8888 Uprising in Burma

On 8 August 1988, at 8:08 am, tens of thousands of Burmese began a general strike and street protests that spread across the country. The date, 8-8-88, gave the movement its name. Students, monks, workers and civil servants demanded an end to one-party military rule. On 8 and 9 August soldiers shot at crowds in Rangoon, and over the following weeks many more were killed. On 18 September the army seized power again, forming the State Law and Order Restoration Council, or SLORC.¹

The cause was an economic and political collapse. Ne Win's Burmese Way to Socialism had left the country one of the poorest in the world. His demonetization in 1987 wiped out people's savings, and the United Nations granted Burma least developed country status in late 1987, which many saw as a national humiliation. Protests began in March 1988 with a fight in a tea shop and the death of students in police custody, and grew until Ne Win resigned as party chief in July. On 26 August Aung San Suu Kyi, the daughter of the independence hero Aung San, addressed hundreds of thousands at the Shwedagon Pagoda and became the symbol of the movement.¹²

Estimates of the dead run from about 3,000 up to 10,000. The junta promised elections, and the National League for Democracy, which Aung San Suu Kyi helped found in September 1988, won a landslide in 1990, but the military refused to hand over power. She spent years under house arrest. The junta renamed the country Myanmar in 1989. Many who fled in 1988 settled abroad or took up arms in border areas.²