My article is in solidarity with the on-going peoples uprising in Myanmar (Burma), led by the Buddhist clergy. In their hundreds of thousands, they have marched across the country and in the capitol Rangoon, to demonstrate against the brutal military junta that denies them democratic governance and basic human freedoms.

I examine the history of the democratic struggle in Myanmar and begin my article with a statement by Aung San Suu Kyi speaking at the Fourth World Conference on Women, Beijing 1995. I note that her house arrest is a damning indicator of the junta’s intolerance of democracy. As another author on Groundviews notes:

Seventeen years since elections, the elected leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, who has since been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, is still under house arrest; millions of men, women and children are in forced labour; one and a half million people are internally displaced; over one thousand are held as political prisoners, many still being routinely tortured; the universities have been closed for most of the last decade to prevent protests; spending on health care is amongst the lowest in the world; 60% of the people are in poverty, even though the GDP per capita is about fifty percent greater than that of Sri Lanka; and the Junta along with their cronies has a stranglehold on wealth and power, feeding themselves through tourism, partnership with foreign businesses, and the sale of natural resources.

My article explores the uprising, the challenges it faces and the manner in which the web, Internet and mobile phones have changed the manner in which we get news from deep within the country, making it far more difficult for the regime to brutally kill thousands of protesters as they did in 1988.

Read my article in full, in Sinhala, on Vikalpa here.