By Intern Guest david@portlanddailysun.me |
Forget flag burnings, protest signs and sit-ins.
Today, the tools of dissent for the world’s most oppressed societies are sleek, metallic, and always get their shot. The names Kalashnikov and Uzi might seem likely brand names for the tools of uprising, but this being the information age, it's Sony and Canon that are a dissident’s weapon of choice.
The film "Burma VJ," screened locally Wednesday and Thursday at Congress Street’s Space Gallery and available on BumaVJ.com, illustrates the point. Shot at great personal risk by undercover reporters in the Southeast Asia country, the movie uses devices from cell phone cameras to carefully concealed camcorders to overcome government reporting bans.
Members of the underground media organization Democratic Voice of Burma, defying restrictions that have kept foreign journalists out of the military-ruled country for years, saw their clips and photos broadcast to the world, from BBC to CNN, and acted as the lone lens in a country where any show of dissent would likely mean imprisonment or death.
Burma is ranked 170th out of 173 countries in Reporters Without Borders’ 2008 world press freedom index.
“I feel like the world is forgetting about us. This is why I became a reporter,” said the film’s narrator, a 27-year-old video journalist using the name “Joshua” who distributed media and coordinated the efforts of DVB reporters from a post in Thailand, where he had escaped to avoid persecution.
Danish director Anders Østergaard gives the world an inside look at Burma’s 2007 Saffron Revolution, when thousands of Buddhist monks and Burmese citizens took to the streets to protests the oppressive military junta, which has ruled the country since 1962.
The revolution took its name from the distinctive hue of the Buddhist monk’s robes. In a country with a poor social service system, the monks and their monasteries provide Burma’s citizens with food, medical care, shelter, and act as the moral arbiter in a country that is 89 percent Buddhist.
The Space screenings featured a post-film Q&A session with three refugee monks who recounted their experiences, imprisonments and political ideology, and explained the important role they played in the brief uprising, which was ultimately quelled by the military government in a crackdown that took an estimated 138 lives, according to DVB.
“These monks are the heart of the country,” said Nickie Sekera with The U.S. Campaign for Burma at Wednesday’s screening, “outside of the military schools, they are the educational system as well, teaching about taboo topics like human rights and foreign policy.”
Burma also has rates of HIV/AIDS equal or higher than that of some sub-Saharan countries, and with the government not allowing aid organizations inside the country, the monks have stepped up to provide shelter and treatment to the affected Burmese.
Buddhist monks are not supposed to get involved in political matters, but have broken this rule on occasion for thousands of years to protect the people of Burma. During the Revolution, the BBC called the thousands of marching monks “a powerful voice of dissent in a devout nation.”
“I don’t know anything about politics,” said head monk U Pyinya Zawta through a translator, “I want one thing, which is freedom for the people.” Zawta spent a combined 10 years incarcerated as a political prisoner, with two-and-a-half of those spent in solitary confinement.
Sekera notes that in a country where prisoners are fed little to nothing, and rely on their families to bring them food and medicine, political prisoners have it especially hard, as they are imprisoned far from their hometown making such visits difficult.
“These political prisoners suffer the most,” said Sekera.
Buddhist doctrine also dictates that the monks cannot eat anything after noon, meaning that the political prisoners must stash their daily bowl of rice — served at 2 p.m. “If they can keep the rats from eating it, they can eat the next day,” said Sekera.
Tensions between the government and citizens came to a head in September 2007, when the government stopped fuel subsidies, effectively doubling the price for fuel and placing a huge economic burden on the Burmese people. This, in conjunction with the beating of a monk by soldiers in the northern part of the country, sparked the revolt, which is painstakingly documented in the film.
“The military refusing to apologize [for the beating of the monk] was their way of saying ‘no, we are above you,’” said Sekera, an act that upset many in the devout nation.
The military government has also kept the democratically elected, western-educated Prime Minister-elect Aung San Suu Kyi under house arrest for 134 of the last 19 years since she was elected by an overwhelming majority in the 1990 general election on the ticket of the National League for Democracy. Following the election, the military government nullified the results and refused to hand over power.
For it’s part, the U.S. Congress is currently trying to renew it’s sanctions on Burma — currently set at the highest possible level — and is working to enact a arms embargo, as well as drumming up support for the Burmese Freedom and Democracy Act, which has been in the works since 2003 and recently received support from Maine Congresswoman Chellie Pingree.
The screening at Space was part of the venue's social justice series, which began in December.
“The presence of the monks added a great deal to what we learned and what we could feel about their experience,” said Leo Barrington of Portland.
Ralph Davis said the film led him to draw all kinds of connections to the current situation in Iran, where social media sites like Twitter are being used to smuggle news out of a country under a media blackout. “It’s important that the communications and videos get out because the totalitarian government is just trying to shut down the media so it can silence the masses,” said Davis.
But the government crackdown on these communications in Iran has been swift, with cell phone service being disconnected in some areas to stop the text-message based “tweets” from reaching the outside media.
“Some friends of mine are involved in it by positing proxy sites, so that someone can Twitter to outside the country and it goes to someone else’s computer so they can circumvent the censorship,” Davis added.
The monks ended their Q&A session by offering up a prayer in both Burmese and English.
“May love and kindness envelop the world, may there be no deception of one another, and may there be peace on Earth,” echoed the three monks.
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