For Burmese Exiles, Hope Amid Turmoil
As Deadly Protests Erupt in Their Country, D.C. Area Expatriates Join the Outcry With New Optimism About a Democratic Future

By Pamela Constable
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, September 30, 2007

From his spartan office suite in Rockville, the headquarters of Burma's democratic opposition in exile, Bo Hla Tint has spent years fruitlessly pressing for international attention on the plight of his impoverished, oppressed and nearly invisible country in Southeast Asia.

Last week, with Burma erupting in bloody protests against military rule, Tint's moment seems to have come. All day Friday, the opposition spokesman's phone was busy with requests for media interviews, plans for meetings on Capitol Hill and long-distance rumors of military splits and diplomatic maneuvering in Rangoon or Mandalay.

"Every day for 17 years I am walking and talking Burma. Now people are listening," said Tint, 63, a man with a polite but harassed air. His office is miles from the District embassy where Rangoon's military regime, which renamed the country Myanmar in 1990, is officially ensconced. Under U.S. laws, Tint's organization occupies a niche somewhere among foreign agent, political party and nonprofit foundation.

"Legally, we don't really exist," Tint said. "Our key leaders are inside the country, not outside," he said, explaining that his group backs Aung San Suu Kyi, the opposition leader who has been under house arrest in Rangoon for most of the past 18 years.

His organization, the National Coalition Government of the Union of Burma, has never asked for diplomatic recognition, but it also has offices in New York, Bangkok and New Delhi. The local office moved to Rockville after several years in Washington.

At the Burma-America Buddhist Association in Silver Spring, TV crews set up Friday on the lawn outside a modest, wood-framed temple decorated with golden roof trim. Ashin Asabhacara, a shy, red-robed monk, struggled to explain in English why tens of thousands of fellow monks in his homeland, sworn to lives of spiritual meditation, have felt compelled to join the massive street demonstrations in the past two weeks.

"We do not like to participate in worldly affairs. Our duty is to pray and chant about loving kindness," said Asabhacara, 50, squinting in the midday sun. "But the citizens are scared of beating and torture and prison, so the monks cannot keep silent any longer. We have no choice but to step in to save our country."

In the Washington area, which is home to about 500 Burmese families and several sympathetic groups, activism has galvanized. On Friday, about 300 Burmese and American protesters marched to the embassies of Myanmar and China, the country's powerful neighbor and economic ally. Asabhacara and other monks led the march, hoisting banners and leading chants for peace.

After nearly four decades of military control, the outbreak of Burma's largest protests in 15 years has rekindled hope among longtime exiled activists in the Washington region. They have seen protests quashed many times, with hundreds of civilians killed while the world's democratic powers responded with tepid concern or pragmatic deference to China.

But now, they said, there are several key differences. One is the digital revolution, which has enabled information and images to leak out of the tightly controlled country and flood the world media. Another is the massive public participation of monks, who are revered in Burmese society. A third is the pent-up anger of Burma's citizens, long inured to military rule but newly outraged at huge price increases in fuel and other staples.

"I have very high hopes this time. There is a very real potential for change," said Tin Maung Thaw of Ashburn, vice president of the Burma-America Buddhist Association, who fled to the United States in 1978 and worked for a time on Capitol Hill. "In 1988, there was no Internet in Burma, and the military could hide the atrocities. Now they can't," he said. "This time, everyone knows what's going on."

Thaw's childhood memories include the 1962 suppression of a student revolt in Rangoon soon after the army seized power for the first time. At dawn, he said, his family was sleeping when security forces bombed a university building. "I was in seventh grade, and we lived near the campus," he recalled. "Early in the morning, we felt the earth shake and saw the sky full of dark clouds."

Yet the dominant emotions expressed by members of the exile community are those of sadness and worry -- sadness for the nine protesters killed and dozens wounded by Burmese security forces in weeks of unrest, and worry that the confrontation will end in another bloodbath instead of the political dialogue the demonstrators seek.

They also describe strong feelings of bitterness toward the U.S. government for what they call a longtime policy of downplaying Burma's problems, even as the military has shot protesters, nullified elections and kept Suu Kyi, who won the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize, under house arrest.

"The United States says this is a brutal regime, but it has never cut diplomatic ties," said Khin Win, 71, a retired Voice of America broadcaster who lives in Maryland. As a reminder of U.S. indifference, he said, he kept a framed copy of a statement by President George H.W. Bush in 1990 that says the United States was "closely watching the situation" in Burma. That was the year the military shut down the democratic opposition after an election in which opposition candidates won 81 percent of the legislative seats.

Tint, a civil engineer by training, was one of those elected to Burma's parliament in 1990. But he said he fled almost immediately after the military crackdown and spent two years hiding in the jungle with ethnic guerrillas. Then he helped set up an opposition office in Thailand but was soon forced to leave. He said he has been "stranded" in Washington ever since.

His office has only two adornments on the walls: a framed photograph of a youthful Suu Kyi, now 61, whom all opposition exiles regard as their leader, and another of her father, a Burmese independence champion who was assassinated in 1947.

Tint's boss, an elderly mathematics professor named Sein Win, holds the title of prime minister of the coalition government, but his stature comes from being a cousin of Suu Kyi and the son of a martyred independence leader. Tint said Win, currently traveling in Europe, has no ambitions for power, and the coalition has pledged to dissolve and seek elections if democracy is restored.

Tint said that many Americans do not understand how much Burmese people have suffered. "They always say, if things are so bad, why do the people keep quiet? They see the smiling faces, and they think life is normal," he said. "They don't realize that after so many killings and so much oppression, the people learned a bitter lesson."

Recently, the Bush administration has signaled its displeasure with Burma's generals, including refusing to accept any more military ambassadors, granting waivers on visa restrictions to some Burmese political refugees and tightening economic and financial sanctions on senior members of the ruling military establishment.

Exile leaders in the Washington area are hoping the United Nations will also take a tougher stance this time by approving sanctions, despite China's veto power in the Security Council. But after so many years of frustration, they said, they are realistic about global politics, the strategic unimportance of their impoverished country and the limits of collective action.

"A small country like ours is always used as a bargaining chip among big powers. I have grave concerns about how far things will have to go to convince the international community," Tint said. "We have giant neighbors, but the will of the people cannot be ignored."