qatarperegrine | Protests in Burma

Burmese politics has suddenly gotten interesting again.

In case you don't follow its politics, Burma is ruled by one of the most repressive governments in the world, a military junta with the lovely Orwellian name of the State Peace and Development Council (cf. Justin's law of repressive government names).

Then called the SLORC, the junta came to power in 1988 after crushing a pro-democracy movement by mowing down thousands of peaceful protesters. The main pro-democracy activist who emerged from that struggle, Aung San Suu Kyi, has spent 12 of the intervening 19 years on house arrest, and the SPDC has continued to crack down on any hint of dissent in the country.

Now protests have begun again -- this time led by Buddhist monks. The government's quintupling of gas prices was the proximal cause of the protests, but the movement is now calling for national reconciliation and the release of political prisoners, including Suu Kyi. The Alliance of All Burmese Buddhist Monks is saying they will march until they have "wiped the military dictatorship from the land"; they are also denying religious rites to members of the military. The demonstrations are growing every day; as of yesterday, around 20,000 people were marching in Rangoon. [Edit: CNN says 100,000.]

This puts the SPDC in an extremely awkward position. In the past they have responded to such uprisings with a brutal show of force, but opening fire on monks and nuns will not win them any friends. When soldiers fired warning shots at protesting monks in Pakokku a couple weeks ago, the monks responded by setting fire to the military vehicles. (Now that's what I call Engaged Buddhism.) Monks and laypeople alike called for the government to apologize to the monks, but not vice versa.

It is unclear at this point what the SPDC is going to do. They can't let the protests continue, but if they stop them things are going to get very bad very quickly.