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Myanmar university re-opening a fraud, says Aung San
Suu Kyi
BANGKOK:- The re-opening of Myanmar's universities last month after a suspension in the wake of a 1996 student uprising is a
sham aimed at defusing criticism of the regime, opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi said Tuesday.
The leader of the National League for Democracy (NLD) spoke in a videotaped message smuggled out of military-run Myanmar
by a group of foreign activists who were invited to an NLD education forum in Yangon Monday.
Aung San Suu Kyi urged governments and student groups to campaign for education to be made freely available in Myanmar,
and not to be used as a political tool. "The universities have been re-opened because of pressure on the government but this is
a mere surface job to make people believe there has been progress in Myanmar," she said. The Nobel laureate said political
change must be achieved before the education system is reformed because the two were inextricably linked.
"We would like governments and the student organisations of the world to think of education in Burma as part of our broader
political situation," she said, using the country's former name. At a press conference in Bangkok, the academics, youth workers
and student union representatives among the group who travelled to Yangon delivered a damning report on the state of the
universities.
"Burma's education system is in dire straits. The students know this and reject it as a sham," said Graham Bailey of the Free
Burma Campaign in South Africa. "Education is being used as a political tool and people are being prevented from learning how
to think."
The NLD believed only 25,000 students had returned to classes, far fewer than the military's claim of 60,000, they said. Even
worse, the academic year has been compressed into three months to push through a student backlog caused by 12 years of
sporadic closures.
The activists said students have returned to their studies under unacceptable conditions, including being compelled to swear an
oath of allegiance to the junta. Campuses have been moved far out of Yangon to rural sites chosen for their close proximity to
military barracks where any dissident activity can be quickly suppressed. This was proving the main barrier to students resum-
ing their studies, they said. Some students were forming study groups and pooling their funds to enable one member to travel
out to the campus and take notes for the others.
Teachers and text books were scarce and many courses were being studied by correspondence. Myanmar's universities have
been sporadically closed since a popular uprising in the summer of 1988 threatened to topple the military regime.
The Yangon junta imposed strict restrictions on universities in the wake of a student revolt in December 1996, formally sus-
pending classes for all second and third-year university students. The activists said the military government was forced to open
the universities because of criticism from fellow Association of Southeast Asian Nation (ASEAN) members.
Norwegian Worldview Rights activist Ronny Hansen said the state of the education system was seen as deplorable even by
ASEAN governments who had given their tacit approval to the regime. "It's no coincidence that they announced the opening on
the same day that the ASEAN meeting opened here in Bangkok," he said. "Even the most conservative governments in this
region said they would not accept the situation," he said, adding that the Myanmar government was believed to be hoping for
improved diplomatic and economic support in return.
Sources within Myanmar have confirmed that despite the re-opening of schools, higher education there is far from functioning
normally. The majority of students do their coursework by correspondence and campuses are almost always empty.
One bitter parent said they were "virtual schools" in which "people don't learn anything." Myanmar authorities insist they place
a high priority on education. The education ministry has claimed the level of higher education is "on a par with the developed
countries of the region". The claims are at odds with the fact that only 0.5 percent of Myanmar's Gross National Product is allo-
cated to education, compared to an average of 2.7 percent in other Southeast Asian countries.
Tuesday, 22 August 2000
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