Unlike Northern Ireland, Burma doesn’t have a marching season, but, if it did, this would be it. A month of sporadic protests has escalated recently, after the military attacked some monks at a protest march on 5th September, and the past week has witnessed daily marches of monks and other civilians around the capital, Rangoon.

On Monday, tens of thousands of Burmese people turned out onto the streets to protest against the oppressive and primitivist military junta. Lower-end estimates for the number in Rangoon alone were 50,000, with potentially as many as 100,000 in the capital and unknown thousands in 24 other cities around the country.

That’s impressive, but it’s not unprecedented. Last time ended with the military ruthlessly cutting down the peaceful protestors, killing over 3,000 innocent people. Now, the junta has made ominous sounds, including threatening to ‘take action’ against ‘destructive elements‘ that were supposedly behind the protests.

Burma is one of the world’s most secretive and oppressive states. According to Freedom House:

The junta rules by decree, controls the judiciary, suppresses nearly all basic rights, and commits human rights abuses with impunity

Whilst Human Rights Watch adds:

Burma is the textbook example of a police state. Government informants and spies are omnipresent. … There is no freedom of speech, assembly or association.

Which is all very unsurprising, because it’s a military dictatorship.  They clearly have no qualms about opening fire upon civilians: including monks of the country’s supposedly state religion.

So we can’t be surprised when the ongoing series of protests gets ugly. We can only hope that, when that happens, the Burmese people don’t lack the will-power and dedication required, and that they refuse to bow down to those that deny them their most basic of rights.