Berlin Wall Holds Lessons for Burmese Regime

By JIM ANDREWS

When cyber “terrorists” knocked out the websites of The Irrawaddy and other Burmese exile media this week, I had a powerful sense of déjà vu.
Forty years ago, I worked for a radio station beaming independent domestic and world news into the captive Communist-ruled countries of Eastern Europe. We were constantly jammed by the Soviet Union.


             Ironically, Russia and a few other countries of the former Soviet Union were again the source of some of this week's cyber attacks. Only the parameters had changed; in the postwar years up to 1989 the targets of the enemies of truth were Western radio stations, while this week The Irrawaddy and other Burmese exile media were in the front line.
The armory of the unseen censors also changed dramatically with the arrival of highly advanced technology. Forty years ago, Soviet jammers sprayed the air waves with high-frequency “junk,” hoping to make broadcasts inaudible. The Internet-age proxies of the Burmese regime use a sophisticated 21st century high-tech tool to achieve much the same results, shutting down websites by overloading them to the point where they can no longer operate.

             In those Cold War years it became a kind of sport to outwit the Soviet jammers, a cat and mouse game, with highly-trained West German technicians seeking out the chinks in the wall of sound created by communist transmitters whose only purpose was to disrupt broadcasts from the West.
             
                They would dodge the jammers by constantly changing frequencies, staying ahead of the Soviet technicians by alerting listeners at the last moment. Country areas often escaped the jamming, and many listeners told us they would drive far out of town to tune in to broadcasts that reached them loud and clear.

                Often, the jamming would cease altogether, apparently because of the expense. The cost to the Kremlin of running the jamming stations far exceeded our own radio's entire budget—and money was short in those days in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.
The arrival of Mikhail Gorbachev and his policies of perestroika (reconstruction) and glasnost (openness) brought a final end to the jamming. The Kremlin's new supremo recognized the futility of trying to suppress the invincible forces of truth.

                Open borders and a free flow of information spelled the end of the Soviet empire. Communist governments fell before the forward march of democracy. Tyrants were also eliminated—notably Romania's Nicolae Ceausescu and his evil wife, executed on Christmas Day, 1989. Their fate undoubtedly haunts Burmese junta supremo Snr-Gen Than Shwe in the evening of his undistinguished life.

                In November 1989 I stood at the open border between east and west Germany and watched people from both sides embrace and celebrate their victory over the forces of oppression. It was a very emotional time.

               In Berlin, I helped break down a section of the wall that had separated the two unequal halves of Germany for nearly 30 years. I took a graffiti-smothered chunk of the wall as a souvenir and it stands now on a bookcase in Thailand, where democracy is also under threat.

               That piece of rough concrete is a constant reminder that “walls”—whether physical or high-tech assaults—cannot suppress for ever a  people's search for basic freedoms. And high on that list of freedoms is the unhindered exchange of information and open debate.