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To start things off, I’d like to say that this is not a rant piece. Nothing I say here is intended to insult anyone, I am merely hoping that I can state some facts and voice an opinion. I am also not part of the school’s softball team or the Burmese population.
That being said, I’m not happy with some recent developments – especially with the recent message from Chris Edwards.
The Rohingya crisis is a hugely international and multifaceted problem that can’t be solved overnight. In fact, it has decades of history behind it that, to be honest, most of the community at UWCSEA Dover and the wider global population seem to overlook. Has anyone asked how this crisis begun? Has anyone received a clear answer? Besides adults everywhere mindlessly condemning Aung San Suu Kyi, have any real solutions or options for advocacy been proposed?
If your answer is anything other than “no”, I’d honestly like to hear your opinion in a response. However, for now, I’ll speak from my perspective. Instead of talking about the Rohingya crisis directly, I’d like to provide some historical background on Myanmar as a whole.
Aung San Suu Kyi is the daughter of Major General Aung San, one of the founders of the Communist Party of Burma and an active revolutionary who was responsible for bringing about Burmese independence from British colonials in 1948. He was assassinated before he could see it happen. In 1962, there was a military coup in Myanmar, signalling the beginning of a totalitarian government that would last for 26 years. In 1974, Myanmar became a one party state with no other political parties legally allowed to exist. The military had absolute control.
In 1988, this began to change. The 8888 Uprising (8 August 1988) was, as many big protests are, started by students. It quickly spread through the country, with everyone from housewives to monks protesting against the military regime. Unfortunately, this was not enough. By the 18th of September, the uprising had been quashed by yet another military coup, this time led by the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC), resulting in the deaths of thousands of civilians. The official number of deaths released by Myanmar authorities remains at 350.
The SLORC organized a democratic election in 1990. Aung San Suu Kyi’s political party, the National League for Democracy (NLD), won 392 out of 492 seats in the government, but these results were not recognized by the ruling military government, who placed Aung San Suu Kyi under house arrest. This was only lifted 20 years later in 2010.
If you still don’t understand why it’s so difficult for Aung San Suu Kyi to speak up about the issue, then count the number of years between the first military coup in 1962 and 2011, when the SLORC was finally dissolved. I only gave a brief overview of the history. I neglected to mention how by 1989, at least 6,000 supporters of the NLD were imprisoned; schools and universities remained shut from 1988 to 2000; and how, throughout this all, the SLORC was holding press conferences in attempts to demonize those who took part in the uprisings.
I hope that everyone who reads this recognizes that, for Aung San Suu Kyi, speaking up against the military could mean losing decades of progress and wasting the sacrifices of thousands during that fateful September in 1988.
I suppose my introduction was misleading. I am not here primarily to discuss the Rohingya crisis. I am not here to try to push any particular agenda on you. I am not here to say which side is right and which side is wrong.
I am simply here to say that, with this much history behind military involvement in Myanmar, it is clear that a single school refusing to send one sports team to the country for SEASAC, an internationally run competition, will not change anything.
For some students, this SEASAC event could be their last chance to play and compete in a sport that they love before they give it up and leave to college. If anything, it should be their choice as to whether or not they attend this year’s competition. They are the only ones who will be affected. Not the general student body, not the parents and certainly not the Rohingyas, who are centered in the Rakhine state, far from the SEASAC activities of some distant international schools.