Never Underestimate The Power Of A Few Committed Citizens

A few monks in Myanmar have led the President of the United States to pay attention to a 19-year old despotic regime:

US President George W Bush is to announce new sanctions against the ruling military junta in Burma, the White House has said. Mr Bush seems poised to impose a US visa ban and financial restrictions on members of the government. The move comes after eight days of increasingly popular protests against the junta led by Buddhist monks. The junta, which violently repressed protests in 1988, said it was ready to "take action" against the monks.

Mr Bush is expected to announce the new restrictions during his speech to the United Nations General Assembly. The BBC's Jonathan Beale, in Washington, says the US has already made clear that it is preparing to take unilateral action against Burma's military dictators. Washington is also hoping that its steps will encourage other nations to act and embolden the protesters on Burma's streets, he adds.

More likely, it's that Bush was looking for something broadly popular that fits with his whole "freedom agenda" to tout at the UN. But Myanmar has hardly been in the global spotlight, until the monks started leading protests last month. The ruling junta has stifled dissent for years, with prominent human rights leaders jailed. They actually picked up and moved the capital city, in its entirety, without warning a couple years back, shaking up lives and stranding its increasingly burdened populace. And here's something interesting.

Mr. Steinberg said the demonstrations appeared to involve younger monks rather than the hierarchy of the country’s religious establishment.

Monks have been at the forefront of protests in Myanmar since colonial times, before the country, then known as Burma, won independence from Britain in 1948. They were prominent, along with students, in the nationwide uprising of 1988 that was crushed by the military with the loss of thousands of lives [...]

This time the junta has appeared reluctant to use force. The protests come at a time when Myanmar is attempting to present itself to the world as a democratizing nation, with the adoption early this month of new constitutional guidelines.

The technology of rapid communication is spreading film and photographs of the demonstrations both within and outside the country, and the junta can no longer operate in the shadows as it has in the past. Two weeks ago, however, soldiers reportedly manhandled a group of protesting monks in Pakokku, near central Mandalay, and fired several shots into the air.

In response, some monks briefly kidnapped a group of officials at a monastery and vandalized buildings belonging to members of the government. The confrontation in Pakokku apparently helped fuel the larger demonstrations that have taken place this week. They began after the government failed to offer an apology demanded by the Buddhist clergy.

The fact that younger monks are leading this fight, emboldened by new communication tools and a sense of standing outside the ruling establishment, shows that a parallel movement for change can happen virtually anywhere.