Second Generation

1962 Coup d’état

Officially, General Ne Win justified the coup d’etat as an essential step to safeguard the unity of the county because of ongoing negotiations between the central government in Rangoon and leaders of the Shan State who threatened secession from the Union of Burma.

About 5,000 students attended to protest the military regime of General Ne Win. The detonation of the RUSU (p. 58) was the begin of the student suppression. To de-politicisation of the universities, Accordingly, and in the light of thirteen university shutdowns between 1962 and 1999, Fink contends that “the primary focus in the development of the university system has been the containment of student activism” In that series about 13 schools have been closed during the time from 1962- 1990.

In the aftermath of the violent crackdown on the student protests, the Government of Ne Win immediately closed all universities for four months and sent all students home. Broad institutional reforms introduced by the 1964 University Education Act, then, brought Burma’s universities under strict government control and profoundly hampered cohesive open student activism in subsequent decades. In this respect, the result of the 1962 Rangoon University protests ushered a new era of underground student activism in which open mass student involvement in national politics erupted only sporadically, most prominently during the student protests of the mid-1970s and during the 8888 Uprising in 1988.