When Secretary Clinton left Burma on December 2nd, she left the ball in President Thein Sein’s court. The trip was a gift in and of itself, and Clinton made it clear that if Burma wants to continue to improve ties with the United States it has to take clear measures of reform such as the release of all political prisoners, an end to hostilities in ethnic areas, and lasting democratic reform. Only then will the US respond positively. In their meetings, President Thein Sein said he want to implement these reforms and Aung San Suu Kyi has even expressed belief in Thein Sein’s sincerity; however, the question remains how much power does Thein Sein actually have?

Some have compared him with De Klerk or Gorbachev, and Thein Sein might genuinely want reform, but his powers are limited. Constitutionally the military still has complete autonomy in not just it’s own affairs, but also has vast powers over the three branches of government. The powers of the Commander-in-Chief and the National Defense and Security Council are just as powerful, or even more so than the Parliament and the President. Constitutional expert David Williams has said “The whole constitution is based on a “wait and see” strategy: if the civilian government does what the Tatmadaw [the armed forces] wants, then it will be allowed to rule; if not, then not.”

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Burma is now seeing it’s own version of the Occupy movement. On Tuesday, a group of monks staged an occupation of the Maha Myat Muni Pagoda in Mandalay, which is one of the most revered Buddhist sites in Burma. They made their presence and intent known by hanging large banners that read “We want freedom,” “Free all political prisoners” and “Stop civil war now.” Throughout the day they gave speeches to the expanding crowd of monks, civilians, and secret police. People donated water, food and other supplies and sent it up to the occupiers via ropes.

This protest comes at a crucial time as Burma’s ruling officials are trying to win over the international community into believing that real democratic reforms are happening. On Monday, there was expected to be an additional release of political prisoners, however, the releases never happened. Despite growing conflict and human rights abuses in the country, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) granted Burma a huge prize by announcing on Tuesday that Burma could take the chairmanship of the regional body in 2014. So Burma’s political prisoners stay locked up, and even more get detained. Since the elections last year, Burma’s political scene has been a mixture of minimal changes followed by brutalities against activists and ethnic minorities.

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• Hundreds of Yemeni women on Wednesday set fire to traditional female veils to protest the government’s brutal crackdown against the country’s popular uprising, as overnight clashes in the capital and another city killed 25 people.

• People in the city of Homs and nearby areas of northwest Syria staged a general strike on Wednesday over President Bashar al-Assad’s intensifying military crackdown on protesters, and two were killed in one town.

• In Georgia, Atlanta police have arrested more than 50 protesters who had been camping out in Woodruff Park for the past two weeks.

• About 4,000 jobless graduates staged a second day of peaceful demonstrations on Tuesday in Morocco’s business hub Casablanca to demand public sector jobs.

• In New York City, more than 100 students, teachers and educational activists occupied the city’s Board of Education meeting Tuesday night to protest the city’s education policies, including budget cutbacks, layoffs, large class sizes and an overemphasis on standardized testing.

• At least seven protesters were killed in the capital city of Sana’a Tuesday, as Saleh told the U.S. ambassador that he would sign a deal to step down—an offer he has made several times before.

• Lawyers in Algeria went on strike Tuesday to protest against proposed changes in the organisation of the profession which they say will limit their independence and powers in court.

• Police in Myanmar halted a demonstration on Thursday by about 60 landless farmers, a rare protest that tests the new civilian government’s commitment to reforms after decades of brutal suppression of dissent.

• In San Francisco, more than 1,000 protesters rallied outside a President Obama fundraiser at the W Hotel on Tuesday to call on Obama to block the proposed Keystone XL tar sands oil pipeline.

Zarganar speaking at the birthday celebration of detained democracy leader Min Ko Naing

Humor has always been a major tactic used to illustrate truth in Burma. It comes as no surprise then that after his release, political prisoner and well-known comedian Zarganar has unleashed an onslaught of jokes aimed at Burma’s “new” government. When asked what he thought about President Thein Sein’s efforts at national reconciliation, he said it was like “applying make-up to a paralyzed old woman and sending her out into the street.” Zarganar’s point is a significant one—how much can you dress up something to look like democracy when it is still a broken military system?

There has been a lot of discussion about whether Burma is finally on the path to reform, now that Aung San Suu Kyi is free, and a parliament is in place. However, it is important to look beyond the facade and see the big picture. The major reason why the National League for Democracy and many ethnic groups did not support the 2010 election was because of the new Constitution. Amongst other undemocratic problems, the Constitution is far from democratic and was drafted so that the military has broad and vague powers, and is free from parliamentary control.  Moreover, the eruption of conflict in Northern Burma as well as in Eastern Burma is largely because ethnic groups feel that they do not have equal rights in this “new” government.

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Ever since Burmese resistance leader Aung San Suu Kyi was released from her house arrest last year by the ruling military junta, I have been trying to understand why she hasn’t given the people of Burma any clear calls for acts of resistance. For Burmese people around the world opposed to the regime, she is an unparalleled source of spiritual authority. Lately, I’ve been thinking of this especially in light of her recent Reith Lectures, which were controversial for her statements that the movement may possibly have to be violent as well as nonviolent. Why would she say this? Is it a tactical threat to the regime? Or is it part of her grand strategy to embrace armed ethnic nationalities? Having been a part of the effort to rid Burma of its oppressors since the nationwide uprising in August of 1988, I took this as a shock. She hadn’t ever spoken quite like this.

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• Tens of thousands of anti-regime demonstrators marched through Yemeni streets on Tuesday to condemn what they said were government attacks on protesters the day before.

• Thousands of demonstrators, including Islamists, held peaceful rallies in Rabat, Casablanca and Tangiers Sunday to demand greater political reforms and social justice in Morocco.

• Syrian troops and militiamen loyal to President Bashar al-Assad killed 16 people in attacks in the city of Homs on Tuesday, residents said, an escalation of a crackdown against a focal point for pro-democracy protests.

• The Israeli navy intercepted a French boat carrying pro-Palestinian activists as the vessel attempted to breach Israel’s naval blockade of the Gaza Strip on Tuesday.

• Thousands took to the streets of Bissau Tuesday for the second rally in five days to demand the resignation of Prime Minister Carlos Gomes Junior, accused of hindering an assassination probe.

• More than 3,000 democracy supporters led by Aung San Suu Kyi marched Tuesday in Myanmar’s biggest city in honor of her father, the nation’s independence hero. The short march was the biggest public demonstration since 2007, when the military junta launched a bloody crackdown on pro-democracy protesters.

• Over the weekend, residents of Southwest Ranches, Florida protested the proposed construction of a privately run immigration detention center.

• In the Philippines, college students in Manila and Quezon City walked out of their classes on Tuesday to protest what they called the Aquino administration’s neglect of the education sector.

• Dozens of Romanians protested Tuesday against a Canadian company’s plans to open a gold mine in Transylvania and called on the culture minister to resign over his support to this project.

• The two-week strike by 120,000 members of the National Union of Metalworkers’ of South Africa (NUMSA) ended over the weekend when union members accepted a three-year contract from the Steel and Engineering Federation of South Africa (SEIFSA), the main metal employers’ federation in South Africa.

BBC’s Reith Lecture series with Aung San Suu Kyi won’t be aired until tomorrow, but already there is a flurry of discussion about whether she is changing her renowned position on non-violence. The lectures were secretly recorded in Burma and then presented before a studio audience this past week before they air for the general public. The Nobel Laureate stunned the audience when she implied “it’s possible” she would not rule out violent resistance as an effective way of creating change in Burma. She later expanded on her position and said, “I have said in the lectures I do not hold to non-violence for moral reasons, but practical and political reasons.”

This may seem shocking coming from the woman who is viewed as the Gandhi of Burma, but the reality is that she is not changing her position. She has always held a view of resistance that centrally values the process of the struggle, “the revolution of the spirit.” However, by saying she doesn’t rule out violent struggle, she is being honest and, importantly, not discrediting the ethnic armed resistance occurring in Burma at present.

Aung San Suu Kyi’s father was the respected military leader Aung San who was the main instrumental leader in bringing an end to colonial rule in Burma. He worked to unite groups across the country and prepare for democratic change, but was assassinated before his vision could be fulfilled. Coming from this background, she has an understanding that military use in and of itself is not wholly corruptible; it is the mindset about military use that is important. She said in her 1991 essay “Freedom from Fear”:

The words used by Jawaharlal Nehru to describe Mahatama Gandhi could well be applied to Aung San: ‘The essence of his teaching was fearlessness and truth and action allied to these, always keeping the welfare of the masses in view.’

Aung San Suu Kyi’s goal is very similar to her father’s. She wants to bring all ethnic groups and sectors of society together to find a peaceful means of reconciliation with which to build a democratic society. Aung San Suu Kyi, even though she is a proponent of non-violence, cannot dismiss the efforts of Burma’s armed ethnic resistance. Whenever she is free she works to reach out to Burma’s ethnic communities. In response to this attention, many ethnic leaders say they heartily support and share Aung San Suu Kyi’s vision of peaceful national reconciliation.

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In my post about Happy World—the short documentary about the absurdity of everyday life under the dictatorship in Burma—I forgot to mention several of the great bonus features, which, along with the movie, can all be enjoyed for free online. In an interview with the French news site Ownie, the filmmakers call their project an experiment in “hypervideo”—an artistic device that allows users to watch a video and “simultaneously receive a feed of related information, such as newspaper articles, data, etc.”

Tristan Mendes-France, the film’s on-screen narrator and co-director, graciously wrote a comment on my original post, pointing to some of these features. To begin, there’s an interactive map [click on photo above] of various Burmese dissident groups, an infographic explaining why the junta moved the capital without warning to a city in the middle-of-nowhere, sample pages of the state-run newspaper The New Light of Myanmar, one hour’s worth of Burma TV—or as the filmmakers call it Valium TV—and lots more, including loads of links to interesting articles that explain more of Burma’s troubled history.

Finally, and perhaps most indicative of their creativity, the filmmakers have created a hilarious web-application that cartoonishly censors your Twitter account. Amazingly, something different happens every time. Watch the Waging Nonviolence Twitter account getting censored and then share it with your friends. But don’t let all these fun features distract you from watching the movie!

Happy World Teaser (english) from Happy World on Vimeo.

What’s life like inside a closed authoritarian country like Burma? A few years ago, it may have been hard to answer that question. Then Burma VJ, the 2010 Oscar-nominated documentary, gave us a glimpse—but mainly from the perspective of dissidents trying to depose the ruling military junta. Now, a brilliant new French documentary called Happy World shows what life is like for the ordinary every-day Burmese citizen. The film’s subtitle says it all: “the dictatorship of the absurd.”

Rather than highlight the brutality already documented in Burma VJ, the filmmakers behind Happy World seem to have set out to make the point that every regime, no matter how seemingly evil, has weaknesses—many of which reside in the arbitrary and oftentimes laughable measures it takes to uphold a thin veil of power. For the Burmese junta it’s basing traffic patterns on horoscope readings, printing currency that’s divisible by the regime’s lucky number nine, and superstitiously forcing people to grow a shrub because its name (kyet-suu) is the inverse of democracy leader Suu Kyi.

All of these ridiculous actions could easily become the target of savvy activists, who by poking fun at the junta, weaken its credibility and grow a movement of resistance. It wouldn’t be surprising if campaigns like this were already underway. As John Jackson and Steve Crawshaw noted in their book Small Acts of Resistance, a clever currency designer working for the government in 1990 subtly and subversively planted an image of Aung Sang Suu Kyi onto new banknotes, as well as several other references to the pro-democracy uprising of 1988. Such acts of defiance and inspiring mischief have seemingly grown less and less isolated.

For their own part, the filmmakers managed to pull one over on the junta, no doubt embarrassing them in the process. By posing as dopey tourists—the only kind of foreigners allowed to visit the country—they captured amazing never-before-seen footage and broadcast it to the world for free.

The full 30-minute documentary, as well as a short making-of video, can be viewed here.

Last week, in a great interview with Irradwaddy, a newspaper started in 1993 by Burmese journalists living in exile, Gene Sharp offers his thoughts on the military intervention in Libya and why nonviolent resistance has not yet succeeded in Burma:

Q:Since Tunisia and Egypt, the protests in the region have changed. Libya’s uprising has become an armed revolt. Do you feel that—even with UN Security Council and Arab League support—it is right to intervene in Libya at this juncture?

A: It is not the course of action I would have chosen. I think the Libyan democrats did not do their homework in advance like the Egyptians did—in Egypt, they appeared to have a plan and studied quite some time in advance to develop a program of non-violence without fear, which brought them victory quite quickly. In Libya, this appears not to have been the case. The Libyans have gotten in over their heads, and should have expected the type of repression that Gaddafi is capable of.

People who are realistic about the power of political defiance know that if it is a threat, the regime will see it that way and will fight back. The regime will jail and beat and kill, and that is a sign that what you are doing is threatening the regime.

Dictators can beat you with violence, if you fight on those terms, and of course the rebels cannot defeat the Gaddafi regime on the level of armed force. So they are left to call in help from outside, which cannot give them the empowerment or victory they seek.

Q:Do you think that when legitimate peaceful protest—such as in Burma—is met with state violence, the protesters then have the right to self-defense? To fight back? To seek alliances with sympathizers in the country’s police and army? To appeal for international military support, as the Libyan rebels have done?

A: I think it is an unfortunate choice that people make. It is predictable that your opponent will have the means of violence, the means of oppression. If you get someone else to come and help you, they will come with their interests, and potentially turn your country into a battlefield. Even if they help defeat the oppressor, it will not result in empowerment. People will not be ready to fight the next oppressor who tries to take over the country. In contrast, if the Egyptian military tries again to take control, the people know how to counter this, they have the sense of empowerment, of their own power.

Ultimately, in any non-violent resistance, you have to plan, you have to study. You have to know what the hell you are doing.

 

I couldn’t agree more and am thrilled that Sharp hasn’t backed this war like so many others in the progressive world. This is exactly the kind of stance that those of us who believe that nonviolence is the most effective way to stop dictators and end repression should be taking.

And here is Sharp’s take on the situation in Burma:

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