Student-Soldiers Wage War for a Myanmar Democracy : Rebellion: O.C. man finds a new generation of his people carrying on armed struggle against military rule.

U Kyaw Win squints through the road’s billowing dust and utters a loud moan--”MMMMMMM!”--into a cloth he holds over his mouth and nose. He braces himself in the back of a pickup truck as it careens sharply down a steep embankment and jounces, for the umpteenth time, across another wide stream.

“This is the same stream,” he yells incredulously. “We cross it 30 times.”

Deep inside Myanmar, three hours from the Thai border, the truck finally jolts to a stop in front of a sign posted on a fence: “Revolution Is Our University.”

The fence restrains the tropical forest’s thick greenery from invading a dusty field dotted with what looks like a few oversize sheds. In this camp live 412 former junior high, high school and college students, male and female.

Most of these students ran away from Yangon, formerly Rangoon, and other cities in Myanmar in 1988, after SLORC, the State Law and Order Restoration Council that governs Myanmar, formerly Burma, massacred thousands of students and took thousands more prisoner. Others have come more recently, seeking to trade life under a stifling military regime for a quest for democratic government.

“Here they learn how to fight,” mutters Win, a 59-year-old Burmese-American Orange Coast College counselor. In the 24th year of his own quest to halt the fraternal bloodshed and to restore democracy to his native country, Win has made six trips to Myanmar. He comes to Minthamee to visit the student-soldiers, to let them know that someone in the outside world is thinking about them.

Throughout the civil strife that has marked this country’s 45 years of independence from Britain, its students have always fueled the nation’s fires of resistance. They are the nation’s voice, and its bellwether.

As was demonstrated in 1990, when Nobel Peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy swept the parliamentary elections, the students’ demands for an end to military rule are solidly backed by the general population.

Young enough to let a cause consume them and unconscious of considerations of mortality, they pursue their goals with the reckless abandon requisite for this type of endeavor. As a result, tens of thousands have been beaten, shot, killed, tortured, imprisoned or forced to flee for their lives.

Although there has hardly been a time when student activists at Rangoon University have not organized protests against the government, on three occasions in recent history they were joined by much of the rest of the country: in 1962, when Gen. Ne Win seized control of the government in a bloodless coup; in 1974, when the populace revolted against food shortages and monetary devaluation; and in 1988, when people again protested the government’s claustrophobic social and economic policies.

Today, those students have fanned out around the world. Several thousand student activists from the 1988 demonstrations live in camps and refugee villages in Myanmar’s “liberated” zones, which are controlled by the country’s minority ethnic groups. They fight, teach school, and carry information, medicine and supplies to villagers. Others who fled to Thailand, Australia, India and the United States call attention to their country’s plight by conducting hunger strikes in front of Myanmar’s embassies and by lobbying. Some remain in Myanmar and work underground. If they are caught by SLOW--Myanmar’s secret police--they just disappear.

As Win moves through the camp at Minthamee, some of the 100 student-soldiers who are present flock eagerly around him. They know of him; they have heard him speak on the shortwave newscasts of the British Broadcasting Corp.

In their teens and early 20s, they have already experienced the terror and despair of battle, of being far from homes to which they cannot return. They have felt fear for the safety of friends and family because of the path they have taken. The bubbling effervescence of youth has long since disappeared from their faces; all that remains is youth’s resilience. They are so different from the students whom Win advises in Orange County.

“I try to divorce my counseling in the United States from what I do here,” he says, “even though I know there is another set of students who just want the opportunity to go to college. My frustration comes when I must convince students in the United States to stay in school, instead of dropping out to make car payments, as if life centers around the car.”

Win walks into the student-soldiers’ headquarters, a one-room building with walls of bamboo slats, a floor of dirt. Spinning slowly on a string tied to the ceiling is an inflated clear plastic globe with a sign inside that reads: “Back to School.” He sits on a stool to listen to their stories.

Like most students who fled Myanmar in 1988, Win Naing’s immediate goal was to find a gun and return to fight SLORC. “I thought it would be over very quickly--three or four months,” he says, his hands tugging on a green towel draped around his neck.

Five years later, he and his fellow student-soldiers have grimly adjusted to the intractability of the war and the realization that their fighting alone will do little to end it, but they do what they can. Now the camp’s deputy commander, Naing, 28, supervises the training and deployment of the student-soldiers, 300 of whom patrol the front lines. The oldest, the camp’s commander, is 33; the youngest, who does not yet fight, is 11. They spend 200 days at the front, 100 days in training, and the other 65 on leave and doing work at the camp.

Yet, “this existence is much better than living under a military regime,” says Naing, who had never heard his teachers in Myanmar utter the word democracy in all his school years. “Even if I were not in prison, SLORC would open up my brain and eat it,” he says, using a Burmese saying that describes brainwashing.

Unlike revolutionaries in other countries who see only war in their future, the students here optimistically try to continue their education in preparation for peace. They run a primary school that has 30 students, are trying to arrange college-level courses and devour news about other nations with similar struggles. “There is revolution all around the world,” says Naing. “Ours is not that far behind the others. Unless we eliminate the military regime, there will be no peace. I must continue on until that happens, even if it is in the time of my children.”

Unfortunately, the Minthamee student-soldiers have ample role models for such perseverance. Their mentors are the leaders of another group of former students, members of the Karen ethnic minority who fled Myanmar in 1974. They set up their own camp nearby nearly 20 years ago; it has evolved into a permanent refugee village with all the trappings of home. There are elementary, junior high and high schools for their children, a hospital for their sick, even a prison for their criminals. But life is a dead end here. The refugees have no college to send their brightest children to, no jobs at businesses or factories, no way to keep pace with an advancing world.

When Win asks Naing and other students in the various camps he visits what they need, they all tell him the same thing: medicine, food, and for the United States to pressure SLORC into relinquishing power to the government duly elected in 1990.

The international community has responded to the plight of Myanmar’s people, but not strongly enough to impress SLORC.

The United States and Japan cut off aid and weapons sales to Myanmar after the 1988 massacres. The 12 countries of the European Community have called on SLORC to restore democracy.

But the countries that still have some leverage with Myanmar--China and the six members of the Assn. of Southeast Asian Nations (Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines and Brunei)--refuse to interfere in what they describe as Myanmar’s “internal” problems, apparently because they are loath to jeopardize profitable trade. China reportedly sold Myanmar $1 billion in arms in 1991. With the blessing of their government, 40 logging companies from Thailand, whose own forests have been sorely depleted, signed contracts with SLORC to harvest Myanmar’s teak forests. Thailand also expects to benefit from construction of a pipeline, planned by a French company, that will deliver natural gas from the petroleum fields of Myanmar. Singapore is also said to be a source of weaponry for Myanmar’s army.

Not even the United Nations has a coherent approach to Myanmar’s problems. Last December, a United Nations General Assembly committee voted to rebuke SLORC for continuing to hold Aung San Suu Kyi, the winner of the 1991 Nobel Prize for Peace, and the international body’s Commission on Human Rights has sharply criticized Myanmar. But the U.N. Development Program still conducts Myanmar development projects, which Karen leaders say are using slave labor.

While the U.S., Canadian, Japanese, European and Australian governments sympathize with the plight of Myanmar’s people, those nations’ businesses have fewer scruples. Oil companies from the United States, Japan, Canada, Australia and Britain lined up to sign exploration agreements with SLORC in 1989.

Win has his own formula for peace in Myanmar. “The United Nations should broker a conference. SLORC must be willing to talk to the opposition,” he says. “They must withdraw all troops (from the contested zones). They must free all political prisoners. They must agree to hold talks outside Myanmar, preferably outside the countries surrounding Myanmar. They can go on talking for 30 years, for all I care. If they take 30 years, the people are still gaining something, because they’re not shooting.”

After 24 years of dealing with the ethnic governments in exile, Win doesn’t think that they alone will be able to oust the military regime, which is one reason he puts most of his energy into helping refugees, publicizing their plight to the world, and inspiring some of the 100,000 Burmese who live in the United States, including the 20,000 in Southern California, to join his efforts. He believes that change must come from inside Myanmar, as it did in 1988, but that the international community must be ready to help when the occasion arises. “In 1988, if somebody had come to their aid, the scales might have been tipped,” he says wistfully.

Thi Thi Khin, a 27-year-old graduate of Rangoon University’s chemistry department, agrees with Win when they talk about the issue in a clinic for refugees in Mae Sot, Thailand. The clinic is near the Myanmar border, where Win has come to drop off some medical supplies. “There are so many groups around here, but they don’t have the ability to unify themselves,” she says. “The change must come from the inside. Nothing will happen for a long time. But it’ll happen some day, and reach the momentum that it had in 1988.”

Khin sits cross-legged on a mat on the wooden floor of an open-air room at the clinic, which is housed in an old residence. There are no beds. A longyi or Burmese sarong, a shirt and a towel hang from a line stretched across one wall. Blankets are neatly piled in a corner. Other refugees, some limp with malaria, crowd the floors nearby. Wearing a gray polo shirt, her hair cut in a short modern style, Khin breast-feeds her two-month-old son, who is wearing tiny mittens on his hands to keep from scratching himself. She has come to the clinic from the student refugee village on the Thai border because her baby is ill. Khin has another son, 2 1/2 years old. Several months ago, she arranged for her parents, who live in Yangon, to take him.

“I had come to the conclusion that I could not raise the child here,” said Khin. She knew that things were bad in Myanmar, but after living in the refugee villages, she could see that life could be worse. “I was worried that he would not get enough food, his education would be limited, he would have few clothes and no cultural or religious training. My parents traveled through the jungle to meet me at the border to pick him up.” She gazed at her second son and whispered in a husky voice, “I plan to hold on to this one.”

She tells Win of her last days in Yangon in 1988, when students, monks, government workers, “everyone” was demonstrating against the government. She watched in horror as SLORC soldiers gave permission for a group of residents to cross a bridge on their way to a demonstration, then gunned them down. “Five or six small children were killed,” she says, pausing, then continuing, her voice low, tense. “My pregnant cousin was tied up naked, suspended from the ceiling and beaten. I don’t know if she’s still in prison, or what happened to the baby.” She rocks her son. “I cannot find adequate words to describe the hostility I feel for SLORC.”

Khin also fled to the border in hopes of taking up arms against SLORC. Although she has received military training, she teaches at a grade school in the refugee village. Win asks her how she finds the inner strength to keep going day after day for the last four years. Khin thinks for a long time, then answers: “Each day, as I look across the border, I see the mountain ranges so close to me, and so far away. I came here by choice. The children of the refugees have no say in the matter. They’re stuck here, deprived of a normal life. They don’t have enough to eat, they can’t continue their education past high school, they wear one shirt the whole year. I have a responsibility to those children.”

Win begins to speak, and stops. His brow creases, his lips pressed tight, and he bows his head as tears stream down his cheeks. Like Khin and the other refugees, he has also paid a price for his fight. After he publicly denounced Myanmar’s military government in 1969, he was banned from re-entering the country. It blacklisted him, including his name in a book of Myanmar’s traitors, usurpers, and enemies.

After Win’s children were born in the early 1960s, his parents applied every year for the exit visa required to travel abroad. They were allowed to visit the United States only once to see their grandchildren, in 1973. Win was not allowed to return to Myanmar to care for his parents when they became ill, nor to attend their funerals when they died. In a culture whose people passionately regard caring for their aging parents as a duty, honor and privilege, the Myanmar government’s interference with Win’s responsibilities is a wound that will not heal.

At the end of two hard weeks bouncing in the beds of pickup trucks, clinging to the gunwales of long-tail river boats, sleeping on wooden floors, dealing with squat toilets and bucket baths, Win is ready to return to the United States to push his campaign another “milli-milli-milli inch” further.

As he prepares to leave Myanmar, Win thinks of Khin. “There are so many parallels between her story and mine,” he says, his forehead wrinkling in pain as he thinks of the decisions he made so long ago. “My father told me when I was 27 not to return to Myanmar. I wonder if she’ll be in the same situation 31 years from now.”