Burma Under Bloody Siege

By Daniel Benjamin

From Mandalay in the central plain to Moulmein on the Andaman Sea, Burma burst into flames last week, the spark provided by protest and bloodshed, the oxygen by rumor. In Sagaing, a city of 70,000 in the center of the country, security forces opened up with shotguns on a crowd of 5,000 that was converging on a police station, and 31 people were reported killed. In the suburbs of Rangoon, the capital, three policemen were reported to have been beheaded by enraged mobs. Word of mutinies by military units in the north and east flickered through the country like fire on a trail of gunpowder. In Rangoon protesters against the regime of recently installed President Sein Lwin begged motorists for gasoline to make Molotov cocktails. Others marched through the streets in grisly corteges, bearing aloft the bodies of demonstrators killed by security forces.

For five days last week, violence engulfed much of Burma, a country peopled by devout Buddhists averse to bloodletting, in a spontaneous eruption of discontent that rocked a despised government to its foundations. Then, just as the surge of clashes ebbed slightly -- as if both sides were catching their breath -- the protesters won what they had set out to achieve, the resignation of Sein Lwin (pronounced sane lwin), 64, a hard-line retired general who had succeeded longtime Strongman Ne Win only 17 days earlier. No explanation accompanied the Radio Rangoon announcement of the President's resignation beyond a brief mention that he had also given up chairmanship of the Burma Socialist Program Party, the country's sole political organization. Who would take his place remained a mystery, but there was speculation that General Kyaw Htin, a respected former chief of staff and Defense Minister, was in control; he had signed the resignation announcement.

The upheaval left Burma's 38 million people in a volatile, though temporarily quiet state, with the party still confronted by an opposition at $ once broad based and emboldened by success. Desperately grasping to save its crumbling legitimacy, the party announced a special meeting of its Central Committee and of the People's Assembly this Friday to address the crisis. Among observers in Rangoon, a wary optimism prevailed. "There is a small glimmer of hope after years of gathering darkness," was the way one Western diplomat put it. "Maybe the country has turned a corner -- and that's a big maybe."

By the time Sein Lwin fell, the official death toll in the disturbances had risen to 98, though foreign diplomats in Rangoon placed the figure at several times that number. Unofficial estimates held that more than 1,000 protesters had been killed by security forces and that many thousands more had suffered injuries.

The fall of Sein Lwin, frequently described as the "most hated man in Burma" because of his brutal handling of past antigovernment outbursts, could mark the end of a 26-year era of one-party rule. Since Ne Win, then head of the Burmese army, seized power in 1962 and replaced democracy with autocracy, virtually all political expression has been suppressed in something of a perpetual purge, the sole exception being the Burma Socialist Program Party.

Ne Win had promised a "Burmese Way to Socialism" -- a strange mix of Buddhism, socialism and isolationism -- but instead allowed a potentially robust economy to drift on a joyless ride down a Burmese road to ruin. Once Asia's premier rice exporter and a country rich in oil, grain, gems and timber, Burma slipped into abject impoverishment, thanks to haphazard central planning, mismanagement and an unbending policy of self-sufficiency. While resources were devoted to a four-decade struggle with tribal guerrilla armies around the country, annual per capita income sank from $670 in 1960 to $190 in 1987, according to the World Bank. The United Nations lists Burma among the least-developed countries on the globe.

Choked off at the center and fraying at the edges, Burma seemed primed for combustion. Harbingers of trouble had appeared in the form of occasional protests for almost a year, only to be quickly suppressed by security forces under the command of Sein Lwin, then the party's secretary-general. Ever strengthening tremors began two weeks ago, as larger and larger crowds, first of students, then of all manner of citizens, gathered at the Shwedagon Pagoda, the splendid golden shrine in North Rangoon, and the Sule Pagoda in the center of the city.

The first major quake struck early last week. In defiance of martial law, which Sein Lwin had decreed on Aug. 3, tens of thousands -- perhaps more than had gathered for any occasion since independence in 1948 -- flocked into the streets of the capital in response to a general strike called by students. Similar demonstrations occurred in at least 16 other cities. Soldiers from the army's 77th Brigade, which had been deployed in Rangoon several days earlier, stood quietly away from the marchers.

All that changed within a few hours. Last Monday evening the 77th Brigade was replaced by the 22nd Light Infantry, a battle-hardened division that was pulled from eastern Burma. Half an hour after, the new unit took up positions, its soldiers opened fire; an estimated four were killed by the first volleys. Through the following day, the shooting against unarmed ralliers continued. According to reports received by officials in Washington, the soldiers appeared to have orders to fire: "There were well-organized bodies of troops roaming the city, shooting at groups of demonstrators."

At one point, after security forces barged into Rangoon General Hospital, several doctors and nurses, having refused to hand over injured demonstrators, were shot by the soldiers. Radio Rangoon broadcast news of the decapitations of three policemen outside Rangoon and later reported that in the town of North Okkalapa, where two of the executions supposedly took place, 10,000 demonstrators had surrounded an army unit, causing more gunfire.

Because of the regime's control of the press and the restrictions on foreign journalists, reliable information was sparse. Even the whereabouts of Ne Win, the man who only a few weeks earlier had seemed so unassailable, were uncertain. Rumor had it that the 78-year-old was honeymooning with his 25- year-old wife -- his sixth -- at his magnificent villa on Inya Lake, about seven miles from Rangoon, protected by 700 soldiers.

Burma's upheaval, meantime, seemed likely to worsen at the periphery. Some of the ethnic guerrillas of the National Democratic Front, an antigovernment coalition that claims to have a total of 35,000 men and women under arms, announced that the tribal armies would join forces with the urban demonstrators. Brang Seng, head of the Kachin Independence Organization, called for an offensive to push government troops out of the cities.

If the road to discontent began in 1962, when Ne Win led a coup that ousted % Prime Minister U Nu, the most careless turns were taken in the past year. A critical one came in September, when the government invalidated all 25-, 35- and 75-kyat notes. (The government-set exchange rate is 6.29 kyats to the dollar; the black-market rate is closer to 45 kyats.) Designed to curb ruinous inflation -- then as high as 100% for some commodities -- and to punch a hole in the black market, the decree wiped out 60% of the country's currency, and with it the savings and hopes of Burma's middle class.

Visible disaffection with the Ne Win regime grew in March, when a fresh round of protests was brutally put down. The unrest, triggered by a teahouse brawl between progovernment and antigovernment youths, was quashed by Sein Lwin's despised riot police, the Lon Htein, with as many as 300 demonstrators killed. While being carted off to jail, 41 detainees suffocated in a police van.

Frustration began bubbling over following a party session last month, a gathering that tantalizingly augured reform but delivered nothing of the kind. Ne Win had called the party congress a year ahead of schedule, purportedly because he was upset over the March riots and lingering unrest in June. At the session, he offered his resignation for being "indirectly responsible" for the rioting. He stunned the delegates and the country even more by proposing a referendum on whether Burma should have a multiparty system. His resignation was accepted, but the referendum was rejected -- in part, no doubt, because party members had no desire to relinquish their privileges.

The announcement that Sein Lwin would assume the party leadership caught the Burmese, as well as foreign observers, by surprise and punctured hope for a political liberalization. Sein Lwin, also known as "the Butcher," was the man most identified with the repression of the Ne Win years. The link went back to 1962, when Sein Lwin, then an army captain and a fellow plotter in Ne Win's coup, commanded a company of soldiers that massacred students at the Rangoon University Students' Union who were opposed to the military takeover. He became Ne Win's chief enforcer and, as commander of the riot police, was believed responsible for the murderous excesses of last March. Explains Minoru Kiryu, a Japanese expert on Burma: "The public sentiment was 'That is the one person we cannot forgive.' "

Matters were exacerbated shortly after Sein Lwin's election, when he ordered the arrest of retired Brigadier Aung Gyi, the closest thing Burma has to an | opposition leader. In recent months, Aung Gyi had sent Ne Win several open letters criticizing government corruption and incompetence -- including that of Sein Lwin -- and advocating reform.

In the absence of a strong class of businessmen or a highly organized church -- both of which existed in the Philippines when Ferdinand Marcos was deposed -- the party and the 163,000-troop Burmese army it controls have a virtual monopoly on political power. The likelihood is that any new leadership will be drawn from the military. If the army engineers a coup, chances are that the move will be led by younger officers, men in their late 40s who are unlikely to take a favorable view of the party's policies. Explains Kiryu: "Those in their 60s and older, who experienced foreign colonial control, understand the Burmese Way to Socialism. But the younger people don't. They go home and see the poverty outside. They have started to question their society."

Whether or not the military will have to act could be decided by the party conference that begins this week. Resistance to reform from within the party might deepen the hostility of younger officers. And popular pressure could also prod the army to action. Protesters said one goal, the ouster of Sein Lwin, had been achieved, but another, the restoration of democracy, had not. As a poster that began appearing around Rangoon on Saturday proclaimed: WE ARE NOT SATISFIED.

With reporting by Jay Branegan/Bangkok and Jay Peterzell/Washington