Concessions Amid Tales of Past Brutality : Burmese Regime Trying to Buy Time

The grudging concessions of Burma’s longtime rulers, blistered by the flames of a brush-fire rebellion, come intermittently over official Rangoon Radio.

A referendum on multi-party politics is promised; dissidents and demonstrators arrested in the bloody days of early August are released; unions of university students will be legalized again.

The Burma Socialist Program Party, the vehicle of former Gen. Ne Win’s erratic and iron-fisted control of the country, is trying to buy time. In their well-guarded mansions around Rangoon’s quiet Inya Lake, members of the tight, military-dominated ruling clique have reason for alarm.

For a quarter of a century, they ruled through fear. Inside the country, opposition to government was spoken only in whispers. Now, it’s shouted in massive nationwide demonstrations, and the damning accounts of life in Ne Win’s Burma are pouring out.

Thai fishermen, arrested in Burmese waters and freed last week in prison breaks and subsequent pardons, have returned home to detail the cruel conditions of Burmese jails.

“The word terrible isn’t enough to describe the hard life there,” 40-year-old Thawil Khamsawasdi, said of the notorious Insein prison north of Rangoon. “Those who entered could never get out.”

Prisoners said they received two meals a day: steamed rice and a few vegetables, sometimes just boiled leaves. Death was a constant presence, another prisoner said. “If it wasn’t an execution of Burmese prisoners, then it was death as a result of fighting between the inmates themselves.”

Brutality Documented

An Amnesty International report, based on June interviews with Burmese refugees in Thailand, documented brutality outside the capital region, in Burma’s Shan state on the Thai border where government soldiers are engaged in a long war against ethnic guerrillas, some of them involved in the illegal opium trade.

Last March, according to one account in the report, soldiers killed three villagers dragooned as porters for their offensive. The incident was described by a surviving porter:

“None of us had been fed, but we had to go up and down the mountains carrying heavy loads.

“The three who were killed were all Shans in their 20s or 30s. They were apparently not used to this sort of heavy labor and were not strong enough to carry their loads. They collapsed. After that, they were repeatedly bludgeoned with rifle butts and kicked by passing Burmese soldiers. They were bludgeoned around their heads until they lay dead. . . .

“I heard the Burmese soldiers saying that if they died, it was their own fault. The soldiers said that if the Shan weren’t in rebellion, we wouldn’t have to go through all this. Seizing us as porters was their way of taking revenge on the Shan for making trouble, they said. And they killed these three to scare the rest of us into working harder for them.”

Accounts of brutality by the authoritarian government abound in Burma, but until recent months they were mostly hearsay. In the northern city of Mandalay a few years ago, for instance, a closet dissident insisted that Burma’s secret police would regularly abduct outspoken men from the streets.

“We never saw them again,” he said, while admitting he had not personally seen any abductions.

In a country where the telephone system has eroded along with other public services, Burmese said with certainty that phone taps are still being used.

Even now, with the government in evident retreat, fear of government oppression feeds rumors. A Burmese businessman in Bangkok declared last week: “Did you hear? They’ve poisoned the water buckets (placed along Burmese roads for thirsty travelers). Many have died.”

No reports of poisoned water buckets have come directly from Burma, but the past brutalities of the government were enough to convince the businessman that the rumor was true.

In the atmosphere of rebellion, Burma’s leaders have lost credibility. Newly appointed President Maung Maung has promised to push his plan for a referendum on a ruling party congress Sept. 12 and pledged that he and the Politburo will resign if it is rejected.

But not all trust him. “Some say it is not needed,” remarked U Nu, Burma’s first prime minister and founder of an opposition alliance. “They are questioning this step at a time when the country is in turmoil clamoring for democracy.

“Others seem to accept it. They feel things should be done in an orderly manner as long as democracy is ultimately achieved.”

Credibility is strained by the past rule of Ne Win, the 77-year-old former president and party leader who led Burma from 1962, when his coup ousted U Nu’s government, until he resigned his party post in late July. Many of his decisions over a quarter of a century seemed based on whim. Government was Ne Win, in the eyes of most Burmese.

‘The Butcher of Burma’

One of the few other leaders to develop a separate identity was Sein Lwin, who succeeded Ne Win in a disastrous 17-day presidency. To the students, who rose immediately against his rule, Sein Lwin was “the Butcher of Burma.”

He led the security forces that crushed student demonstrations against Ne Win in 1962, and he commanded riot police in the brutal suppression of student protests last March. He was president when Burmese soldiers of a hardened division called in from the Shan state fired into demonstrators in Rangoon on Aug. 8 and 9, killing up to 1,000, inflaming nationwide protests against the government and forcing his resignation.

But like most top leaders, Sein Lwin had shielded himself from public view. In the days after the August killings, students paraded placards bearing his face with vampire-like fangs dripping blood. The caricature was based on an old news photograph, apparently the only likeness available of the reviled ex-general.

“(The present situation) is not a stalemate,” a diplomat in Rangoon declared over the weekend. “The people have won.”

At least the fear of further oppression has lifted enough that demonstrators no longer wear the kerchief masks of early August. The government is reeling, and many leaders of the Burma Socialist Program Party no doubt now fear retribution themselves.

But it’s unlikely that they include Ne Win. Despite constant rumors that he has fled the country, the old general apparently remains in Rangoon. Many analysts believe he is orchestrating government strategy.

“Ne Win is still in command; he’s the guy,” says Kyaw Win, the Southern California-based publisher of Burma Bulletin, a dissident newsletter.

But power has shifted to the streets, and despite his apparent control of the main military forces, Ne Win would be hard-pressed to regain the control he once held.