Students and community members gathered at White Plaza last Friday to peacefully rally in support of victims of military oppression in Burma.

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Maggie Skortcheva

Red-clad students listen to speakers Nick Harmony,a pro-democracy activist, and Religious Studies Prof. Mark Gonnerman in Friday’s rally condemning oppressive measures used by Burma’s military junta to suppress non-violent demonstrators.

The event was organized by at least seven students in cooperation with the student group Buddhist Community at Stanford. Last week, the group also circulated flyers in White Plaza in hopes of spreading awareness of human rights abuse by the country’s ruling dictatorship.

The organizers of the rally crafted a student petition requesting that the Chinese government step in and help resolve the situation in Burma.

“If the world doesn’t act, Burma is doomed,” Nick Harmony, a human rights activist, told the assembled crowd. Harmony, who is also a board member of the Burmese American Democratic Alliance, has traveled to Burma 16 times over the past 26 years to work with pro-democracy leaders in the country.

“Right now, I have numerous friends in jail and as for many of them,” he said, “I don’t even know what their current situation is.”

During past weeks, the news of massacres of monks, brutal beatings on streets and worse have been coming out of Burma. The demonstrations led by monks are the largest the country has seen in almost 20 years, and many believe they may have the potential to topple the regime.

“There is so much that people can take,” Michael Nagler, professor emeritus at UC-Berkeley and founder of the University’s Peace & Conflict Studies Program, told The Daily.

“When people decide they want their freedom, nothing can stop them. Burmese have been suffering from this military dictatorship for almost half a century, and before that, they were very brutally handled by the Japanese, and before that, by the British. I think they have just decided that their time has come.”

Troops in Burma are patrolling the former capital city of Rangoon by night and the number of protesters who have been arrested and beaten by the military junta these past weeks is still unknown, Harmony said.

Some media outlets have reported that at least 10 people have been killed in the pro-democracy protests, but the number is feared to be significantly higher.

Burmese students who turned out for the event expressed concern for family and friends who remain in their home country.

“I was able to speak briefly with my cousin and she told me how her friends were getting arrested,” said one junior, who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation against her relatives. “My family is afraid and staying home.”

Speakers urged students to participate in further non-violent rallies and campaigns in favor of international pressure on the Burmese junta.

Prof. of Religious Studies Mark Gonnerman encouraged students to act as global citizens in an interconnected world. He is the founder and director of the Aurora Forum, an on-campus initiative to promote discussion of current issues.

“Our wearing red today is one way we may begin to more fully identify ourselves with those who suffer political and economic injustice,” Gonnerman said. “We must learn to relate ourselves to the people who suffer injustices that stem from our ways of life in this overdeveloped world.”

Gonnerman invited students to learn to emulate the non-violent actions of the monks and nuns of Burma during the past weeks.

“In this incredibly rich resource institution, we must unblinkingly learn to examine and think about our part in the world,” Gonnerman said. “Study non-violence here at Stanford... let’s talk to people about the ways we can build the world we would all like to live in.”