8888 Uprising

8888 Uprising

The 8888 Nationwide Popular Pro-Democracy Protests ; MLCTS: hrac le: lum: also known as the People Power Uprising) was a series of marches, demonstrations, protests, and riots in the Socialist Republic of the Union of Burma (today commonly known as Burma or Myanmar). Key events occurred on 8 August 1988, and therefore it is known as the "8888 Uprising".

Since 1962, the country had been ruled by the Burma Socialist Programme Party regime as a one-party state, headed by General Ne Win. The catastrophic Burmese Way to Socialism had turned Burma into one of the world's most impoverished countries. Almost everything was nationalized and the government combined Soviet-style central planning with superstitious beliefs. In an article published in a February 1974 issue of Newsweek magazine, the Burmese Way to Socialism was described as "an amalgam of Buddhist and Marxist illogic".

The 8888 uprising was started by students in Yangon (Rangoon) on 8 August 1988. Student protests spread throughout the country. Hundreds of thousands of ochre-robed monks, young children, university students, housewives, and doctors demonstrated against the regime. The uprising ended on 18 September, after a bloody military coup by the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC). Thousands of deaths have been attributed to the military during this uprising, while authorities in Myanmar put the figure at around 350 people killed.

During the crisis, Aung San Suu Kyi emerged as a national icon. When the military junta arranged an election in 1990, her party, the National League for Democracy, won 80% of the seats in the government (392 out of 447). But the military junta suppressed everything that could have developed from these democratic achievements. Part of the strategy was to place Aung San Suu Kyi under house arrest. The State Law and Order Restoration Council would be a cosmetic change from the Burma Socialist Programme Party. Suu Kyi's house arrest would be lifted no earlier than in 2010 when worldwide attention for her peaked again during the making of the biographical film The Lady.