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Correspondent Anne Fletcher meets former activists of the 88 Generation who made new lives on the other side of the world...
"The menacing group of five soldiers emerged from Rangoon’s city hall, knelt down and aimed their guns at the protesters. Tin Maung Htoo, a 16-year-old high school student, sat tight, linking arms with others in the front row.
The first shots Tin Maung Htoo heard, however, sounded like machine gun fire from armored cars sweeping round both sides of the Sule Pagoda on that August night, 19 years ago.
Then the soldiers facing Tin Maung Htoo and his companions opened fire, the bullets from their guns hitting the ground, ricocheting up and striking home. “Some students started running and then falling on one another,” Tin Maung Htoo recalls. “I also ran and ran and ran.”
Among the protesters who had massed in Rangoon streets the whole day was 21-year-old Toe Kyi. By 10:30 p.m. that night, sensing a terrible climax to come, the leader of his 100-strong group asked him to take half the young demonstrators back to safety in Sanchaung Township.
One protester, Ko Naing, was doubly wary of the danger. Jailed for seven days after taking part in a march near Inya Lake on March 16—also violently broken up by government forces—he left the City Hall area about 5 p.m. to escort a group of teenagers home to Hlaing Township.
Both Toe Kyi and Ko Naing, then 24, were in the crowd on Prome Road the following month, on September 19, when again the military fired on protesters. Those demonstrations were followed by the coup that brought the present regime to power.
Today, after claiming UN refugee status in Thailand, all three men have built new lives in Canada, a country free but very foreign to those who grew up in the tropical time warp of pre-1988 Burma...
