Myanmar's people say too scared, tired to rise up

YANGON, Aug 30 (Reuters) The grind of everyday life, fear of being beaten up and a lack of belief in people power as a weapon against a ruthless military junta suggest a string of protests in Myanmar will not snowball into a mass uprising.

''Of course, we're scared. We are not only afraid of being arrested and tortured but also afraid of being starved,'' Ko Kyaw Gyi, a worker at a construction site in the heart of the former capital, said yesterday.

''For most of us, daily survival is more important than anything else. The whole family has to toil the whole day to earn enough for two meals. If we join the protests, one thing we can be sure of is having to go without dinner.'' Besides intimidating the public with gangs of paid thugs in a crackdown on this month's sporadic protests, the junta has also sought to neutralise students and Buddhist monks, backbone of a 1988 uprising crushed by the army with the loss of 3,000 lives.

Since 1988, university campuses have been moved to Yangon's outskirts, making them easier to control, and the generals have warned abbots of consequences if the monasteries join this month's rare outbreak of dissent at soaring fuel prices.

''You can see in our history that it was monks and students who played a leading role in our independence struggle. Workers, farmers and civil servants were just followers,'' said one retired government worker who did not want to be named.

''At the moment, we can't expect anything from both the monks and the students. The monks cannot move out of fear and most students are not as keen on politics as those in the past.'' WELL-ORGANISED CRACKDOWN Underlining the point, the first to be arrested in last week's crackdown on dissent in the former Burma were leaders of the 1988 student movement still seen as the voice of the ebullient youth.

Min Ko Naing, head of the so-called ''88 Generation Students Group'' and the most influential dissident after detained democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi, is now in Yangon's notorious Insein prison.

He spent 15 years in jail after the 1988 uprising. Now he haves another 20 years on sedition charges.

Many also see the junta's shock decision in 2005 to move its capital to a small former logging town 400 km north of Yangon as a deliberate tactic to stop civil servants being around to swell the ranks of a people's movement.

''With the monks confined at the monasteries, the students disappointed outside the cities and the civil servants depressed in Nay Pyi Taw, the situation is quite different from 1988,'' a retired university professor said.

''It is completely in favour of the regime.'' Many veterans of 1988 also remember the blood flowing on the streets of Yangon and question whether it was worth it.

''If the protests were going to bring us a better life immediately, the situation would surely be different,'' a pavement teashop owner said. ''But many of us sacrificed a lot in 1988, and what happened? Things just went from bad to worse.'' REUTERS SG ND0914