February 2002
Vol. VIII, No.2

Nonviolent Struggle: Burma and the Middle East

Min Zin was 14 years old in March 1988 when Burma's militia arrested his eldest brother and his sister, pro-democracy student leaders at Rangoon University. Within days, the police had rounded up 141 student activists at that university, including Min Zin's cousin and several neighbors. Outraged, Min Zin joined a campaign to get the students released and to stir up opposition to the repressive military regime that ruled Burma, now called Myanmar by the current military regime. Today, 28 years old and a visiting scholar at the University of California at Berkeley, Min Zin says that he never finished high school and cannot go home, where a death penalty certainly awaits him.

Min Zin

"All of my family members were arrested because of me," he says. "For 13 years, the only community that embraced me was my colleagues." Together, this group of pro-democracy movement youths eventually went underground, hiding in both Burma and along the border in Thailand, working together, supporting each other, facing possible death together. "It was a valuable human experience," but it has demanded sacrifices, Min Zin says. "Work, family life—all these things are nothing in my life. Sometimes I feel like a stranger to ordinary life. Sometimes I feel not just like an exile, but like an internal exile, too."

Min Zin discussed his experiences in Burma's pro-democracy movement in an interview during a three-day conference of some 20 nonviolent activists from around the world held on January 9–11 in Airlie, Va. The U.S. Institute of Peace and the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict (ICNC) co-sponsored the meeting, which also included U.S. and other experts on the subject such as Gene Sharp of the Einstein Institute and Peter Ackerman, chairman of ICNC. Nonviolent civic activists attending had successfully opposed repression or were currently engaged in or trying to launch such a struggle in countries including Belarus, Burma, Chile, Iraq, Mongolia, the Philippines, Yugoslavia (Kosovo and Serbia), and Zimbabwe. Discussion was off the record, and the Institute is preparing a report of the proceedings. During the meeting, Peace Watch interviewed Min Zin and Mubarak Awad, an expert on nonviolence and founder of Nonviolence International, Washington, D.C., and of the Palestinian Center for the Study of Nonviolence, Jerusalem, for this article.

When Min Zin first joined the pro-democracy movement, he traveled to rural areas of Burma circulating leaflets among secondary school students demanding the release of the student prisoners and their readmission to school, organizing after-school protests, and giving anti-government talks. The secondary school population in Burma is very large, he explains, and thus has considerably more leverage than university students. His brother was held incommunicado for four months, during which time he was tortured, then finally released. It took him a very long time to recover from the swollen joints caused by repeated beatings, says Min Zin.

For nine years Min Zin worked inside Burma against military rule, at first against the military regime that had run the country since 1963 and that murdered thousands during a popular protest in August 1988. A military junta, the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC), toppled the regime in a September 1988 coup and promised elections to assuage an angry public. During 1988–89, Min Zin worked closely with democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi until the junta put her under house arrest in 1989. That same day, the police went to Min Zin's house to arrest him, but he was not at home and immediately went into hiding. When Aung San Suu Kyi's party won the 1990 election, the junta nullified the election results. She remained under house arrest until 1995, then was arrested again in 2000. Min Zin remained in hiding in Burma until 1997, engaging in a variety of nonviolent resistance actions. In 1997, he fled to Thailand, where he read everything he could get his hands on to make up for his lost education and began to write analytical articles on Burmese culture.

After so many decades of military repression, Min Zin says, Burmese society is fragmented and suffers from fear, apathy, and a sense of powerlessness. Given the severe military repression, the junta's reliance on the drug trade for revenue, the power of the drug lords, and the strengths and weaknesses of the opposition movement, progress in Burma is likely to be slow, he says. The opposition needs to create a broad base of support and focus on reconstructing civil society, which has been decimated by nearly 40 years of military rule.

The Middle East

Mubarak Awad

As the 17-month-long intifada in the Middle East rages on, Mubarak Awad continues his decades-long effort to promote strategic nonviolent tactics among Palestinians. Many Palestinians believe that nonviolent strategies could succeed in gaining international sympathy for their quest for self determination, Awad says. Indeed, Palestinian awareness of strategic nonviolence has increased dramatically in recent years, but so has Palestinian anger as political chaos and economic deterioration accelerate and their hopes for a better life crumble, he says.

In 1983, Mubarak, who holds a doctorate in counseling, founded a center in Jerusalem—the city where he was born—to provide psychological counseling for Palestinian youths living under Israeli occupation. However, when he began teaching strategic nonviolence to Palestinians and other Arabs and Muslims in the 1980s, the Israelis arrested and deported him. He has continued to work for a nonviolent solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict since then, founding in 1989 Nonviolence International, which he currently directs.

"The Palestinians have no choice but to use the methods of nonviolence on a very large scale, both in Gaza and the West Bank," as well as in areas beyond the Palestinian Authority in the refugee camps in Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan, Awad says. Such strategies would get Palestinian voices heard in places like the United Nations and other international forums, he says.

"Any strategy for nonviolence must be implemented on a large scale and must involve the Palestinian Authority and the public at large," Awad says. "A nonviolent strategy must be discussed and approved by everyone and it must be a long-term commitment."

If Palestinians were to reject the intifada and initiate a campaign of nonviolent action, support from the international community would become critical to its continuation and ultimate success, he says. When international sympathy for the Palestinian cause is aroused, "the Palestinians, with the help of the international community, should request a vote on a Palestinian state in the UN General Assembly, even if the United States rejects this proposal," Awad argues. He is convinced that, if the Palestinians demonstrate nonviolently, their aspirations for statehood and freedom will gain greater support and the international community will acknowledge their just cause. "Nonviolence . . . is more powerful than any weapons we have, especially against the Israelis," whose military might and other resources are far greater than those of the Palestinians. "It is my hope," Awad concludes, "that nonviolent thinking, peace, and reconciliation will prevail."