A military junta and multinational corporations on one side, and Buddhist democratic forces led by Aung San Suu Kyi on the other, are engaged in battle for Burma.
Milan Kundera once wrote that the “struggle against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting”. Few outside Burma know about the epic events that took place here between 1988 and 1990. Few have heard of the White Bridge on Inya Lake in the centre of Rangoon, now known to foreign business people as the site of an “inter- national business centre”.
Yet it was here that an uprising as momentous as the storming of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was sparked. On March 18th, 1988, hundreds of schoolchildren and students marched along the bridge, singing the national anthem, signaling that they wanted no more of the authoritarian rule that had been in place since a 1962 military coup. The march was as joyful as it was defiant. When suddenly they saw behind them the steel helmets of the riot police, they knew they were trapped.
Then again, after months of rising popular confidence, the moment of general uprising came precisely at eight minutes past eight on the morning of the eighth day of the eighth month of 1988. This was the auspicious time the dockers chose to go on strike, and the country followed: teachers, journalists, railway-workers, weather-forecasters, grave-
— source johnpilger.com | john pilger | 21 Jul 2000