Whispers From the Web

[johnston@xxxxxxxxxxxx]

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Burma:  Whispers From the Web

by Christopher Johnston


Excepting excerpted Net postings, which are the property of the respective
authors, the following article is Copyright 1995 by Christopher Johnston.
It may not be reproduced, quoted from, or excerpted in whole or part
without the express written permission of the author.

Begin Italics
Destroy all enemies, both Internal and External  - Tatmadaw billboard in
Rangoon.
End Italics

McDonalds, that golden bastion of western culture is one of the few places
in Bangkok where a caffeine addict can get real, and cheap, filter coffee.
Air conditioning as well.  It was there in Siam Centre I spoke to an
American  in his late twenties with  sandy hair and piercing  eyes.  His
moniker is Strider, his real name can't be known.  If it were he'd likely
be deported by the Thai government - or perhaps targeted for something far
worse by the Slorc, the scary sounding acronym of the really scary Burmese
military government's State Law and Order Restoration Council.

=46or Strider is fast becoming one of the most wanted men on the border of
Thailand and Burma because he maintains the list server for BurmaNet, an
initiative of The Burma Project - itself backed by industrialist George
Soros's Open Society Institute.  The
hard working Strider is also editor and publisher of BurmaNet News, a
digest of press clippings and original reportage on Burma, which goes out
on the BurmaNet list almost every day, under the banner "Appropriate
Information Technologies, Practical Strategies".

=46or the past year and a half Strider has lived up to his virtual name,
patrolling the Thai/Burma border gathering  information   about the
political situation there, then using any technology necessary to spread
the word. "I don't represent anybody.  BurmaNet is like CNN, but goes
beyond that," he says.  "Yes, it's about gathering information, but ten
years ago something like this would have been done by an intelligence
agency for some government. Here, anybody, including the Slorc, can put
information on it."  Everybody might be able to post, but that BurmaNet
even exists is itself inherently political. "With BurmaNet News I make a
point of gathering information from  every side of the issue and from every
source," he says.  "BurmaNet is one of the few list servers where you can
put out a message and be guaranteed that it will be read by the Slorc, the
Burmese opposition, NGOs, the Thai government, the US government and the US
intelligence agencies."  In addition, copies of BNN, encrypted with PGP,
are smuggled into Burma on disk and disseminated on hard copy.  With this
kind of audience it's no wonder Strider is a careful man.

Burma is  the largest (and poorest) country in Southeast Asia - but  only
has a population of 42 million. It is also one of the most politically
repressive countries  in the world: a constant civil war has raged there
since 1948. But  government  - and, since 1962, military  government  - has
managed to control reports of human rights abuses coming out of the
country,  and restrict  access to the foreign and domestic media by its own
citizens. For years foreigners were only granted 24 hour visas, and though
later this expanded to seven days and now thirty, visitors are closely
watched by government police agents.  It's been easy for the world to
forget about Burma.

There are other reasons.  The most obvious is that it's hard work to find
out what happens there and to whom.   Burma has 135 distinct ethnic groups.
The Buddhist Burman majority  constitutes sixty percent of the population
with the rest made up of ethnic minorities who follow Buddhism,
Christianity,  Islam, Hinduism, and Animism.  Most Burmans live in the
centre of the country, or Delta region, while the ethnic minorities live in
the mountains and thick jungle that ring the country. And to this add the
fact that before most were defeated or neutralised, Burma had 23 different
rebel armies, each with their own political organisations.  With such a
combination of repressive regime and antithetical multi-ethnic groupings,
it is not surprising that many foreigners  find themselves lost in a sea of
acronyms and long-standing political enmities.  But this too the Net has
changed, for as well as uniting dissidents it educates the interested in
bite-sized pieces.

Begin Italics
BURMANET: Up to 1000 DKBA/SLORC troops hit  four  more refugee camps  April
28, 1995

In their largest incursion to date, as many as 1,000 Burmese army and
Democratic Karen Buddhist Army (DKBA) troops attacked four Karen refugee
camps today. The attacks began early in the morning when an "intruder"
attacked a section of Me Ta Wa camp. Thai Border Patrol Police fired on the
attackers but were forced to retreat. There are as yet unconfirmed reports
that one Thai soldier was killed and another taken prisoner. The attacking
troops burned the guard post at Me Ta Wa and then moved on to Sho Klo
refugee camp at about 10:00am.

After burning a section of Sho Klo, they moved on to Kler Klo camp and
burned it to the ground. After Kler Klo, they returned to Kamaw Lay Ko and
finished the job of destruction they began there on Tuesday.

=46or the first time, the Thai authorities seem to be serious about
responding. The Thais have brought up armored vehicles and aircraft and
there were reports of running engagements with the intruders. In the words
of one usually taciturn border relief official, "the shit has hit the fan."

End Italics

Burma exploded in 1988.  Riots in the urban centres against military
government led to a crackdown which left thousands of Burmese dead.  The
uprising would probably have gone unnoticed outside Burma except for some
videos taken of demonstrators being slaughtered in front of the US Embassy
in Rangoon.  Fleeing the Tatmadaw (the military's name for itself) and the
feared Hlon Thein, secret police, thousands of university students, city
folks mostly, fled to the border region, and joined forces with the ethnic
rebel minorities in the country.  The Burmese students formed ABSDF, and it
became the primary military  and political organisation for all Burman
rebels, regardless of whether or not they attended university.   This
uprising also led to a fake coup in which the aging dictator stepped aside
and twelve other military men, the Slorc, took power.

In 1990 the Burmese government held its first free elections  since 1960,
which to the public amazement, were actually more or less fair.  To the
Slorc's surprise they lost more than 80 per cent of the vote to opposition
parties led by the National League for Democracy and so the results were
ignored and the repression continued. The NLD's charismatic leader was Aung
San Suu Kyi, daughter of the Burma's great colonial liberator, Aung San.
She was placed under house arrest prior to the election and banned from
running because she is married to a Briton and has been under guard every
since in Rangoon.   Widely popular, she became a living symbol for the
aspirations of the Burmese people including ABSDF.  In 1991 she won the
Nobel Peace Prize after being nominated by Vaclav Havel.

=46rom Bangkok Strider puts out BurmaNet News quickly enough to make that it
impacts on all the parties concerned. Being a single-issue kind of guy he
collects - both digitally and in-person - phenomenal amounts of difficult
to obtain data and launches it onto the Net in  super-fast time.   The
excerpt  above is from a report  in  his regular issue of BNN=1F  =1F- itsel=
f
nearly 12,000 words  - which arrived on April 29, less than a day after
the latest events had transpired. Strider's  previous issue arrived two
days before, and contained 13,000 words of information.  Another five
thousand words arrived on April 30.  And though a lot of BNN  includes wire
copy, much is original reportage.

"The trick is using the right kind of information  and then disseminating
it," says Strider. "That's why the investigative  component is so
important.  It's not just reprinting  news reports available already on the
Internet.  That's too easy and pretty ineffective.  BurmaNet is trying to
build a network of information  beyond the end of the Net. You have to go
into areas where the  Net isn't, and come out with  something more.  The
Net just makes delivery cheaper and faster."

Strider didn't set out to be an activist.  He had been in Thailand for
several years prior to his involvement in BurmaNet and got involved through
a sense of duty.  His real wish is to write  scholarly tracts on US
President Abraham Lincoln, who abolished slavery.   "It's just that it's
pretty hard to justify contemplating Lincoln's navel while sitting next to
the only country left on earth that still practices an organised form of
slavery.  All the more so when I see Americans like the President of Unocal
defend a slave-labor system in Burma on grounds that we have long since
discarded in America as reprehensible."

The Nat Ei Taung gas pipeline project is a deal between the Slorc and
western oil giants Total of France and Unocal of California to pump natural
gas from the vast virgin fields of the Gulf of Martaban across the
Tenasserim to Thailand, where it will help feed Thailand's industrial
growth at a nice price.   To build the pipeline and a railway related to it
the Slorc has been using "volunteers" from local villages.  Sources on the
Net suggest that to date between 120,000 and 150,000 people were relocated
or forced into concentration camps to work on this project.   Situated
about fifty kilometres south of the infamous "Railway of Death" where
Allied POWs and Asian civilians were worked to death by the Japanase
Imperial Army during World War II, the pipeline is a bitter echo of their
suffering.

What's amazing about this story is the fastest and best quality information
has come from Strider's BurmaNet News .  "Burma is a police state where
information doesn't move in or out very easily," says Strider.  "The
pipeline, for example, is one our projects.  This is an area in which
information is tough to come by.  There are 17,000 Slorc troops there whose
main job is to keep people away from the site. Companies can go over there
and do things in Burma which would be impossible elsewhere, because people
don't know where Burma is.  It's documenting things like that which happen
inside Burma that BurmaNet is all about."

This year has brought plenty of other news for Strider to report  on  - and
most of it bad.   In late January, Manerplaw, the joint Burman and ethnic
revolutionary headquarters deep in the jungle of the ethnic Karen Khaw Thoo
Lei state, collapsed before an offensive of the Burmese Army.   The army
exploited divisions between Buddhist and Christian Karens and managed to
divide the Karen National Union (KNU), the most powerful opposition army,
along these religious lines.  The result was that Manerplaw fell with
hardly a shot being fired.

A month later the KNU's last major stronghold at Kawmoora, near the Thai
town of Mae Sot, was abandoned after the Burmese Army reportedly used
chemical weapons.   Finally in  late March, the KNU leadership ordered its
troops to cease operations against the Burmese Army and offered to talk
with the Slorcs.   The Slorc responded by sending combined Burmese Army and
Karen rebel soldiers as far as five kilometres into Thailand to burn down
Karen refugee camps and terrorize  refugees into returning to Burma.  The
goal was to subvert the KNU's support base.  So far this strategy has
failed.  The Karens and other rebel groups may be losing the war on the
ground, but they've commenced operations on the Net.

Begin Italics
We deeply conceive that our goals can be achieved through revolutionary
struggle, co-operatively done by strong and hard alliance forces including
both democratic and national revolutionary forces,"
The manifesto of the People's Progressive Front.

"We earnestly appeal to the international  community to exert more pressure
against the Slorc who has been ruling Burma like fascists,"
A joint statement of revolutionary groups.
End Italics

"One of the few advantages that the opposition has over the regime is that
its kids are a lot more adept at computers than the government, which is
loathed by its own people," says Strider.  "Those people  the Slorc can get
to work for them won't be the best and the brightest."

You can find some of these best and the brightest on soc.culture.burma.
They've fled the regime and are scattered from the Chittagong Hill tracts
in Bangladesh to Norway, but soc.culture.burma  creates an environment
where they can talk politics, plan strategy, and trade insults with Slorc
sympathisers.  In addition, the FreeBurma World Wide Web site has a vast
repository of activist resources, with which both expats and foreign
activists alike can plan strategy to bring down the Slorc.

Begin Italics
I just saw it with my own eyes a few days ago when I was reviewing the case
of a student (khin zaw maung) who was studying in Singapore on public
policy. He wrote a paper on Burma public policy.  There were a few others
who were arrested with him.

According to that law, most people on the Net will be arrested for
associating with rebel forces (democratic forces). There was also a clause
where if you write anything remotely against SLORC, you can be arrested
too. Therefore, any of us Burmese netters go to Rangoon, you are HISTORY.
Those fascist dogs will eat you alive. Coban Tun, responding to a westerner
inquiring about Burmese law.
End Italics

However, people representing the Slorc point of view are also common in
soc.culture.burma where they attempt to divide the opposition and
manipulate foreign public opinion openly.  After the fall  of Kawmoora,
where chemical weapons were reportedly used by the Slorc, the following
excerpt was posted. It was part of a long series of posts which ran under
the header: "Whither KNU" and is an attempt at discrediting and dividing
the KNU by accepting the leap of logic that the Karens gassed themselves.
It was uploaded ten days later into soc.culture.burma from an address at
America On-Line.   It's a fantasy the Slorc would have you think went on in
the mind of the Karen leader General Bo Mya who they call here Nya Mya.
"The thing about the Whither KNU? stuff," says Strider, "is that clearly
they don't have a good enough command of English to pull it off."

Begin Italics
The New Light of Myanmar Newspaper
03  March 1995
                Nga Mya was sorely dejected when Kawmura fell. His very
'throne' had begun to totter. Nevertheless, he did not fail to plan making
capital out of its loss.
        "The enemy used poison bombs in Kawmura battle, did they not?"
        Htaw Hla answered this question by shaking his head and Nga Mya
grimaced.
        "Maybe, you didn't know. The enemy used poison bombs. We have
passed word that the enemy was using poison bombs and the radios have begun
to bombard the Na Wa Ta".
        "Not so, General. Bombs the enemy used were not poison bombs, they
were smoke bombs.
        They laid a smoke screen just before their entry into the camp. The
smoke choked our comrades.
        Not one comrade showed any symptom of being poisoned".
        "It doesn't matter. Even if they didn't,we must still say they did".
        Htaw Hla dared not make any more rebuttal and kept quiet.
        "What are they doing now in Kawmura?"
        "Keeping quiet".
        "Are they not firing at this bank?"
        "They are not".
        "Anyway, say they are firing".
        Nga Mya had to keep concocting news for theWest bloc media. But he
really needed to do very little: the Western media were already experts in
calling a bed-bug a tortoise and they very easily exaggerated what little
information  Nga Mya supplied them...
End Italics

The Karen Human Rights Group noted in BurmaNet News that in one of these
Whither KNU articles might even have tipped the Slorc's hand, because it
mentioned a specific chemical used at Kawmoora.

Begin Italics
"I have instructed them to explode bombs everywhere.  I have asked them to
poison wells and tanks with potassium cyanide."

The specific mention of potassium cyanide is intriguing, because no one
else except SLORC has mentioned such a specific chemical.  Potassium
cyanide causes 'cyanosis': inability to breathe, respiratory failure and as
little as 0.5 mg. can kill an adult, leaving the victim with blue face,
lips and extremities.
Slorc first secretary Lt. Gen. Khin Nyunt
Begin Italics

If you follow these threads of Burmese Internet dissent they will lead to
the border of Thailand and Burma, where the largest commodity is human
misery, and where one's well-being is bought at retail tariffs.  My goal
was to find the technocrats on the ground who have chosen to devote their
lives to the revolution on the ground.

I soon found my knees jammed to my throat in the back seat of a white
Toyota pick-up while I fondling the action on a six inch stiletto in the
front pocket of my waist pack debating under what circumstances I should
plunge it into the neck of the skinny Thai border patrolman who is driving.
He arranged the mirror to keep an eye on me and fiddles with the squawking
portable scanner in its leather harness on the dashboard.  A big smirk
adorned his face, because this ride cost me a 3,000 baht (=A385) bribe and
most of it went into his pocket.

His pimple-faced mate was from the Air Force and had provided the truck to
take us to the border with Burma.  Beside me,  my companion, a Karen member
of the All Burma Students' Democratic Front (ABSDF) central committee, is
nervous, but sits with grim dignity, refusing to understand anything they
said to him in Thai.   Ahead of us loom the craggy mountains of the
Tenasserim in Burma, which hold within her jungle  valleys the last refuge
for democracy-minded rebels.

Thanks to the timely dispensation of my bribe, we reached the border
without a fight. The Toyota purred up to a border post they happily kicked
300 baht to a border patrolman in aviator glasses, who quietly accepted his
share, ignored the human cargo, and led us down country roads, where there
were no recognised crossings.  My drivers dropped us off in the middle of a
blazing hot field, where a local farmer and his son drove me and my guide
by motorcycle into the mountains and the border's edge.  We then hiked
through the Tennaserim  jungle careful to keep an eye out for Burmese Army
patrols which may have lost their way.

Begin Italics
We firmly believe that our goals cannot be achieved by  means of
negotiations with SLORC, the military clique which represents military
dictatorship in Burma.
End Italics

These are dark days for Burmese revolutionaries.  Ethnic rebel groups have
been picked off one by one and now only a few groups remain on active
service.   But their secret weapon is tech and not just the Internet
either.  Deep in the Tenasserim jungle I found myself sitting in ABSDF's
bamboo hut HQ.  With me were Aung Thu Nyein Vice-Chairman of ABSDF and the
highest ranking commander on the ground, and  Min Min, the camp's computer
tech support guy.  Min Min won this honour from his days studying CS in
Singapore. "Computers are part of our program," says Aung Thu Nyein.  "Our
situation is like East Timor.  In East Timor they have rebel groups with
only 300 or 400 soldiers.   The Indonesian army is very big, nearly one
million. With that small number, they can still make a lot of campaigns  in
the international  community, a mass movement in their countryside, rally
and organisational work.  I think that in the future our situation will
change like that."

Aung  Thu Nyein says that one of the Slorc's biggest fears is cable and
satellite television and that the Slorc has announced that every satellite
dish and receiver in Burma must now be registered with the government.
"The Burmese people with satellite dishes have seen the real situation on
the BBC and CNN, they know the real situation and the Slorc worries for
this one," he says. With the Internet,  a far easier tool to spread
information  and a far less easy technology to spot, the  potential is
obvious.

Sowing divisions in the Burmese Army is at the top of Aung Thu Nyein's
upgrade plans.   Burma more than doubled the size of its army over the last
seven years and, according to Aung Thu Nyein, has involuntarily pressed
many young men into service.  "In this area alone over the last year there
were three mutinies in which conscripts shot their officers and fled to the
revolutionary  area.  "With more advanced technology  we can  divide the
army very easily.  We hope to distribute information to the soldiers in the
Burmese Army.  A colour scanner will be especially good for us, because we
can easily make fake currency notes to distribute inside of Burma and make
big problems  for the government."

Min Min dreams of the day when they have a satellite hook up throughout
the jungle.  "With  a fast modem we can send information from here to the
people inside Burma, so they can find out what is happening outside and
what we are doing. They can know this with technology."

It is here, along the broken lines of combat that the ABSDF collects
information brought out by its troops and transfers  it by special courier
to Thailand. There it is put onto  disk and loaded onto the Net. In the
jungle there are currently no computers for Min Min to support.  The one
system they owned was transferred out to Thailand along with the satellite
dish and the television after a hut fire during a football party
celebrating  last year's World Cup final between Italy  and Brazil.

Begin Italics
Two thousand of them have become refugees in Thailand,
joining  thousands  more  already  in  camps.  People  in   these conflicts
areas  are  subject  to  arbitrary  executions  in their fields, torture
during  interrogation,  and  the rape  of  women. Deforestation  has  also
been used as a weapon against insurgents , with entire forests denuded to
give them no  place  to  hide.  The resulting  environmental  degradation
resulted in flesh floods last year in Kachin, Arakan, and Mon states, with
mass  destruction  of property and lives.

A Post from the Burma Action Group (UK) as a new influx of refugees flooded
Thailand following the fall of Manerplaw.
End Italics

At a secret place somewhere in Bangkok I spoke with Moe Thee Zon, the
chairman of ABSDF.  It's in urban centres like Bangkok in safe houses like
this one where ABSDF issues press releases and posts onto the Internet
using the laptops and Windows boxes, which are ready to move at a moment's
notice.  Moe Thee Zon is also moves around a lot for he also has to keep
two steps ahead of Slorc agents who operate in Thailand.  The setbacks for
the KNU has brought about a basic switch in strategies by ABSDF from jungle
warfare based on defensible terra firma with front lines, to one based on
urban guerrilla warfare, where small bands of soldiers attack convoys and
sites around the country and in the city centres.  Important components of
this strategy  are: communications, computers and media.  Moe Thee Zon sums
up the campaign using technologies such as the Internet with the phrase "In
one hand we hold fire.  In the other we hold water."

"If  we shoot even one bullet or throw one grenade at a Slorc truck it will
be a victory.  It's very difficult for the Slorc to attack us this way. But
for this we need to use a modernised military  and media communications
system. In the new world  order   information will become more important
for revolutionary groups as well as for government  and business."

Moe Thee Zon is a dark 33 year old revolutionary who also plays guitar very
well.  He confesses that his favourite radio show is the World Service's
Hooked on New Technology. He concedes that ABSDF requires a lot more
technology of all kinds to foster the democracy movement as well as the
war. "We need satellites to give information  to our students and our
people.  We want our students to see what is happening in the war.  But we
also need it for education."

He also thinks that a lot of the technology  he wants could be cheaper than
it is and even sympathised with China's position in the recent trade
brinksmanship actions with the US over copyright protection.  "Computer
programs are a kind of invention that is related to the whole world peace.
These should be cheap for everybody.  It will also be more widely
distributed if it is cheaper.  The Chinese people are very smart with this
kind of thing. Education and equality is related to price.  Newsweek is
very difficult to read for Burmese people because of the price."  But
that's how the market works of course. If Burma were to change government,
it's likely many foreign publishers' prices would drop as they did, at
first, in Russia.

Begin Italics
=46ear is a habit.  I am not afriad
 .Aung San Suu Kyi, leader of the National League for Democracy
End Italics

So can revolution, or at least revolutionary consciousness be brought about
by information technology?  I would argue that it already has.  The Net was
integral in getting information out during the coup attempt in Russia
during 1990 galvanising international outrage against it.  Subcommandante
Marcos recognised the Net as his strongest weapon against the Mexican Army
crackdown following the Chiapas uprising.  A black socked photo of him
graces the Chiapas Information home page.  And others are joining in as
well, including the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Ealam, better known as the
Tamil Tigers.

In the case of Burma, ABSDF commanders assert that the only way to get rid
of the Slorc is through a general uprising.  Information Technologies will
most likely be the integral catalyst for this uprising.  Not because
documenting human rights abuses will do much to pressure the Slorc--the
military government has long proven that cares not a whit about
international opinion--but because of the simultaneous nature of these
technologies.

The basic problem the opposition forces face is that there are so many
ethnic groups and they are so damned disorganised.  Until IT came along
they didn't have access to the same basic  information, and couldn't easily
distribute that information to people inside Burma or broadcast it to the
world.  Any act of protest or violence was inevitably conducted in a void.


So consider the Rodney King verdict.  As soon as the verdict was announced
via television, people in several major cities in the United States, fueled
by outrage, began to riot.  They did this independently of any political
agenda and they did it all at the same time:

Multiply that outrage by one hundred and you get Burma.  The Slorc is
despised by the people it rules.  IT is the Slorcs faustian Hell, waiting
to swallow it up, while it enjoys the pleasures of the present.   The key
media bringing the uprising to bear will be television and radio, but it
will likely be supported and coordinated by other tendrils of tech such as
telephony, encryption technology, and Net resources such as BurmaNet,
soc.culture.burma, and the FreeBurma WWW.   Alone each technology is only a
finger, but gathered tightly together it becomes a fist.  Sooner or later
that fist will become the harbinger of violent change for the people of
this golden land.

You Say You Want A Revolution?

The All Burma Students' Democratic Front, Burma Net and human rights
workers are looking for candidates with wide technology backgrounds to help
free Burma from the Slorc. They're also looking for technology. As a matter
of fact they have a shopping list.   "To help free the people of Burma we
need technology," says Moe Thee Zon.  "We need satellites to give
information to our students and our people.  The Slorc doesn't want that
our students see what is happening in the war.  This means a satellite
system, mobile telephones and laptops including cellular modems for data
transmission to attach to the Internet.  We also need solar batteries since
there isn't so much electricity .   We could also use a mobile radio
transmitter  to contact the people cheaply.  For our ABSDF students
fighting in the jungle they  should have walkie talkies and radios.
Computer scanners are also important. About two weeks ago I saw in one
Chinese newspaper a picture showing an African Zulu warrior and in   his
other hand is a mobile telephone.  This is what Burma needs."

Strider, the activist who collects and publishes Burma Net says "that it
would be wonderful to have technical people who know computers (and can
teach) interested in doing something for Burma.  People who can teach
others how to run an  office are also good."  Strider says that his Burma
Net doesn't need anything, but if readers have old computers or 14.4K
modems (don't bother that with that skanky old 2400 bps clunker)  scanners,
and most  important satellite telephones rember that: "You can read  e-mail
over one way satellite. There are satellite dishes all over Burma so with a
satellite telephone there are lots of places which can use it to  access
the Internet."   Interested?  Respond to strider@xxxxxxxxxxxx