Protests no immediate threat to Burma junta, say analysts

Associated Press - Michael Casey

A week of protests over fuel price hikes present no immediate threat to Burma’s military rulers because very few people joined the demonstrations and the key organizers were swiftly detained, analysts said Sunday.

Enraged by the doubling of fuel prices earlier this month, activists launched a series of rare street demonstrations in the country’s largest city, Rangoon, starting August 19. The military responded by detaining at least 65 activists, including leaders of pro-democracy groups the 88 Generation Students and the Myanmar Development Committee.

Crowds cheered on the demonstrators, but few joined in. Attendance at the marches ranged from a few dozen hardened activists to a few hundred—mainly limited to Rangoon.

“Although the public probably is behind the relatively few demonstrators in the streets, I do not think that now the people as a whole are ready in any major way to risk their lives,” David Steinberg, a Burma expert at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, said in an e-mail interview with The Associated Press.

“The chances are that small demonstrations may continue for a bit, but major ones are unlikely,” Steinberg said. “By allowing small demonstrations, the military may be trying to fend off larger ones.”

The military has arrested the key activists “who might make things worse for them,” he said.

Rangoon was quiet Sunday, with pro-junta supporters and plainclothes police deployed throughout the city to prevent further protests.

In neighboring Thailand, about 90 people protested outside the Burmese Embassy in Bangkok demanding the junta revoke the fuel price hike and end the violent crackdown on activists.

Josef Silverstein, a Burma expert and retired professor of Rutgers University in New Jersey, noted the junta’s decision to clamp down on the organizers has failed to spark anything more than a routine condemnation from the UN and foreign governments.

“No outside country or individual outsider is coming to the aid of the people, not the US, Asean member countries or even soldiers of fortune,” Silverstein said in an e-mail interview.

Burma is a member of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, or Asean, which has a rigid policy of noninterference in members’ domestic affairs.

“The Burma military has been busy winning the indifference of foreign states to their behavior toward their own people,” Silverstein said. “Burma is willing and able to see off or give away at bargain prices the natural resources, oil, gas, timber … at the expense of the nation and its people.”

Since liberalizing its investment code in 1988, Burma has signed a number of energy deals with its neighbors including China, India, South Korea and Thailand. Desperate for energy to fuel their growing economies, these countries have ignored Burma’s dire human rights record to secure lucrative oil and natural gas contracts.

Activists say the fuel price increase was probably needed to remedy a cash shortage after the government spent heavily relocating its capital 400 kilometers (250 miles) from Rangoon to Naypyidaw in 2005.

Presiding over one of the poorest countries in Asia, Burma’s military government has exposed the public to increasing hardship in the form of rising bus fares, and brought to mind the mass demonstrations in 1988.

Hundreds of thousands filled the streets that year to protest economic hardship and to demand an end to the military rule that began in 1962.

The army violently subdued the protests, killing hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people. The junta held a general election in 1990, but refused to honor the results when the National League for Democracy—led by Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi, who remains under house arrest—won in a landslide.

Analysts say events this past week pale in comparison to 1988, when demonstrations took place nationwide, food was scarce, and support for the protests came from within the bureaucracy and military.

“The present demonstrations are important, but nothing like the scale of 1988,” Steinberg said.