Commemorating the 23rd Anniversary of 8.8.88

By Joy Agner

Twenty-three years ago today hundreds of thousands of Burmese people took to the streets demanding change, demanding democracy. Like many of the recent uprisings in Northern Africa and the Middle East, the revolution was led by students. Young people, perhaps emboldened by a sense of invincibility or unadulterated optimism, took incredible risks sacrificing security for the possibility of freedom. On September 18, 1988 the euphemistically titled State Law Order and Restoration Council (SLORC) cracked down hard in a desperate attempt to maintain power. Over 3,000 protesters were killed on 8/8/88 alone, 10,000 exiled, and countless jailed, injured, and affected.

Today, the Burmese government claims to be on the path to democracy, complete with an elected civilian government. On Saturday, July 14, I had a personal encounter with this so-called democracy. I traveled to Tachilek carrying pro-democracy music, literature, stickers that read “Peace in Burma Now,” and postcards with the image of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. My intention was to send a message of encouragement and solidarity to those striving and hoping for peace. Such materials are illegal in Burma, so I distributed them randomly, giving those who found them a choice whether or not to take them, and the ability to easily and honestly deny culpability […]

8.8.88: Burma’s Past + Future

The Free Burma VJ Campaign and the Best Friend Library on Saturday organised a special event to commemorate the 23rd anniversary of Burma’s nationwide pro-democracy uprising where shared information about new campaign developments.

The event took place at the Sangdee Gallery in Chiang Mai, and attracted around 90 people […]

Protests to Mark Burma’s 8888 Nationwide Uprising

People from Burma living in foreign countries today organise a demonstration rally to mark the anniversary of what has been also known as the ‘People Power Uprising’ against the military regime on 8 August 1988 […]

Alms giving in honor of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi’s 66th Birthday

To celebrate Daw Aung San Suu Kyi’s 66th Birthday, her first free birthday in nine years, The Best Friend Library in Mae Sot took part in a alms giving to more than 400 monks from Mae Sot and Myawaddy […]

Worldwide Demonstrations Against Broken Ceasefire in Kachin State

Armed conflict broke out in Kachin State on 9 June, breaking a 17-year ceasefire agreement between the KIO and the Burma Army. As many of 10,000 people have fled from the fighting and remain displaced along the China border.

The Kachin National Organization has called for a Global Day of Action on Friday 24 June to show solidarity with the Kachin Independence Army (KIO) that is fighting to protect the people of Kachin State […]

Aung San Suu Kyi birthday surprise flash mob in Chiang Mai

This past weekend was significant for millions of Aung San Suu Kyi supporters all around the world, as 19 June 2011 was Daw Suu’s first birthday to be celebrated outside of house arrest in seven years. In Chiang Mai, Thailand, members of The Best Friend Library joined dozens of other activists from many other Burma-related organizations to perform in surprise ‘flash mobs’ in honor of Aung San Suu Kyi in busy locales across the city […]

Burma Democratic Concern (BDC) Celebrates Daw Aung San Suu Kyi’s Birthday

Burma’s democracy leader, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi was born on 19 June 1945 from the parents General Aung San, Burma’s independence hero and Daw Khin Kyi. Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the world’s renowned Nobel Peace Prize Laureate turns 66th on 19 June 2011 as the very first time ever as the free person after several years of house arrest. We salute her courage. She really is the icon of the Burmese people’s struggle for freedom and non-violent movement. She gives us hope, confidence and faith in our aspiration for democracy […]

Weekly Political Events Regarding the Post Election (057/2011)

* တိုင္းရင္းသားလႊတ္ေတာ္ အမတ္အခ်ဳိ႕ႏွင့္ အတိုက္အခံလႊတ္ေတာ္အမတ္အခ်ဳိ႕ တင္သြင္းထားေသာ ႏိုင္ငံေရးအက်ဥ္းသားမ်ား လြတ္ျငိမ္းခ်မ္းသာခြင့္ ေပးေရးကိစၥကို ျပည္ေထာင္စု လႊတ္ေတာ္က လက္မခံပဲ ျငင္းပယ္ရန္ ေသခ်ာေနသည္ဟု ေနျပည္ေတာ္ေရာက္ လႊတ္ေတာ္ အမတ္မ်ားက ေျပာသည္။
* ထိုင္း-ျမန္မာနယ္စစ္ တာ့ပ္ခရိုင္တြင္ ခိုလႈံေနၾကသည့္ ျမန္မာအတိုက္အခံမ်ားႏွင့္ လူမ်ဳိးစုအတိုက္အခံမ်ား အေနျဖင့္ ျမန္မာစစ္တပ္အား သြားေရာက္တိုက္ခိုက္ျခင္းႏွင့္ ႏိုင္ငံေရးလႈပ္ရွားမႈမ်ားအေပၚ ထိုင္းအစိုးရက တင္းတင္းၾကပ္ၾကပ္ ကိုင္တြယ္သြားမည္ျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း တာ့ခ္ခရိုင္ဝန္ၾကီးက ေျပာၾကားလိုက္သည္ […]

Video: Aung San Suu Kyi accepts honorary degree from Carleton University

On 22 February, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi was awarded an honorary degree in Law from Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. In this video, Daw Suu accepted the degree on behalf of the National League for Democracy’s Legal Aid Committee and spoke about the legal situation in Burma […]

Letter from Burma: Keepers of Conscience

Is the story of Pinocchio still popular with children? It is when such questions arise in my mind that I am made acutely aware of the peculiar gaps in my contact with the outside world. Had I been in constant touch with my grandchildren or even with other people’s grandchildren over the years, I would have known the answers. Fortunately a few days after Pinocchio had floated into my head, I had a meeting with the children of the United States Embassy staff in Rangoon […]