by Khin Maung Soe

The banned Communist Party of Burma (CPB) claims it played a key role in the 1988 student-led, pro-democracy uprising in Myanmar, saying its ironic use of “multiparty democracy” as a slogan for ousting the country’s dictatorship drew popular support from the people and laid the foundation for the country’s ongoing reforms.

“I don’t see the 1988 uprising as a failure,” a key CPB leader, Hla Kyaw Zaw, told RFA’s Myanmar Service from Kunming, the capital of China’s southwestern Yunnan province, where she lives in exile.

DW

The military coup of 1988 brutally ended the opposition’s dream of democracy, it seemed. Today there is evidence of democratization in Myanmar. But experts continue to speculate over the reasons and motives behind this.

After the military took power in Myanmar on September 18, 1988, the opposition had to re-orientate itself. It had two choices: it could latch onto other newly created parties or it could go underground – either in the middle of the country or somewhere in the border areas.
 Aung San Suu Kyi, Tin Oo and Aung Gyi founded the National League for Democracy (NLD) on September 27. The party attracted a good portion of the opposition and was thus able to create the strongest political alternative to the then governing State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC), which had been created by the military.

By Zin Linn

On Thursday Burmese people around the country commemorated the 25th Anniversary of the 1988 People’s Democracy Revolution. In the past, no remembrances were allowed to mark the 8888 anniversary in Burma, and this year heavy police security was be seen in big cities, especially in Rangoon (Yangon) around Shwedagon Pagoda.

The uprising was violently suppressed on 8- 8-88 by the then-ruling military junta in which Thein Sein and several senior military officers in the existing quasi-civilian government were complicit.

by Nay Rain Kyaw

A Myanmar activist held for a week in Yangon’s Insein prison has staged a hunger strike to protest his arrest over his role in an anti-land grabbing campaign, fellow activists said Friday.

Htin Kyaw began his hunger strike four days ago after he was detained last Friday following a demonstration he staged with Yangon residents denouncing the government’s seizure of their homes located in an area that has been reallocated for a business venture, according to activists.

The former political prisoner and grassroots community protest leader has been charged with spreading statements that incite unrest and violating a controversial peaceful assembly law.

By Charlie Campbell

The wrinkled limestone karst landscape of the Thai-Burmese border is home to around 130,000 Burmese refugees. Many who fled decades of ethnic conflict have lost their lands, families and livelihoods, and countless children born in makeshift camps have neither set foot in the country of their parents’ birth nor speak their parents’ native tongue. While recent reforms in military-dominated Burma, officially known as Myanmar, have seen democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi elected to Parliament, as well as the suspension of Western sanctions and the release of political prisoners, the refugee quandary endures. A survey conducted last month attempted to determine how this fraught situation could be remedied — asking inhabitants of one camp if they wanted to return to Burma, resettle in third countries or stay permanently in Thailand. Results are still being tallied, but this barometer of opinion is largely a moot point, as there are no easy answers for victims of the world’s longest running civil war.