Free Burma: Transnational Legal Action and Corporate Accountability

2. Locating Power in the Free Burma Movement

63 At 8:08 a.m. on August 8, 1988, nearly one hundred thousand people walked off their jobs and into the streets of cities all over Burma, calling for an end to military rule. In what has since become commonly referred to in Burma as Shitlay Loan A-Yay A-Hkin, or the “Four Eights Affair (8– 8–88),” these citizens protested against the ruling military’s then twentysix years of economic mismanagement, political repression, indiscriminate violence, and monopolization of access to uncensored media and communication networks. They publicly denounced the military junta’s practices that, under the “Burmese way to socialism,” had dominated the state and economic activity from the time of General Ne Win’s coup d’état in 1962. They chanted and displayed a mixture of pro-democratic slogans and reappropriated symbols of the country’s nationalist independence struggle through which, by 1948, Burma had shed the yoke of both British colonization and post–World War II Japanese occupation and established a fledgling democratic state. They called for an undistorted account of the state’s violent action over the previous months, including rape, torture, indiscriminate killings, and secret mass cremations. These protesters wanted more than reform. They wanted a fundamental change in governance. They demanded the resignation of the military leaders, the establishment of a multiparty government and democratic 2 Locating Power in the Free Burma Movement 64 Locating Power elections, and the restoration of civil liberties. The military government violently and indiscriminately repressed the public protest, in ways more dramatic and bloody than the Chinese repression of protests in Tiananmen Square the following year.1 Foreign embassies in Burma numbered the casualties as high as twelve thousand—three to four thousand of whom were shot dead, including monks, medical workers, and even elementary school students. Unlike the massacre in Beijing, however, the violent repression of Burma’s statewide bid for democracy was not televised. The Myanmar military not only violently and indiscriminately repressed this people power uprising, but it also heavily restricted nonmilitary access to communications and transportation infrastructure and effectively censored all civilian information flows.2 State repression, however, did not snuff out the movement. Instead, the state’s indiscriminate violence fanned the movement’s flames with more radical resolve. Although the military’s leadership sensed sufficient control and an opportunity to secure international legitimacy by organizing “free and fair” elections in 1990, the majority of Burma’s citizens foiled this plan. The main opposition party, the National League for Democracy (NLD), under the leadership of Aung San Suu Kyi, won more than 60 percent of the popular vote and 82 percent of the parliamentary seats. The military exposed its rationale for holding democratic elections when it refused to honor the results and tightened its authoritarian grip. It outlawed opposition parties and systematically imprisoned or “disappeared ”3 members of the NLD. This time, however, no mass protest ensued. Signs of organized, large-scale, nonviolent public protest reappeared briefly in the 1996 student demonstrations and again during the 1998 tenth-year anniversary of the “8–8–88” uprising. Yet the military quickly and easily repressed all of this collective action without significant casualties . Although pro-democracy activists have contested the legitimacy of the military’s rule ever since,4 the military has remained in power to this day. The movement, if we think of it as occurring entirely within Burma, seems to have slipped into abeyance.5 Indeed, most of the scholarship today describing the pro-democracy movement that first emerged in Burma in 1988 tells a story of its ultimate failure. Even some former leaders within the movement have gradually adopted variations of such a nar- Locating Power 65 rative.6 Explanations of its contemporary insignificance range in their depictions from a failed “people power” movement7 to a movement that has been hopelessly stalled by ineffective international foreign policy measures, an increasingly repressive military government, and divisive politics within the ranks of a resource-poor and organizationally outflanked domestic opposition.8 The mass protests of the so-called Saffron Revolution in 2007 arguably do little to challenge this assessment, if measured in terms of their immediate impact on the political governance of Myanmar. I challenge such representations of the movement by situating it in a transnational rather than purely domestic context. My account of the emergence of this movement shows how the dominant theoretical paradigm in social movement research fails to give...