seems to envelop the whole country. It doesn't just feel like a defeat for the people of Myanmar; it feels like the end of an era. It was an era that began at the other end of southeast Asia two decades ago, with the nonviolent overthrow of the Marcos regime in the Philippines by "people power" in 1986.
For a while, nonviolent revolutions seemed almost unstoppable: Bangladesh, South Korea, Thailand and Indonesia followed the Filipinos' example, overthrowing military rule and moving to open democratic systems after decades of oppression. China almost managed to follow their example in the Tiananmen Square episode of 1989, and then the contagion spread to Europe.
The Berlin Wall came down in late 1989, the communist regimes of eastern Europe melted away with scarcely a shot fired, and by 1991, the Soviet Union had gone into liquidation. It was the threat of similar nonviolent action that finally brought the apartheid regime in South Africa to the negotiating table in the early 1990s. The trend continued into the 21st century, with undemocratic regimes forced to yield power by unarmed protesters from Serbia to Georgia to Nepal. But there always are exceptions, and exceptions always are instructive.
The greatest exception, in the early days, was Myanmar. Entranced by the seeming ease with which their neighbors were dumping their dictators and emboldened by the transfer of power from Gen. Ne Win (who had been in power for a quarter-century) to a junta of lesser generals, civilians ventured out streets to demand democracy. The army slaughtered 3,000 of them in the streets of Yangon, whisking the bodies away to be burned, and the protesters went very quiet.
It was this repression that gave the Chinese regime the confidence to do the same thing in Tiananmen Square the following year, and it worked there, too. People went very quiet after the massacre, and the regime remains firmly in power 18 years later. Nonviolent protest is a powerful tactic, but no tactic works in every contingency. Nonviolent protest does not work against a regime that is willing to commit a massacre and can persuade its troops to carry out its orders.
The emotion that nonviolence works on is shame. Most people feel that murdering large numbers of their fellow citizens on the streets in broad daylight is a shameful action, and even if the privileged people at the top of a regime can smother that emotion, their soldiers, who have to do the killing, may not be able to.
If you cannot be sure your soldiers will obey that order, then it is wise not to give it, since you present them with a dilemma that can only be resolved by turning their weapons against the regime. Better to negotiate a peaceful withdrawal from power. Nonviolent revolution can't succeed if the army is sufficiently isolated from the public.
The isolation can be achieved by indoctrination, but physical separation helps. Before Chinese leaders ordered the attack on Tiananmen Square, it withdrew the Beijing garrison, which they believed to be contaminated by close contact with the public, and replaced it with divisions brought in from the deep interior. The killing was carried out by country boys to whom the sophisticated residents of Beijing looked like alien beings, people about whom almost any lie seemed credible.
Myanmar's army is profoundly isolated from civilians. Its officers, over the decades of military rule, have become a separate, self-recruiting caste that enjoys great privileges, and its soldiers are country boys. Not one in a hundred is from Yangon or Mandalay. The regime has even moved the capital from Yangon to the preposterous jungle "city" of Naypyidaw, a newly built place whose only business is government, in order to increase the social isolation of its soldiers and servants.
So when the protesters came out on the streets again in the bigger cities after 19 years, led this time by monks whose prestige made many believe the army would not dare touch them, the regime simply started killing again. The death toll this time is probably no more than a tenth of that in 1988, because people got the message very quickly: Nobody who defies the regime is safe. Not even monks.
The people are now pinning their hopes on foreign intervention, but that never is going to happen. It never played a decisive role in the nonviolent revolutions that succeeded, either. Sooner or later the extreme corruption of the army's senior officers will destroy its discipline, but meanwhile it is probably more years of tyranny, with only Aung San Suu Kyi, the heroic symbol of democracy who lives under semipermanent house arrest, to bear witness against it.
Against other repressive regimes, nonviolence has a reasonable chance of succeeding.
It never has worked in Myanmar.
Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.
76312.1476@compuserve.com
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