Monday 14 February 2011

What Can We Learn from Egypt?

The ongoing protests that are forcing the beginning of a political transition in Egypt are receiving attention not only in the Arab region and among its strategic western allies like the US, the uprising is also being closely watched by authoritarian regimes such as Burma's and their pro-democracy opponents.

Yeni is news editor of the Irrawaddy magazine. He can be reached at yeni@irrawaddy.org.
Burma’s state-media remains silent on the recent turmoil in Egypt and the Burmese embassy has made no effort to contact or repatriate its nationals who are trapped in the country while many governments—including it's neighbor Thailand—help their citizens return home. However, the Burmese people are eagerly following news of the world’s most interesting and moving current event by watching foreign television networks, listening to foreign radio and reading reports on the Internet.

In a recent live question and answer session on BBC World Service radio, Burmese pro-democracy leader and Noble Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi threw her support behind the “revolution” taking place in Egypt. “We're all with you,” she said, speaking to the hundreds of thousands of people on the streets in Cairo calling for democratic change and demanding that Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, who has ruled his country with an iron fist for 30 years, step down.

As reports emerged of the sudden and brutal violence unleashed against the peaceful Egyptian demonstrators by thuggish supporters of Mubarak, Suu Kyi responded to a caller from Cairo, who asked her advice as he faced a “very scary moment of transition,” by saying: “It's necessary to keep cool heads and strong hearts and not ever to lose hope and to keep on going.”

For many Burmese activists, watching the events in Egypt unfold brings back vivid recollections of the 1988 uprising, which ended in a bloody government crack-down following a military coup, and the 2007 “Saffron Revolution,” which was also violently suppressed by the ruling regime. In hindsight, members of the Burmese opposition understand that their own failed tactics contributed to their defeat in these uprisings, and so they are analyzing the similarities and disparities between their mass demonstrations and those taking place in Egypt in order to improve their strategy in the future.

The previous mass demonstrations in Burma were similar to the the current protests in Egypt in that the uprising in both countries was a “revolution without leaders” that was led by young people. In Egypt, the uprisings were started by tech-savvy young Egyptians who tapped into widespread discontent and spread word about planned protests through social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter. In Burma, student-led protests eventually snowballed into a nationwide popular uprising in 1988. And the 2007 Saffron Revolution was led by both brave young Buddhist monks, who walked point in the street protests, and tech-savvy young bloggers, who broke through the military junta’s tight internet controls to post photos and videos of the swelling anti-government protests and the resulting crackdown. As in Egypt, the Burmese uprisings also spawned sympathy protests and solidarity movements across the world.

One of the main differences between the Egyptian and Burmese uprisings relate to the nature of the historically more well-known opposition organizations and personalities. While disparate Egyptian opposition leaders and groups—including the Muslim Brotherhood, Nobel Peace Prize winner Mohamed ElBaradei and former Egyptian Foreign Minister and current Arab League Secretary Genera Amr Moussa—are displaying strength by effectively playing their respective roles and working in concert with a loosely harmonized strategy, Burmese opposition groups are currently divided and weak and in no position to threaten the military and its power structure.

U Gawsita, one of the monks who led the Saffron Revolution, told The Irrawaddy in a recent interview that Burma's leading opposition party, the National League for Democracy, failed to assume its appropriate leadership role in the protest. “When the opposition political forces failed to step in, we ourselves had to call for the forming of an interim government should no dialogue take place between us and the regime. That set off the brutal crackdown,” U Gawsita lamented.

But probably the biggest difference between Egypt and Burma is the role of the military in the midst of a civilian uprising.