Capitalizing on Burma's Autumn of Dissent

Opposition in Exile Urging More Protests, Even Armed Conflict

MAE SOT, Thailand -- Desperate to maintain the momentum of their challenge to military rule in Burma, opposition leaders in this border town are working with networks of supporters to get monks to return to the streets in protest, to push foreign governments to impose tougher sanctions and to persuade ethnic militias to resume guerrilla attacks.

The leaders here say they believe that the generals who run Burma gave them a priceless political gift in September by ordering soldiers to attack Buddhist monks. "We have to thank them for their stupidity," said Maung Maung, secretary general of the National Council of the Union of Burma, which is based in this hill town along the Thailand-Burma border and is the main umbrella group for exiled politicians and ethnic leaders.

Images of soldiers clubbing barefoot monks in saffron robes focused world attention on Burma's often-ignored military dictatorship and prodded the generals to begin talking to Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel Peace laureate and opposition leader whose party trounced them in a 1990 election and who is under house arrest in Rangoon. It also energized a nationwide cadre of angry monks, potent agents of grass-roots change in a Buddhist nation where the number of monks (about 400,000) rivals the number of soldiers.

Still, the generals' public relations gift loses value with each passing day, Burmese opposition figures say.

Without more "bone-breaking" pressure on the generals, talks with Suu Kyi will devolve into an empty delaying game, Maung Maung said. More than a dozen senior leaders of the opposition who were interviewed here, including longtime members of Suu Kyi's party, the National League for Democracy, echoed his comments.

To ratchet up pressure, opposition leaders said they are urging monks inside Burma to regroup and join in more mass protests with students and workers. They are pleading with Western countries to stiffen economic sanctions and to donate cash to support political activity inside Burma, which the generals call Myanmar.

Opposition leaders including several recently exiled supporters of Suu Kyi, a proponent of nonviolence, are also urging Burma's armed ethnic minorities to prepare for a unified guerrilla conflict against the government.

"Armed struggle has to be part of the pressure," said Khun Myint Tun, a longtime supporter of Suu Kyi and member of the Pao ethnic group. "Something needs to happen soon to take advantage of the September momentum."

Some of that momentum does seem to be slipping away.

The military continued last week to raid monasteries and arrest civilians, as it has since the late September crackdown on protesters. Suu Kyi remains under house arrest and is cut off from her supporters.

China, Thailand and India have not substantially changed their economic dealings with the Burmese military, buying electricity, natural gas, oil and timber worth an estimated $2 billion a year.

Rangoon is said to be quiet and tense. Since the crackdown, sandbag bunkers have been built on many of its streets. Soldiers often stand around the bunkers, but it is now uncommon to see monks in the country's largest city, according to Shari Villarosa, charge d'affaires for the U.S. Embassy in Burma.