Asian Window

George Packer in the New Yorker:

In a just world, the names Min Ko Naing and Ko Ko Gyi would be as well known as Steve Biko and Adam Michnik. These two leaders of Burma’s 88 Generation students, now in their forties, have spent almost their entire adult lives in prison for organizing pro-democracy demonstrations. After a short period of freedom, between 2005 and 2007, they and their colleagues were jailed again for staging a long walk around Rangoon, in August of 2007, in protest of soaring transportation prices-a gesture that sparked the so-called Saffron Revolution, the largest demonstrations in Burma since 1988, both times put down in blood.

After Aung San Suu Kyi, these two men are the leaders of Burma’s democracy movement, and a source of intense admiration and inspiration among the young Burmese I met on two trips there earlier this year. Ko Ko Gyi is the political strategist of the movement; Min Ko Naing is its charismatic soul. A friend who met Min Ko Naing after his release in 2005 told me how the former prisoner shed tears as he described the death of his only cellmate, a cat. Other Burmese and Americans speak of Min Ko Naing as having a special glow that raises him above the ordinary run of humanity. But because of Burma’s obscurity, the rest of the world has never heard of them.

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