Issue: Human rights crisis in Burma.
Why? Torture and ethnic cleansing in a nation hidden from the world.
Action: Refugees use the internet to organize relief and solidarity.
(photos courtesy of Free Burma Rangers)
On a sticky Friday night in the rainy season, three twentysomething guys huddle around a computer screen in a locked and shuttered house near Thailand's western border. Though I'm showing them something that is, by many people's standards, perfectly banal -- pictures of my family and friends on MySpace -- they stare at the monitor in stunned silence.
"Wow," Mu Na finally says quietly when I ask him what he thinks.
"Are these people" -- the ones whose photos and personal information are right there in front of them, to whom they could send messages instantly -- "in America?" Htoo La asks. When I answer that they are, Doh Poe looks skeptical.
I show them the browse feature, and we drop down the long list of countries whose citizens we can examine and get to know. It doesn't take long for these Burmese refugees, who are living illegally in a country that refuses to grant them official sanctuary, to realize that they're looking at a window into a world they haven't been and may not be able to see for decades, or ever. They are not even free to move about Thailand, and though some of them, and all of their parents, were born in Burma, they can't set foot in that country for fear of being arrested, tortured, enslaved or killed.
An oppressive junta has ruled Burma since 1962, when a military general seized control of the government in a coup. In 1988, after over two decades of increasingly crumbling infrastructure, economics and freedoms, students on a Rangoon campus organized protests that escalated into a massive uprising, ultimately involving citizens of all ages and occupations and spreading through the streets of the capital as well as to cities around the nation.
Though the armed forces killed thousands of demonstrators, demands for democracy continued, and the government finally held elections in 1990. When the leader of the National League for Democracy, Aung San Suu Kyi, won by a landslide, the junta invalidated the results and has subsequently kept Suu Kyi under house arrest. Fearing further rebellion, military leaders cracked down: Thousands of activists have been jailed, killed, or exiled; it's illegal to hand out any literature -- a pamphlet, even a flyer -- that hasn't been approved by the government; universities have been shut down without warning for years at a time. The censorship and intimidation have been very effective; Burma (the name the government changed to "Myanmar" in 1989 but which has been retained by pro-democracy activists and sympathizers who don't recognize the regime's authority to do so) has been virtually protest-free for nearly 20 years.
These curious refugees are rebelling against the result. While the junta has used its power to strip civil (elections, expression) and human (healthcare, on which the government spends less than $1 per person per year) rights from its citizens in the cities, it is enacting an all-out genocide against those in the outlying hills. Ethnic minorities in the villages face forced labor, crop and property destruction, rape, harassment and theft. Many of those who aren't shot or starved or beaten to death flee to the depths of the jungle, where more than a million people are displaced, or to refugee camps in Thailand, which the U.N. estimated were home to 140,000 Burmese last year.
Despite these extraordinary obstacles, Mu Na, Htoo La, and Doh Poe (whose names have been changed for their safety) are a few of scores of refugees who refuse to wait listlessly in U.N. camps wishing for change; they sneaked out, determined to work for their people, determined to empower them from the inside and the ground up, as did the students in the 1988 uprisings that won them the first election in almost 30 years. Working in conjunction with several organizations (which also cannot be named), the refugees steal back into Burma, traveling from village to village, spreading their pro-democracy message and encouraging the communities to unite.
"How about Myanmar," Mu Na suggests, spying the country in the browse options. I choose it from the box, surprised that it's there. But our first search turns up some 3,000 profiles. Most of the users are young, and many of them are students -- the same demographic that ignited the protests that led to the 1990 elections, the same demographic that has trouble organizing in a country where anti-government groups are illegal.
At the house meeting a week later, more than a dozen guys and a handful of women sit crowded on the cool stone floor. Some of them have already set up personal accounts in order to chat with strangers about their interests. But what if they set up an advocate account to talk to people about their cause? Though this group has reached thousands of villagers through their grassroots campaigning over the years, they have, so far, been unable to tap a key demographic: the concentrated populations -- comprised mostly of ethnic majority Burmans -- in the cities.
Due to the extreme government censorship and surveillance of the past decades, many urban Burmese don't know what war wages outside the towns, that many Western leaders are sanctioning their government, or that they have so many potential allies inside their own borders, because no one has any way to tell them. These refugee-activists have a new, albeit unlikely, tool with which to break through a junta's unyielding tyranny: social networking sites.
The Free Burma MySpace page is up (and run by friends in the United States so that the safe house IP address can't be tracked) with information about the 1988 revolt, current-events blog posts, photos, and links to international organizations dedicated to ending the Burmese dictatorship. The refugees hope their message will reach more sympathizers overseas and, more important, further traverse Burma's ethnic and political borders to continue slowly, gradually building a dissemination of ideas, a common dissent, a momentum that the military has for so long been so successfully suppressing.
Mu Na scrolls through the pictures of the Burmese users, all of whom will be targeted as "friends." "I don't know them," Mu Na says.
His parents ran from the regime before he was even born; he's spent his entire life in Thailand. "Did you think you would?" I ask.
He looks at me, realizing his mistake. "I don't know," he says. "But maybe soon I will."
For more information on human rights in Burma, visit Free Burma Rangers and U.S.A. Campaign For Burma.
Nicole McClelland is the founding editor of the online literary magazine The Extrovert and the copy editor of Mother Jones. Before moving to San Francisco, she taught English to displaced students in Thailand and New Orleans.
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