YANGON, Burma (AP) — The soldiers began to shoot students at
Rangoon University at 6:30pm. Hla Shwe watched, cowering in a nearby building,
as his friends died. “I heard the shouting,” he recalled. “They shot whoever
they saw.”
It was July 7, 1962, the day rage
at the military’s recent coup boiled over and a date now seared into the memory
of Hla Shwe, who is 75 years old.
“I got the idea that if they used
the gun against students, why shouldn’t we use guns to fight them?” he said.
When President Barack Obama
speaks at Hla Shwe’s alma mater Monday, he will be treading on ground heavy
with political and historical significance.
Since colonial times, the fight
for change in Burma has begun on this leafy campus. It was a center of the
struggle for independence against Britain and served as a launching point for
pro-democracy protests in 1962, 1974, 1988 and 1996. Burma’s former military
junta shut the dormitories in the 1990s fearing further unrest and forced most
students to attend classes on satellite campuses on the outskirts of town.
Today, few students walk the
broken pathways of what was once one of Asia’s finest universities. Birdsong
fills the halls of cracked buildings. For many, the school — which was renamed
University of Yangon in 1989 — has today become a symbol of the country’s
ruined education system and a monument to a half century of misrule.
“Obama knows very well about the
history of Yangon University, I think. This is an enemy place for the
authorities,” said Hla Shwe, who fought with Communist insurgents and spent 25
years as a political prisoner. “The American government is trying to show in a
delicate way that they are not only working for the government but will also
take care of the Burmese people.”
A movement has been building
within Burma to reclaim the university’s history and restore it to its former
glory. Opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi has repeatedly stressed the
importance of upgrading the country’s feeble school system and has been
fighting in Parliament to repair the campus as part of sweeping educational
reforms. U Myint, an adviser to Burma’s reformist president, Thein Sein, in May
wrote an open letter urging the government to fill the campus’s empty
classrooms with students, reopen the dormitories and reconstruct the Student
Union building, which the junta blew up the day after Hla Shwe watched his
friends get shot.
“For those who have reservations
about our students and young people forming associations like other members of
our society, the question we need to ask ourselves is: when we are striving so
hard for reconciliation on many fronts, even with foreigners who have not been
particularly kind to us, then why not also with our own young people?” wrote U
Myint.
The government ramped up education
spending in the last budget but critics say it hasn’t moved boldly enough to
catch up after years of neglect.
“If there is one area where
America can help most it is in education,” said Thant Myint-U, another
presidential adviser and a historian, who is the grandson of the late U.N.
Secretary General U Thant. “Burma’s university system has been decimated after
fifty years of army rule. American universities are still second to none.
There’s no better way for the U.S. to project its soft power than through a
real partnership to educate Burma’s brightest students.”
Some repair work on campus began
about six months ago, but it is nothing compared with the frenzy of
preparations for Obama’s arrival.
Inside the school’s Convocation
Hall, where Obama will deliver his speech, is a riot of staple guns, buzz saws,
sandpaper, hammers, spackle, drills, brooms, and fresh paint. But the facade of
the building remains cracked with a black crust. Local superstition holds that
scrubbing the building clean would unbalance the resigned calm that has settled
on the campus and spark another round of unrest.
The curbs, lampposts and
buildings that line the main road to the hall have been covered with fresh
paint, but elsewhere the campus is a picture of moldering neglect. Broken desks
lie stacked in the rain and shunted into unused cobwebby rooms. Teachers in
bright blue sarongs walk past buildings sprouting weeds. Stray dogs nap in
dilapidated corridors.
“This is a prominent place which
taught students to love the truth and to fight for it,” said Zaw Zaw Min, who
participated in the 1988 student demonstrations and, like his father and his
son, served time as a political prisoner. He said before the recent
renovations, the state of the campus made him deeply sad. “It was like a
damaged city,” he said.
There is a real hunger for
learning among many young people in Burma.
Aung Kaung Myat, 19, studies
English at Yangon’s University of Foreign Languages. “Everything is messed up,”
he said. “I don’t want to blame my teachers. They are just the things in the
system.”
Literature class involves reading
out loud and poetry is mostly memorization, he said. For books in English, he
heads to the well-stocked library of the American Center, a cultural outpost of
the U.S. Embassy in Yangon. He got so frustrated at the poor syllabus and
teachers who seemed to know little about their subjects that he wrote an angry
letter to the Ministry of Education, which he convinced a bunch of his friends
to sign. His professor found out before he could send it, called his parents
and threatened to expel him, he said.
Still, he’d like to pursue a master’s
degree at the University of Yangon.
“Maybe it’s better than the
Yangon University of Foreign Languages,” he said.
July San, 23, is pursuing a
master’s in computer science at the University of Yangon. She said there are
only 5 students in her class.
“We want more students. More and
more and more! And we don’t want to see this long grass anymore,” she said,
gesturing at the weeds behind her.
“We should thank Obama,” she
added. At least he managed to get the Convocation Hall spruced up in time for
her graduation.
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