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Burma's upheaval, meantime, seemed likely to worsen at the periphery. Some of the ethnic guerrillas of the National Democratic Front, an antigovernment coalition that claims to have a total of 35,000 men and women under arms, announced that the tribal armies would join forces with the urban demonstrators. Brang Seng, head of the Kachin Independence Organization, called for an offensive to push government troops out of the cities.
If the road to discontent began in 1962, when Ne Win led a coup that ousted % Prime Minister U Nu, the most careless turns were taken in the past year. A critical one came in September, when the government invalidated all 25-, 35- and 75-kyat notes. (The government-set exchange rate is 6.29 kyats to the dollar; the black-market rate is closer to 45 kyats.) Designed to curb ruinous inflation -- then as high as 100% for some commodities -- and to punch a hole in the black market, the decree wiped out 60% of the country's currency, and with it the savings and hopes of Burma's middle class.
Visible disaffection with the Ne Win regime grew in March, when a fresh round of protests was brutally put down. The unrest, triggered by a teahouse brawl between progovernment and antigovernment youths, was quashed by Sein Lwin's despised riot police, the Lon Htein, with as many as 300 demonstrators killed. While being carted off to jail, 41 detainees suffocated in a police van.
Frustration began bubbling over following a party session last month, a gathering that tantalizingly augured reform but delivered nothing of the kind. Ne Win had called the party congress a year ahead of schedule, purportedly because he was upset over the March riots and lingering unrest in June. At the session, he offered his resignation for being "indirectly responsible" for the rioting. He stunned the delegates and the country even more by proposing a referendum on whether Burma should have a multiparty system. His resignation was accepted, but the referendum was rejected -- in part, no doubt, because party members had no desire to relinquish their privileges.
The announcement that Sein Lwin would assume the party leadership caught the Burmese, as well as foreign observers, by surprise and punctured hope for a political liberalization. Sein Lwin, also known as "the Butcher," was the man most identified with the repression of the Ne Win years. The link went back to 1962, when Sein Lwin, then an army captain and a fellow plotter in Ne Win's coup, commanded a company of soldiers that massacred students at the Rangoon University Students' Union who were opposed to the military takeover. He became Ne Win's chief enforcer and, as commander of the riot police, was believed responsible for the murderous excesses of last March. Explains Minoru Kiryu, a Japanese expert on Burma: "The public sentiment was 'That is the one person we cannot forgive.' "
Matters were exacerbated shortly after Sein Lwin's election, when he ordered the arrest of retired Brigadier Aung Gyi, the closest thing Burma has to an | opposition leader. In recent months, Aung Gyi had sent Ne Win several open letters criticizing government corruption and incompetence -- including that of Sein Lwin -- and advocating reform.