Burma Eats Its Young

(Photograph: Min Ko Naing as a young man.)

In a just world, the names Min Ko Naing and Ko Ko Gyi would be as well known as Steve Biko and Adam Michnik. These two leaders of Burma’s 88 Generation students, now in their forties, have spent almost their entire adult lives in prison for organizing pro-democracy demonstrations. After a short period of freedom, between 2005 and 2007, they and their colleagues were jailed again for staging a long walk around Rangoon, in August of 2007, in protest of soaring transportation prices—a gesture that sparked the so-called Saffron Revolution, the largest demonstrations in Burma since 1988, both times put down in blood.

After Aung San Suu Kyi, these two men are the leaders of Burma’s democracy movement, and a source of intense admiration and inspiration among the young Burmese I met on two trips there earlier this year. Ko Ko Gyi is the political strategist of the movement; Min Ko Naing is its charismatic soul. A friend who met Min Ko Naing after his release in 2005 told me how the former prisoner shed tears as he described the death of his only cellmate, a cat. Other Burmese and Americans speak of Min Ko Naing as having a special glow that raises him above the ordinary run of humanity. But because of Burma’s obscurity, the rest of the world has never heard of them.

On November 11th, Min Ko Naing, Ko Ko Gyi, and other democracy activists were sentenced to sixty-five years in remote prisons scattered across Burma, where contact with their families and friends will be extremely difficult. The trial took place in a closed court in the Irrawaddy Delta, without defense counsel. The defendants still face up to twenty other charges—all because of the walk, staged fifteen months ago, on behalf of their hard-pressed countrymen. Meanwhile, the Burmese regime continues to prepare for “elections” in 2010 as part of its self-appointed transition to “democracy.”

These sentences are the regime’s response to the United Nations, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, the governments of India and China, the International Crisis Group, and every other group or individual that is trying, in good faith or not, to end Burma’s isolation and enable the regime to reform. What Joseph Lelyveld, in his great book “Move Your Shadow,” wrote of a South African government that had imprisoned and tortured one of Biko’s comrades, is equally true of a Burmese government that has decided to destroy its very best young people: “A system that could make the confession about itself that was implicit in the attempt to humiliate and break a young man like this, I thought, showed that it was fundamentally resigned to its own moral rancidness.”




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