With Student Rebels in Burma
The Shan, known to us as “Mosco,” was the regimental adjutant. He lives down below in the Thai frontier town of Mae Hong Son, where he scrounges the rice and other staples that keep the tiny post alive. In truth, Mosco despises the desolate life of the mountains and will do anything to avoid it except forgo the chance to lead tourists up at $60 a head. A woman who runs a guest house in Mae Hong Son supplies him with these adventurers. Mosco remembered meeting her. “I’m a revolutionary soldier,” he announced. “Don’t give up your day job,” she advised him.
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Late at night, by the glow of the candles and cigars, Mosco reminisced. In 1962 Burma was the economic equal of South Korea, he told us sadly. That was the year the strongman, General Ne Win, came to power. Ne Win imposed his brutal “Burmese way to Socialism,” a way charted by numerology, and severed Burma from the outside world. Today, Mosco mourned, “we are poorer than poor.”
Friends invited him to join the resistance. He apologized, but he wasn’t up to that. But a morning came when he and a friend dared come out of hiding and visit a Rangoon tea shop. Some soldiers swaggered in; Mosco’s friend panicked and ran and was shot dead. Arrested again, Mosco once more lied. His guards showed him pornographic pictures and warned him that if democracy ever came to Burma his wife, his mother, his daughters would descend to this. Mosco denounced democracy, denounced politics of any kind.
The tribal leaders want local autonomy or independence. The students want a free and pluralistic Burma. “They don’t have an ideology [beyond that]. In some ways that’s their Achilles’ heel,” Taylor said. “There’s no Che Guevara.”
With its leaders behind bars, the NLD won 392 of the 485 contested seats in Burma’s national assembly. Military candidates won 10. SLORC simply annulled the election. Although she received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991, Suu Kyi remains under house arrest.
