One Year After Saffron Revolution

By James Rose

Last September, peaceful demonstrations let the world know that the Burmese people have had enough of the crushing oppression of the military junta, yet, today, Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, still languishes in a haze of terror and deprivation.

Another year goes by and those monks who are left after the military cracked down after the demonstration are contemplating huge risks once again because the world just didn't get it last time.

If Myanmar is a part of the global family it is perhaps its most neglected, like a child cast away simply because it was mugged by some bullies and held hostage by them ever since. As with most situations of this kind, ostracization is as much the story of the ostracizer as the ostracized.

It certainly doesn't make sense to ignore the Myanmarese (Burmese). Most risk their lives daily in keeping the Saffron Revolution alive and in trying to get the message to the world, they need help.

Led by a community of monks in the devoutly Buddhist country, known as the Sangha, a network of activism has firmed throughout the country since last September. Monks have boycotted the military and continue to thwart their attempts to crush Myanmar's spiritual soul.

The military have been largely cut off from the Buddhist clergy and the monks have openly campaigned for an international arms embargo as a means of taking the tools of oppression away from their oppressors.

The Sangha provided the aid and accommodation services the military refused to give to some 70 percent of homeless survivors from May's Cyclone Nargis in the Yangon (Rangoon) and around the Irrawaddy delta.

This is a case of the civil overwhelming the political, of citizens and their spiritual, not their political, leaders taking up the slack left neglectfully dangling by the dispirited goons of the olive drab government.

Perhaps this is why the community of nations finds it difficult to respond more firmly in Myanmar ― notions of state sovereignty run deep and tend to undermine many of the good souls who would dearly love to effect positive change in a much maligned country.

A flavor of this was seen in the immediate aftermath of Nargis as civil aid groups found it more or less impossible to deliver aid over and around an unwilling state government.

Perhaps this is why the global community and its more influential members refuse to demand the release of some 2,000 political prisoners in Myanmar, including Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, nor can find the will to dam the arms trade flowing in from Russia and China.

Perhaps this is why the world will not act even as the military backbone to the ruling junta bends and weakens under the force of its own people clamoring for an end to the nightmare.

Structural shifts, widespread dissatisfaction among the ranks, including regular desertions, are enfeebling an already untenable organization, yet still no-one moves to show the generals the door.

Myanmar continues to win all the sort of awards no one wants to win. It has the largest number of child soldiers anywhere in the world, many fighting the world's longest running civil war; it is the world's most corrupt country and it has probably the world's highest military spending as a percentage of budgetary funds (40 percent).

It has Asia's second highest child mortality rate and is the third largest source of refugees in the world.

This in a country with the 10th largest natural gas reserves in the world and in an economy which already, despite huge natural resources remaining untapped, receives some $150 million per month in energy export revenues alone.

One year on from the Saffron Revolution, the world is highly distracted by an economic crisis largely of its own making.

As the graphs and stock charts head southward, attention is justifiably on the family home, keeping one's job and hoping the whole shooting match doesn't end up with blood everywhere.

But, this isn't the time to get caught up in ones own crises. This is an opportunity to extend crisis thinking outwards. It is a time to remember that even as the world reels, there are those in Myanmar as in Sudan, Tibet, North Korea, Chad, Zimbabwe, Western Sahara and elsewhere who need some crisis thinking of their own.

In dealing with the economic crisis, lets use that energy and fix-it thinking to extend to other areas. One year after the Saffron Revolution another opportunity has appeared to help the long-suffering people of Myanmar.

James Rose is advisor to the Burma Fund, policy think tank of the New York-based National Coalition Government for the Union of Burma. He can be reached at jamesrose18@aapt.net.au.