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BURMESE DISSIDENTS MOURN PROFESSOR



Subject: BURMESE DISSIDENTS MOURN PROFESSOR MATHEW PENNINGTON





  BURMESE DISSIDENTS MOURN PROFESSOR MATHEW PENNINGTON

Times Higher Educational Supplement in London
Friday April 2, 1999

A decade after fleeing across Burma's borders following the
popular uprising against military rule in 1988, student exiles in
Thailand, India, Bangladesh and China are still carrying a torch
for the pro-democracy struggle. 

Through relentless lobbying and painstaking documentation of
human rights abuses in their homeland, renamed Myanmar since
1989, student veterans who fought a guerrilla war against the
Burmese junta are at the forefront of the campaign for freedom.

In the days before his death last Saturday, they were burning
candles in Bangkok for Michael Aris, the husband of Burmese
opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi. 

They also demanded the release of Min Ko Naing, the charismatic
student leader who led the 1988 protests that almost toppled the
military. He has been in prison in Burma for ten years.

Aung Naing Oo, 34, of the All Burma Students' Democratic Front,
said: "I'm a bit old to call myself a student, but we still see
ourselves as students, as in Burma it's a group that plays a
leading role in politics.

"The front is the main student exile group with more than 1,000
members, among an estimated 5,000 university and high school
students who have escaped Burma since the 1988 clampdown, in
which thousands were gunned down or arrested.

For eight years they fought alongside ethnic insurgents in the
malarial jungles along the Thai-Burma border, but as the Rangoon
military machine, the Tatmadaw, gathered strength, they decided
instead to concentrate efforts on winning hearts and minds .

The front, which is outlawed in Burma and routinely branded as a
terrorist outfit by the junta, has agents inside the country, who
at great personal risk gather information about forced labour,
mass relocations and persecution of dissidents. 

They also prepare and distribute information on human rights. In
January, one member was imprisoned for 54 years for carrying
"seditious" literature, said Aung Naing Oo. About half of Burma's
estimated 1,400 political prisoners are believed to be students.

But as persecution inside Burma has worsened, the campaigning of
the front - most of whose members live as illegal 
immigrants in Thailand - has grown more professional. 

Using funding from international organisations and governments,
they have published a stream of books on human rights abuses in
Burma, including personal accounts of torture inside Rangoon's
notorious Insein prison.