Hard-Line Burma President Resigns : Sein Lwin Quits After 17-Day Reign That Was Marked by Bloody Protests

Faced with a nationwide rebellion and signs of crumbling support among the military rank and file, retired Gen. Sein Lwin resigned Friday as Burma’s president and ruling party leader.

The 64-year-old protege of former Burmese strongman Ne Win surrendered his posts just 17 days after taking power and five days after massive and bloody demonstrations began in Rangoon, the capital. The resignation was announced Friday night by official Rangoon Radio.

The brief broadcast said simply that the Central Committee of the Burma Socialist Program Party, the country’s sole political vehicle, had accepted Sein Lwin’s resignation as party leader and that the Council of State had acknowledged the hard-liner’s withdrawal from the national presidency. No successor was named, but the radio report said that emergency sessions of the National Assembly and the political party had been called for next Friday.

Protesters Filled Streets

The broadcast gave no reason for the resignation, but Sein Lwin’s political demise was the No. 1 demand of demonstrators who filled the streets of Rangoon and other Burmese cities for the past week in defiance of “shoot to hit” orders to the security forces.

According to government figures, about 100 demonstrators died and hundreds more were wounded in the ruthless military crackdown this week. Casualty estimates by Rangoon-based diplomats were double or triple the official figures.

The resignation leaves in doubt the leadership of the Southeast Asian nation, which descended to the ranks of the world’s poorest under a quarter century of erratic, dictatorial rule by Ne Win.

The political opposition to Ne Win’s ruling apparatus is limited to activist students, former members of the Socialist Program Party and leaders of Burma’s rebellious ethnic groups. None of these sectors have a leader of national standing, with the exception of Aung Gyi, a 70-year-old former general and one-time ally of Ne Win. In recent years, Aung Gyi had become the regime’s sharpest critic, and he was arrested as a threat to the state two weeks ago.

Since Ne Win took power in a 1962 coup, there has been no legal political party but his, and it did not encourage policy debate.

Response to Vacuum

The probable immediate response to the leadership vacuum will be appointments by the Socialist Program Party, presumably a person or persons more acceptable than Sein Lwin, a former brigadier general who retired from the army in 1977. One name mentioned by diplomats abroad was Maung Maung Kha, a former prime minister ousted in the shake-up that brought Sein Lwin to the presidency.

Prime Minister Tun Tin would appear to be the de facto head of state until a new president takes office.

However, the student protesters, buoyed by Sein Lwin’s departure, are expected to press their other demands on whoever takes power. They seek the release of demonstrators arrested in the past two weeks and in earlier protests this year, establishment of a multiparty democracy and human rights guarantees.

Sein Lwin’s resignation came on the first day of relative calm in the capital since he took power and was immediately targeted by student activists as the man who had led bloody crackdowns on students during Ne Win’s 1962 coup and during anti-government demonstrations last March.

And while central Rangoon appeared to be quiet Friday, State Department spokesman Charles Redman said in Washington that “we have reports of continued demonstrations and shooting in the suburbs” and “in towns and cities throughout Burma.”

Redman declined to predict what impact Sein Lwin’s resignation would have on the turmoil and said “we hope that the violence will stop.”

U.S. Embassy Operating

No reports have been received of any Americans killed, injured or arrested, Redman added, and the U.S. Embassy in Rangoon is now “open on a reduced-staffing basis.”

Since Monday, tens of thousands of students, monks and workers had demonstrated against the military-based regime, in Rangoon and in nearly every other city and major town in Burma. Since Tuesday, police and army units deployed under martial law had fired into the milling, restive crowds.

Sein Lwin’s name was reviled in the streets. Protest literature branded his ruling party as Nazi in character and practice. The Burmese people wanted him out of office, and there were growing signs that some of the uniformed rank and file agreed.

Rumors of mutiny and massacre swept the country Thursday and Friday. The situation appeared to be slipping beyond control of a government that has held Burma tightly in its fist for 26 years.

“Things are bad, real bad,” a Rangoon-based Western diplomat said Thursday night.

A Nationwide Explosion

What has happened in Burma, diplomats and dissidents say, is rage, a nationwide explosion. More than a quarter of a century of oppressive military rule and shriveling living standards became an unbearable weight. The ascendance of a new leader with the old ways, chosen in secret, sent the Burmese into the streets.

With the government pursuing a hard line, the focus was on the military rank and file. Reports of mutinies in the cities of Pegu and Taunggyi could not be confirmed. In Rangoon, demonstrators attacked at least two police stations and may have seized weapons in the raids. But other unconfirmed reports said the guns in the hands of the protesters may have been handed over by repentant police and soldiers. Demonstration speakers in the capital called for the military “to join the people” in a Philippine-style split within the ranks.

According to reports in Bangkok, about 300 soldiers and policeman kept to their barracks in the southern Burmese town of Victoria Point on Friday while protesters marched through the streets.

Earlier Friday, before Sein Lwin’s resignation was announced, Brang Seng, the leader of the ethnic Kachin guerrillas, called on the rebel coalition, the National Democratic Front, to strike on a broad front against the embattled Rangoon regime.

Troops Reject Mutiny

However, the main military bulwark against the demonstrators in the Rangoon, the 22nd Light Infantry Division, an estimated 8,000 heavily armed, well-disciplined troops, reportedly stood firmly loyal to Sein Lwin.

The demonstrators broadened their base beyond the student ranks that have carried the struggle against military rule in the past. According to eyewitnesses in Rangoon, the students were joined by workers and Buddhist monks, although some reports say the monks were novices, new to the Buddhist brotherhood and less influential than the senior monks who called for a peaceful settlement.

The organization that staged the student demonstrations was clearly effective, but otherwise little is known about it. Student leaders calling the shots operated anonymously; they have no political reputations.

Circulars demanding Sein Lwin’s resignation and a multiparty democracy were issued in the name of the All-Burma Students’ Democratic Assn., but virtually nothing is known of its leadership. Driven to secrecy by police pressure, the student network reportedly is organized in semiautonomous cells, drawn together only for political demonstrations.

Most of the demonstrators appeared to be in their teens and 20s, including a fairly large percentage of high school students. “These are not radicals,” said Kyaw Win, a Burmese dissident leader interviewed by telephone in Southern California. “They are not political.”

An Isolated Country

Except for the few Burmese students who study abroad, there is little exposure for foreign ideologies, right or left. Ne Win, now 78, has determinedly isolated the country, even withdrawing from membership in the Nonaligned Movement.

Most analysts believe Ne Win himself is still pulling the political strings, despite his resignation from political office late last month, a move that triggered the events leading to this week’s turmoil.

At that time, Ne Win summoned his party and delivered a series of shock announcements. He was resigning as head of the party; he accepted partial responsibility for the brutal suppression of student demonstrations in March and June; he called for a referendum on establishing a multiparty political system, and he demanded reforms to open up the economic system, his own erratic creation.

What appeared as a shaft of light in the country quickly darkened, however. The party accepted Ne Win’s resignation, although his retirement from power and politics seemed improbable. But it rejected the referendum on multiparty government as untimely and named Sein Lwin the party boss and head of state. To the students, the game was unchanged, and after only a few days of stunned contemplation, they began the demonstrations that culminated with Sein Lwin’s announced resignations.

Times staff writer Norman Kempster contributed to this story from Washington.