On the 8th August 1988 in the student city of Rangoon, Burma, thousands of students marched to the town hall for a 48 hour hunger strike. The peaceful protesters were in objection to the military junta controlling the country and were led by a group of student leaders. One leader, Ko Aung, was a seasoned protester and had rounded up 3-4000 students to join his group, the Red Fighting Peacocks. They were all committed to the 8888 Uprising.
After a day of protest and tense negotiations, the students remained. That was until the threat of forced exit became a reality.
“At 10.30pm an armoured car and eight military trucks came round the pagoda and blocked one end of the street. And then it started – the killing, the beating, the shootings. I witnessed hundreds of students being killed in front of me.
“I vividly remember one girl called Nu Nu Ngwe. She was just 13, I had taught her English and maths. She held a Red-fighting Peacock flag and ran towards the armoured car. I shouted and shouted, but she didn’t stop. I tried to push through the crowd, but there were too many people. She climbed up the armoured car and put her chest in front of the machine gun.
She shouted: “We are the people’s soldiers, don’t shoot us we are students. We are your brothers and sisters.”
I tried to reach her to stop her, but I couldn’t. Then the machine gun opened fire.”
As Ko Aung recounts the event that changed his life, he becomes emotional. He was a twenty-one year old protest leader and his student activism had made him a wanted dissident, torn from his family and constantly in hiding. One day he was a promising student studying Industrial Chemistry, the next he had taken up a cause which was soon to change his entire life. Twenty years on, Ko Aung can still vividly remember every detail. “I find it hard to talk about it. It’s very painful” he explains “I have a complex; I need to talk about it, but the violence was… hundreds of students were killed in front of my eyes…”
His life’s journey doesn’t need hyperbole. The horrific events that he witnessed and the incarceration he was subjected to speak for themselves. Student activism to this extent tests dedication to the limits.
Burma has had a troubled and complex history riddled with ethnic tension. In 1962, a coup led by General Ne Win began a 26 year reign that was to turn Burma into one of the world’s most impoverished countries. Unrest was inevitable and Ko Aung’s efforts weren’t the first brutally crushed student protests in recent Burmese history.
Ko Aung was a normal student studying at Rangoon University with no strong political views, “All I knew was that the regime was very corrupt, but I didn’t think it was a direct threat to me ”.
It wasn’t until a surprise announcement in the University library that he was suddenly affected, “We were told bank notes had been made illegal. I couldn’t believe it, I stood up and shouted ‘This so stupid!’ – It was an emotional outburst. We had no money!”.
His surprise soon turned to indignation. Immediately, Ko Aung began organising a student protest on campus, “We went to the library and classrooms giving out leaflets. Soon we had the majority of the campus involved and were ready to march.”
Yet he was aware from a young age that there were serious consequences to rebelling against a no-nonsense regime. His Father, a senior governor in the previous civilian government, had originally agreed to the 1962 coup but resigned soon after with many other senior officials. The military junta took exception to the decision.
His family was soon targeted and Ko Aung had his first insight into the unjust world of Burmese politics, “My Father was too high profile, so instead they took my mum. She had a successful business exporting tea leaves, but the ‘socialist’ government took her away because she was so-called bourgeois. They put her in a detention centre for 6 months”.
It was the same detention centre that Ko Aung would be sent to many years later. His tone turns melancholy as he remembers asking his mother about her experience; “When I was young she wouldn’t tell me. She couldn’t bear to talk to me about it.” But in time, she opened up and revealed the horrors “She told me they poisoned the water tank with lead. Everyone had to drink it.”
Political beginnings
Despite his family’s political background, he continued to organise the march.
The Burmese military were keen to quash student rebellion – they had previously blown up the Rangoon student union. Ko Aung’s organised march was no different, and soon the police arrived to stop them and the protest turned nasty, “Some students tried to fight back, but the police had guns and rubber sticks. They beat us. Over 100 people were injured.”
It was then that Ko Aung witnessed a disregard for human rights that would later become customary, “They loaded all the injured people into one truck. But it was too small. They suffocated in the police truck. Over a hundred students dead in one day”.
This was Ko Aung’s initiation into a brutal world and the repercussions of his involvement were soon to become apparent. “I managed to escape. Stupidly I decided to go home. The police came in the middle of the night and blocked the whole of my family house.”
His first arrest was punishing. He was continually beaten and tortured in a detention centre. “I wasn’t asked anything for the first three days. They just came in and beat us while we were handcuffed. When I was finally released, I had to sign a contract saying I was no longer involved in politics”. To protect his family, Ko Aung signed it and was released. Yet his brief spell of punishment was only a taster of what was to come.
The 8888 Uprising
For some, the ordeal would have been too much. But for Ko Aung, it gave him greater conviction.
Ko Aung was among many protest leaders building an army of students. To continue, he was forced into hiding and gathered support using guerrilla tactics, “We wanted to get a lot of young people involved, students from University and schools. There were three of us and each had a different job. We would find a crowd, then I would make a speech whilst another would leaflet and the other would be lookout. We could only manage a few minutes until we had to run. We did it all over the city.”
It wasn’t long before Ko Aung had built a strong network and protests were causing severe disruption. Unrest was widespread and it wasn’t long before the infamous 8888 uprising was conceived
Arranged for the 8th of August 1988, the protest was to bring together students from across the area to protest in unison at the town hall in a 48 hour hunger strike.
The protest was unprecedented, thousands upon thousands gathered to show their anger at the military rule.
Yet, despite the peaceful nature, there was an immediate police presence. “Later that evening, the military came. They ordered us with loudspeakers to move, otherwise they would force us to move” explains Aung.
“I was part of a student delegation to talk to the head of the Rangoon military. We told them we would be peaceful, though we wouldn’t move”. However, the negotiations proved unsuccessful and at 10:30pm, the army moved in and crushed the protest. They were unforgiving. “We didn’t have anything against them except our voices, but they started to kill with bullets and bayonets.”
“I tried to carry one student who had been shot to the hospital, but she died in my arms”, recalls Ko Aung. His voice suddenly starts to tremble. He tries to explain again the story of Nu Nu Ngwe, the 13 year old girl, but his voice cracks again ““I had tried to stop her, but couldn’t reach in time. I ran to where her body had dropped, she was… she had died for the cause”.
Ko Aung pauses as he relives the moment, “Everyone was telling me to run… I was just crying and crying. I laid the red flag over her and tied my headband around her head. Then I had to leave her.”
As he explains the army’s forced intervention and subsequent violence, the emotion overcomes Ko Aung. Throughout the interview he has given a thorough account, but until now, has revealed little about how he was affected mentally. He begins to admit the guilt and grief he feels, “During that time, I lost the one I loved, I lost the comrades I admired, and I lost so many students. So many students had died because of me”.
Torture
Yet, the 8888 uprising is undoubtedly a memory that gave him the courage and conviction to continue fighting for his right. In forced positivity he resumes, “I guess it gave me the strength that what I was doing was right. Physically they could beat or torture me, but mentally they could never get me.” The following years would test this belief to the limit.
Having evaded arrest, Ko Aung continued the fight underground until he was eventually caught. Aung had reneged on his earlier contract to stay out of politics and was a wanted man. The police were unsympathetic when they finally arrested him, “I was detained, interrogated and beaten for three days and nights without sleep. I spent six months in the detention centre until they forced a confession out of me.”
Over the six months of his interrogation, the torture Ko Aung endured was horrendous. “I still cannot believe that humans can inflict such Terror and pain on other human beings” he admits. “I was bound to a chair, badly beaten with a rubber rod and interrogated constantly for three days. They burnt me on the chest with their cigarettes ”. The frightening brutality continued. Sometimes he was tied to the ceiling and spun round – a technique called ‘Helicopter’ – and other times he had an iron rod rolled up and down his shins until the skin came off.
One night, he was blindfolded and taken outside. He was left in a small ditch with a corpse. During the day the body began decomposing under the sun and smelled foul. At night it was too cold to sleep. Each day the guard lowered water and rice, but he couldn’t eat for the smell of the rotting corpse. Though he doesn’t remember, at some point during this ordeal Ko Aung broke and signed the confession.
His admittance was enough for the trial to go ahead. “I was sentenced to seven years hard labour in Insein Prison – without a fair trial, or even a lawyer.”
Pronounced ‘Insane’, the name is apt for what is branded the “darkest hell hole in Burma”. Even to this day it’s inhumane conditions and abuse are notorious worldwide. A prison where political prisoners are treated worse than criminals. Ko Aung tries to recall his emotions when hearing the ‘guilty’ verdict and punishment; “I felt nothing, there was nothing in their to feel. My mind was frozen.”
Incarcerated
Inside the prison it was clear the rumours were true, “It was an army state so prison was really bad. I was sent to block no.5 with various criminals, thieves and rapists. Every prisoner was beaten without reason. I couldn’t sleep, I was crammed in a space one and a half feet wide, crammed in by bodies. It was the most tormenting and humiliating conditions I have ever faced in my life” he explains.
Yet Ko Aung was not ready to give up, “I wanted to fight for our prisoners’ rights, it couldn’t go on like this. I told the others we had to protest.”
“So first, I organised everyone to go on hunger strike. There were forty of us. But we were punished; hoods over our heads and leg irons clamped on, we were beaten and put in solitary confinement.”
Surprisingly, Ko Aung speaks in a different tone when speaking about prison life. He is less emotional and far more flippant. What he wanted was justice, punishment wouldn’t deter him. So he persisted, “I asked what our rights were as prisoners. I said ‘I want to know what rules you use, what you follow?”, he chuckles when he continues “but they just beat me”.
Yet his unrelenting determination went unrewarded. Instead, he was again put into solitary confinement – “Because of my so-called bad behaviour”. In total, Aung spent 3½ years in solitary confinement.
How did he get through it? “I sang songs, I meditated, but most of all I had to be strong. I had to stay positive, I had to remember I was in the right. If you don’t, you can’t survive an environment like that. I had to stay alive for the cause of freedom. So many of my comrades had died. ”
And after five years, seven months and twenty-four days, he was released. Today, Ko Aung lives in London and he still campaigns for Burmese justice through Amnesty International.
So, does he think his time as a student activist was successful? Ko Aung takes his time considering this, and decides “Yes, during our time three presidents were forced to resign over the three month period of general uprising. But we were, and still are, aiming to achieve. Our aim was to stop military rule in Burma, but unfortunately they are still in power today. ”
“I am an activist, not a victim. I want to restore dignity, justice, freedom, equality and peace to Burma. That’s why we have been fighting for democracy; we give our lives to achieve it.”