The Nation 970105: Burma's Busy N

[suriya@xxxxxxxxxxxx]

The road from Mandalay led to the information superhighway for Zar Ni, the man who coordinates one of the Internet's biggest human rights campaigns. Sandy Barron reports. 

Burma's Busy Networker

" We have students in key institutions in America now. This is their formative age. If we touch their hearts now, they'll stay with us. When Burma is free, they can go back and help build up the country."


Zar Ni left Rangoon for the United States armed with US$50 and a bunch of foreigners' addresses written in a new copy book. The cash- 50$ was all the Burmese government allowed people to travdl with- didn't last much longer than a disastrously expensive overnight stopover at Bangkok's airport hotel, but the 24 year old's  real stash was in the copybook.

He collected the addresses during seven years spent hanging around Mandalay, working as a private English teacher and as a guide for foreign tourists.  One of those rare visitors to the closed-off Burma of the 1980s helped him get a student visa for the US. Others became friends and pen pals.  By the time Zar Ni got on the plane in 1988, he was sitting on his own little private global network.

Anyone who could pull off international networking in 1980s Mandalay was unlikely to miss out on the network of the 90s - given half a chance.  Ten years on, Zar Ni,has swapped his copybook for a computer and puts in 15-hour days as the person at the centre of one of the Internet's biggest human rights campaigns.

TWo years ago, Zar Ni, by then a student at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, was looking for ways to support Burma's pro-democracy movement when he twigged the possibilities of the Internet.  Now the group he founded links activists, exiles, scholars and academics from around the world, all working to promote political change in Burma.

The Free Burma Coalition (FBC) has scored some spectacular successes, notably in its efforts to discourage outsiders from doing business with the military regime, recently renamed the State Peace and Development Council.

Texaco, Apple Computer and Pepsi are among scores of high-profile US companies to have withdrawn from the country after becoming the targets of FBC boycott campaigns. Dozens of other American institutions such as city and state councils and universities have passed laws aimed at companies which do business with the regime.  An international tourist-boycott campaign turned the junta's " Visit Myanmar Year" into a failure.  And last summer, activists celebrated when US President Bill Clinton passed a limited sanctions bill prohibiting American companies from making new investments in Burma.  Australia and the European
Union are also increasingly tough on Rangoon.

Zar Ni credits the Net for the campaigns impact.  Once isolated and scattered, Burmese expats and their supporters have been spurred into action by the simple fact of being in close contact.  Sharing information and experience means that a small bank of expertise can go a long way.  A canny British ethical-investment specialist in Boston who helped push through tough anti-Burma legislation in Massachusetts now advises college groups around the US on strategy.  A media
expert in Seattle gives advice to activists in Florida, or Australia, or England, on ways of getting their message across on newspapers and television.  Ethnic group activists and Burmese students on the Thai border who once felt cut off, now alert supporters in Asia and elsewhere to problems and human rights violations within minutes.  Scraps of information on the regime's home page are disseminated around the globe and dissected for clues to behind the scene power plays (usually, given the military's exatreme secretiveness, with limited success).

The credit for the "free Burma" campaigns growing support goes mostly to the junta itself, says Seattle based activist Larry Dohrs, drily.  "Once the general public hears the facts - the plain, unembellished facts about what is going on in Burma - they are on our side.They are appaled," he says. Harder to convince have been some members of the American business community, which has been growing increasingly jittey over the trend to impose sanctions on unpopular regimes. In Seattle, the US Asean Business Council, with backers such as Boeing and large Burma-invester Unocal, has been fighting FBC attempts to get the city council to pass an anti-Burma ordinance.  Nor has the campaign made much headway in Asean, which admitted Burma as a member last year.

Still, the activists are in a relatively upbeat mood.  Over two years of Internet activity, the Burma "issue" has been transformed from relative obscurity into a high-profile campaign with heavyweight supporters.  Taking their cue from a comparison first made by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, optimistic activists sometimes refer to the campaign as the "South Africa of the 90s" with an eye to how intenational pressure and sanctions helped bring down what had become a pariah regime there.

Few are prepared to guess when a similar result might be expected in Burma.  The campaigns successes may be hurting the regime financially (as is the recent Asian downturn), but there are no signs yet of democratisation or of improvements in the junta's grim human rights record.  Reports of forced labour and the killing of villagers by the military, of dreadful jail conditions and the arrests of opposition party members continue to pour out of Burma.  No one knows whether recent signs of possible strain within the regime - its name change, the ouster of a few senior generals, the attempts at image improvement via American public relations firms - amount to much.  After 35 years of Iron rule by the generals, few Burmese underestimate the military's staying power.

Sticking with a campaign that has no end in sight can be a tough call for Burmese pro-democracy activists who have given up careers, family lives  and often personal security for their cause. Thousands of university students have
spent their 20s and 30s in grim border camps and as refugees in exiles.  If
things were different , 34-year old Zar Ni reckons he'd be thinking  of settling down now figuring out a regular career, perhaps as a journalist, may be even starting a family after he  finishes his PhD next summer on the politics of education under former Burmese military strong-man General Ne Win. But he's decided to stick with the uncertainties of activism "Probably in Washington".

That Will take him even further from his Mandalay upbringing, where family military connections - including a distant uncle he's never met who was a pilot for General	Ne Win - encouraged the	teenaged Zar Ni to think about a career
in the army. If he had not been an "obedient Burmese son" he might have been rising through the ranks of the military today.


"The army was the way to success - to a career, to money, Power and women,"
he laughs.  "General Aung San [father of Aung San Suu Kyi and the man who led
Burma to independence after World War Two was our hero.  We all wanted to be a general, like him.  We were brainwashed into thinking the army was the saviour of the country.  But my parents didd not want me to join, even though we had good connections."

Instead, he started on the trajectory which led him to where he is now by going to Mandalay Diversity and becoming a private English teacher and and 
Part-time tour guide; his desperated desire to travel himself was the spur to start net-working with foreigners. When he eventually got a visa for the US, he started off in California with a tuition fellowship at the university of California at Davis,working on the university farm, and as a gas station attendant to help pay his way.

While at university, Zar Ni helped scriptwriter Bill Rubinstein with material for the Hollywood movie	-Beyond Rangoon. "I invested a lot of hope in its becoming a major vehicle to promote awareness of what was happening in Burma 
- like The Killing Fields did for Cambodia." Beyond Rangoon's limited impact at the box office sent Zar Ni back to his books - until an ABC Nightline interview with Aung San Suu Kyi in 1994 goaded him into action.

"That was the turning point. I felt seriously challenged. She was describing fear.  I thought'that's what's holding me back.  She was talking about getting your mind free, your heart free. If she could do this [give UP her former life to work for democracy], I thought, so could I." A campus hunger strike plan was scotched, but Zar Ni and a few others made up Aung San Suu Kyi posters and leaflets for a conference on student activism.  "We left an e-mafl address and suddenly there were 40, then 80 people wanting to join up and do something.  That was the start of the Free Burma Coalition, and it just snowballed from there."

Today, the FBC's listserver acts as a daily information board and clearing house for activist bulletins.  Scores of other Burma information sites and information sources have also SprUng up - anyone wanting to could easily receive a hundred e-mails a day of news and views from far-flung members of the pro-democracy movement.

Zar Ni sees the network as more than simply a campaign.  "It's also a training ground and talent pool for young Burmese who will be part of the country's future. we have students in key institutions in America now.  This is their formative age.  If we touch their hearts now, they'll stay with. us.  When Burma is free, they can go back and help build up the country."

He's back to networking.  "There are really positive things being done here, now.  This is the first time in Burmese history that Burmese activists are working with non-Burmese.

"I know our message is getting back into the country, too, and how important that is.  When I was growing up, I heard of Burmese in Newldelhi protesting the military, and I felt good - I felt that we were not forgotten.  It was easy to be aftaid, there.  Burma was like a huge prison."

It's hardly surprising that young people, who grew up in one of the world's most censored countries should relish the untrammelled freedom of the Internet.  Even trading opinions with the occasional regime supporters who flame the activist networks is strangely satisfying. Says Zar Ni, with just a touch of irony:  'At least it's dialogue - it's the only dialogue from the other side there is."

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