Twenty-five years later, you can still see the fear in the eyes of the doctors — two young men carrying a schoolgirl, her blouse drenched in blood, through streets where soldiers were brutally crushing pro-democracy protests.
The photograph, thrust to prominence when it ran on the cover of Newsweek, came to symbolize the defeat of a 1988 uprising in the nation then called Burma. The revolt’s end cemented the power of the military, sent thousands of activists to prison and helped bring a future Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Aung San Suu Kyi, to prominence.
Only now, a generation after the events of the day known as “8.8.88,” is Win Zaw beginning to talk about it all.
He is the doctor in the back of the scene, his glasses slipping down his nose as he struggles to carry the bloody girl. Today, two years after Myanmar’s military junta handed over power to a quasi-civilian government, he still hesitates to summon that long-ago day. And for many people in Myanmar, their own painful history remains little more than a whisper.
“The door is only open a little bit,” says Win, now 48, taking long pauses as he tries to find the right words. “I want to talk, for the sake of history, and all those who died. In my heart, I feel like this is the right time. But still I feel insecure.”
It is a story from so many nations that have struggled with the aftermaths of their own horrors. When is the right time to push long-hidden conversations into the open, to deal with the past, to cope?
Argentina faced this in the years after the Dirty War of the 1970s, when the nation tried to move past decades of military oppression. It happened in Cambodia, where the savagery of Pol Pot’s regime trained an entire nation to remain silent.
It has happened repeatedly in modern China, where the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown remains a largely forbidden topic, and where even the half-century-old historical realities of the “Great Leap Forward” — Mao Zedong’s disastrous policies that led to widespread famine and the deaths of tens of millions in the late 1950s and early 1960s — have come into the open only recently.
“We avoided even making reference to it,” said Dali Yang, a political scientist at the University of Chicago who was born and raised in China. “There’s still a constant tug of war, between the censors and the people who want to tell the truth ... Subtly, gradually, though, this is beginning to change.”
25 years after unrest, Myanmar begins to cope
