March 4, 1997

Rangoon in the spider's Web

\ poisonous military regime brings a country to its knees,
Sut both Burmese and international oe
ombat it with a Web stronger than silk anda ~~

enom of their own.

7\
CT

 

by Jim Chliboyko

he ammunition of the soldiers, like
the driving monsoon wind, lashes
into the crowds of students, monks
d workers as the army finally closes in.
e tanks rev their engines in behind the
dvancing troops, waiting their turn. They
ill roll over those who cannot manage to’
Nude them and roll through civilians who
ave set up homemade barricades in the
treets of the capital. The army is eager;
ey’ ve been holding back since the other
e-sided skirmishes that had taken place in
arch and June. But nothing would hold
em back now.
The crowd shatters and spreads through
jtreets and down alleyways like mercury
leeing a broken thermometer. One group
akes for the city’s General Hospital,
poking for sanctuary, but several truckloads
f soldiers follow them there, and forcefully
mter the grounds. Hospital staff try to help;
everal doctors and nurses intercept the
oung military men in an attempt to reason
vith them. They are not very persuasive; the
o doctors and three nurses are shot to
eath.
This isn’t Tiananmen, it is not even close
o Beijing. It is Burma, August 8, 1988,
hich became known as the massacre of 8/
/ 88) ten months before the Chinese
assacre of students and protestors.
Considering the magnitude of the massa-
tres, there was scant media attention on
ugust 8. There were no jarring video clips
guileless men stepping in front of tanks
n CNN. Burma was neither economically
ooming, nor fashionable. The Burmese
ere never too much trouble either; there
as no antagonism towards, or with,
erica. So the attention was
relegated to the international section,
pages into the newspaper,
ongside tiny dispatches from
orthern Ireland and Israel. Occa-
ionally there was a picture. Half-
way through 1988, after two
brotestor-army skirmishes, The Globe
nd Mail published an article,
companied by a map, just to show
veryone where this new trouble
pot actually was. Not even when
he estimates started rolling in—3000
ead, no, 10 000 dead—did the
Burmese make it to the front page.

  
  
 
 
   
   
   
 
   
  
   
  
  
   
 
  
 
   
   
   
    
 
  
  
  

 

   

Unlike the Chinese, though, Burma hasn’t .”

boomed after the mayhem. They are still one “
of the poorest countries in the world. There

is no boomtown like Shenzhen in Burma,

nor any new wealth that is not connected to
the military. There is just the government,
known as the State Law and Order Restora-
tion Council (SLORC, who like to refer to

the country as Myanmar), and the people
they oppress.

“We're seeing no relief,” says Christine
Harmston, coordinator of the Ottawa-based
Canadian Friends of Burma. She sounds
exhausted after detailing SLORC’s new
hobby; wiping out the tenacious Karen
minority group, a guerilla force that has
been holding off the government for 50
years in the jungles of Burma. Harmston
calls it a civil war, and sees the new offen-
sive as SLORC seeking revenge against the
minority. Fifteen thousand people have fled
to Thailand. There, the Thais are separating
the men from their families and attempting
to repatriate them, handing them right back
into the hands of SLORC. There are tales of
human mine sweepers, human porters, and
not surprisingly, worse human rights
abuses; gang rapes, beheadings... “They
tend to get worse during an offensive,” says
Harmston of the abuses.

Advances are being made, though. Earlier
this winter PepsiCo decided to withdraw
their Burmese operation, joining such
companies as London Fog, Heineken, and
Carlsburg who had already decided to pull
out of the country.

 

 

  

Press

We've been doing women since 1976

 

 
   

.

Perhaps there was some altruism behind
the Pepsi withdrawl, but Harmston has
some theories of her own. “The Pepsi
boycott was called for by ex-patriate Bur-
mese students, and became a world-wide
boycott. There were letter campaigns,
demonstrations, shareholder pressure, grass-
roots pressure. But with Pepsi, you have a
company that relies on the young people,
and when the young people, their target
audience, got angry, Pepsi got nervous. The
students voted through their wallets.”

Harmston and her group were also
responsible for getting Labatt to abandon
their operations in Burma. According to
Harmston, the Canadian Friends of Burma
initiated the boycott of Labatt after it found
out that Labatt’s Ice was being sold in the
country. “There were signs all over Burma,
saying ‘Labatt’s Ice, Canada’s number one
beer.”

With cooperation from European human-
rights groups, the activists pressured the
Belgium-based corporation Interbrew (who
own Labatt’s) to leave Burma.

“Whenever a company pulls out, it is
great,” says Harmston, “but we rejoice, and
move on to the next company.”

epsi, on some websites, was a bad

word. The Web, an important tool in

the struggle between SLORC and pro-
democracy activists, has become the scene
of accusation and organization; both sides
have access, and both sides are trying to use
the new technology to electronically out-do
the other.

The better websites are based in the
Western world, though they are infused by
the spirit of the Burmese who have man-
aged to escape their country. The pro-
Burmese websites advocate various kinds of
strategies for protest, give the addresses of
CEOs of corporations that patronize the
Myanmar junta, and include the latest news
from Burma. The Free Burma coalition is a

Volume 21 -

 

Women’s
issue

starts on
page 5

Cola puppets - 3
They look mad - 10

11

a=

Wenlido -

Issue

prominent one, “an umbrella group of
organizations around the world working for
freedom and democracy in Burma.” Its
website, recently nominated for a Robert F.
Kennedy human rights award, claims that
the attempt to save Burma from Myanmar is
the largest human rights campaign in
cyberspace.

Those involved with the Free Burma
Coalition website call themselves spiders, an
allegory to the Web that they helped to
build, and occasionally one can read the
quote “When spiders unite, they can tie
down a lion.”

Their objectives are two-fold: “To weaken
the grip of the SLORC by cutting its substan-
tial flow of foreign currency provided by
multinational corporations such as Total,
Unocal, Texaco, ARCO and PepsiCo,” and
“to strengthen the position of the democratic
forces within Burma by building up an
international movement calling for the end
of totalitarian rule under SLORC.”

SLORC has a website of its own, which
describes the status of their country, the
promise that the future holds and the
business they want to stimulate. There are
pictures of tourist attractions, as well as the
outlines of initiatives which they hope to
strengthen the country; we are currently in
Visit Myanmar Year, which lasts until the fall
of 1997. SLORC does acknowledge 1988, but
to SLORC, the most important event wasn’t
the massacres, it was tiring economic
pronouncements: “In 1988, the SLORC
announced a completely different political
and economic system and its intention to
adopt and move towards a more open
market-oriented economic system.” No
mentionwas made of the deaths.

continues on page 4