Features

April 10, 2008

Khin Maung Shwe | Preparing Burma For Transition

Often in political transitions, at a pivotal unexpected moment, relationships between the forces in charge and those pushing for change are fundamentally rearranged, propelling both into uncertainty and chaos.

What happens in the days and weeks after such a rupture can alter history; yet often events that take place long before the transition affect the course of change.

A crucial facet of the ICTJ's work is long-term capacity-building activities designed to prepare human rights defenders for transitions under extremely challenging circumstances. Our annual fellowship programs-currently active in Chile, Lebanon, Morocco, and South Africa-encourage participation by practitioners from countries where fostering a TJ culture is a vital precursor to a successful future transition. We are proud to see that many of our former fellows have gone on to become important activists in their home countries.

Burmese activist Khin Maung Shwe attended the Center's Cape Town fellowship program in 2004. Among other things he credits the program with imparting a comprehensive sense of the field, as well as building an extensive network of practitioners who continue to work together globally on justice issues. Khin Maung Shwe has since lived and worked along the Thai-Burma border, where he works on TJ issues alongside local human rights organizations and the ICTJ. He helps provide training to activists and also supports a human rights documentation project that helps set the stage for a democratic transition by documenting what has happened in Burma since the military assumed power.

"We can't predict when our transition will come," said Khin Maung Shwe in an August 2007 telephone interview. "But whatever follows this long era of military oppression, it will be vital to be organized in advance-not only to steer the process in the right direction, but also to be ready with a historical record that can be used to secure justice for victims."

"I discovered there is tremendous hunger for knowledge about justice and truth-seeking in Burma. I am grateful for my experience in Cape Town because it helped me think through the specific obstacles Burmese society faces and to start to envision tangible ways to move forward in the context of challenging a deeply militarized state and engaging TJ in a largely Buddhist society. I really benefited from studying other transitions-such as in Chile, South Africa, Rwanda, Guatemala, and East Timor-because they taught me practical lessons about sequencing and gave me ideas of what Burmese activists can begin to address even before a true transition takes place."

Under the lens of recent events, TJ efforts in Burma are gaining increasing importance. Following a fuel price hike in August 2007, Buddhist monks led mass demonstrations calling for political reform and reconciliation. The military carried out a harsh crackdown, killing at least 33 people and arresting hundreds. The regime has also moved forward with its "Roadmap to Democracy," producing a new constitution that aims to solidify its long-term leading role in the political life of the country. With ethnic tensions unresolved and the democratic opposition excluded from the transition process, the monks' demands for change continue to go unheeded. The country will vote on the constitution in a national referendum, slated for May10, 2008. Transitional justice work that develops an accurate record of human rights violations will boost future efforts to gain justice and to guard against impunity.