Burma's Prisons a Caldron of Protest Fury

"In '88, our generation didn't know anything about politics," said a Rangoon teacher jailed for five years in the aftermath of the uprising. He was 21 when he was arrested. "We cared [only] about brutal repression. We saw it with our own eyes and heard it with our own ears."

Under a tarpaulin canopy at an empty tea shop one recent afternoon, he lighted his second cigarette in minutes and paused to watch the smoke mingle with a monsoon downpour.

In prison, he said, "you know who your real friends are; you learn the meaning of 'friend.' We shared everything we had: our food and all our knowledge."

He and two prison mates tore apart an old English primer, the only book that one of them had managed to have smuggled inside. They took turns reading and hiding the pieces, burying them in the soil outside their cells. From the pages he learned to speak English.

In their cells or in snatched moments in the prison yards, they could encounter a spectrum of dissidents whom they might never otherwise have met -- or had a chance to clash with. "I remember in my first months in Insein Prison, some young political prisoners came to ask me to do something for them, because the communists were waiting to 'dye them pink,' " the scholar said.

It was in jail that a Rangoon University student, now 29, said he met elected members from the opposition National League for Democracy, ethnic leaders and members of countless dissident groups. "I saw the future of Burma in the prisons," he said.

He heard them fiercely arguing and saw them give up visions they had once held, he said. The divides were revelatory. Democracy in the country would come, he concluded, only with "a proper understanding of each other. To do that, we need to improve the education. . . . We need better spirituality, better tolerance and better compassion."

To counter the hopelessness, many detainees said they relied on meditation. For others, the only cure was a chance to fight again beyond prison walls.

"You can't even see the sky. No stars. No moon. No sun, " said Win Naing, 71, who was once part of the political party of U Nu, the prime minister deposed in a 1962 military coup. For years, Win Naing has led an unspecified number of national politicians in a loose, unofficial opposition group, because, he said, a democracy requires multiple parties.

But his detention last year risked all that. "I thought I wouldn't be released for 20 or 30 years. I was almost totally hopeless," he said. "If I get released, I thought, I shouldn't get involved in politics."

After 35 days of detention in Insein, Rangoon's most notorious prison, his release came as a total surprise. And within two months, with his health largely back to normal, he had taken up his activities again.

"In Burma there is a saying: You can't stop yourself from getting up and dancing when you hear the music," he said. "When I heard the music of politics, when many came to see me . . . things changed. I changed. I thought, what the heck."