Interviews with Khin Ohmar

The advantages that we have as a movement is that we have the people with us, even though people may not go out to the street nowadays because they are really living in great fear. But they are with us. So how the military regime has treated the whole country, the whole population, has always been the weakness for them.

Because they only care for the gain of their power and their personal benefit out of the system. So that has become also an advantage for us. What we have is the people. What we have is our belief in justice and truth. And what we have is our belief in this democracy, and that we believe that all of us are entitled to enjoy our human rights.

And that no one can actually dictate and oppress us and imprison us for the rights that we are entitled. So those are what we have and our commitment, of course. But also, our advantage is that our movement, this Burmese democracy movement, is a movement where you can see a very clear line of the evil and what do you call it? I guess the truth and justice, I think.

So in that sense, in that case, yes, these are the advantages that we have. But on the other hand, what are the advantages that this regime has, that the military regime has, is that they still control the whole infrastructure. That includes all the money, of course, national budget, and all these natural resources they can take out and sell any time to China or neighboring countries.

And therefore, yes, they do have this and they have this large army that they have built. So they have the large army. And then they have the modern army that they have already upgraded. And they do have lots of money, particularly from the oil and gas energy sector, that they are earning.

So those are the advantages that they have. But these advantages happen to be very practical advantages for them: to continue to hang onto the power and keep oppressing the people, whereas our advantages are more of this moral, and where our mind, our commitment. And yes, we do have the support from around the world. And those are the practical advantages that we have: is like we have the support from the United States government, we have the support from other democracy governments from different parts of the world.

But then we still have disadvantages that, when it comes to the reality – when we have China on one hand and India on the other hand, other side of our country border – where both Asian powers want to eat every bit of our natural resources for their national interest. In that case, we are having a disadvantage from that.

Khin Ohmar is a Burmese democracy activist who lives and works in Mae Sot, Thailand. She is a leader of the Women’s League of Burma, the main umbrella organization for women’s organizations in exile and inside Burma.

Khin has served as a spokesperson for the Burmese democracy movement in the United Nations General Assembly and in other international forums. She also serves as coordinator of the Burma Partnership, a regional coalition of civil society groups supporting democracy in Burma, and she is an organizer of the ASEAN civil society and human rights consultation processes.

Admitted to the United States as a refugee after being persecuted for her participation in the 1988 student demonstrations, Khin became a United States citizen and worked for refugee and human rights organizations in Washington, D.C., before moving back to the Thai-Burma border area in the late 1990s.

Burma, a Southeast Asian country with about 57 million people, is ruled by a military regime that seized power in 1962. Although the reformist National League for Democracy (NLD) won overwhelmingly in a 1990 election, the country’s military rulers ignored the results and arrested NLD leader Aung San Suu Kyi, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991 “for her nonviolent struggle for democracy and human rights.” The military government held a referendum on a new constitution in 2008 and a parliamentary election in 2010, neither of which was regarded by international observers as free or fair, and both of which resulted in overwhelming majorities for pro-government positions and candidates. The military regime has committed widespread and systematic human rights violations, including extrajudicial killing, torture, rape, and denial of freedom of expression, association, assembly, and religion.

Throughout its existence, the regime has been at war with a number of Burma’s ethnic minority groups. Ethnic minority voters overwhelmingly supported the NLD in the 1990 election, and after the suppression of the democracy movement several of these groups continued or resumed armed resistance to the de facto government. Although the government signed cease-fire agreements with several of these groups ostensibly granting them autonomy within their respective regions, the Burmese military has used a range of brutal techniques, including the killing of civilians, forced labor, rape, and the destruction of homes, crops, and villages, in cease-fire zones as well as in areas where there is still armed resistance.

In 2007, as on several previous occasions, there were mass demonstrations throughout the country demanding freedom and democracy. The 2007 demonstrations were led by Buddhist monks and eventually became known as the “Saffron Revolution” after the color of the monks’ robes. The armed forces brutally suppressed these demonstrations—estimates of the number of protestors killed range from 31 to several thousand—and intensified popular dissatisfaction with the government by the killing, beating, and public humiliation of monks.

The nominally civilian government resulting from the 2010 election has been widely regarded as a façade for continuing military rule. However, in October 2011, the government released 206 of Burma’s estimated 2,000 prisoners of conscience. The next month, the government announced that it would soon release all remaining political prisoners. The NLD, which had declined to participate in the 2010 election, registered to participate in the next election and announced that Aung San Suu Kyi would be among the NLD candidates.

Although the military regime announced in 1989 that it had changed the English name of the country from Burma to “Myanmar,” the United States government and other international supporters of democracy in Burma have generally continued to call the country Burma because this is the name preferred by Aung San Suu Kyi and other democracy advocates who won the 1990 election.