August 27, 2007 6:00 PM

Burma's Courageous Citizens

Witness is a recipient organization of Working Assets member support.

The Associated Press and others reported yesterday and today on an unusual occurrence in the South-East Asian country of Burma (officially called Myanmar by its military junta). The event was so significant that some of the world’s most respected news outlets including the BBC, The New York Times and others reported on it. The event? A public demonstration of about 300 people protesting the recent rise in gas prices that has doubled the cost of some goods and more than quadrupled transportation costs. We have a hard time in the U.S. getting coverage of protests in our capitol city of several hundred thousand!

We hear very little about Burma and the brutal military junta the rules the country would like to keep it that way. The dictatorship known as the State Peace and Development Council or SPDC has governed for over 40 years with an iron fist. (For more on the SPDC’s rise to power see the BBC country profile of Burma.) Yet, there is something you can do…

Sanctions levied by countries including the United States and condemnation from regional and international bodies such as ASEAN and the UN Security Council have made little visible impact on the stability of the SPDC. The charismatic leader of the pro-democracy movement and the democratically elected leader of the country, Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi, is a Nobel Peace Prize laureate. She has never been able to govern and has spent almost 11 cumulative years under house arrest.

In addition to widespread corruption, leaving the majority of the country’s 50 million citizens living in poverty, the SPDC is accused widely of human rights abuses. In addition to a near complete clamp down on freedom of expression (several opposition leaders who helped organize the protests, members of the 88 Generation- so named for the last major student-led uprising in 1988, were hauled away by plainclothes police officers into waiting cars – more analysis here - a largely silent war is waged in the ethnic minority areas of Burma’s borderlands.

Sometimes called the “Darfur of Asia,” Burma has the worst crisis of internal displacement in Asia with more than 500,000 people. Villagers are sometimes forced to move to relocation sites under heavy guard, men are forced to work as porters and human mine-sweeps for the army, women are raped, and children are denied access to education and health care. In the past decade over 3000 villages have been destroyed or relocated in eastern Burma – for more details visit the US Campaign For Burma’s website.

Burma Issues, a Thai-based organization that documents human rights abuses inside Burma, works with WITNESS and other allies to raise awareness of human rights abuses committed against the ethnic Karen people who are concentrated on Burma’s eastern border with Thailand. Watch an excerpt from a recent Burma Issues video which brings the voices of these unseen people to the forefront -- and take action to end the persecution of innocent people inside Burma.

As the media reports on reverberations of this public protest, perhaps signs that discontent inside one of Asia’s poorest country’s has reached a new zenith, one where people feel they have nothing left to lose, let’s help raise the alarm for the democracy movement and its leaders but also for the internally displaced people of Burma whose story goes underreported.