I’m going to blog this week about Myanmar’s 2007 saffron uprising. It’s hard to put precise dates around a series of protests triggered on August 15 by a withdrawal of government fuel subsidies, launched on August 19 by former political prisoners from the 88 Generation (who were all quickly arrested), boosted from the middle of September by swelling ranks of Buddhist monks, and openly supported during those latter days by the general population. However, September 22 is the day when monks filed past Aung San Suu Kyi’s house and she stood briefly at her gate to pay tearful respect to them – the first time in years she’d been seen publicly. September 26 is the day when the government crackdown began in earnest. Pretty soon after that, it was all over bar the shouting.

It’s also difficult to agree on an acceptable name for what happened in Myanmar during just a few weeks in August-September 2007. The favoured term, now as then, is saffron revolution (often capitalized). For instance, the Economist‘s report from September 27, 2007 used this phrase (not capitalized). Against this, there are objections that neither part is satisfactory. The monks’ robes were typically not saffron, but ochre. Their movement was not revolutionary. The first point strikes me as unimportant – to the wider world, saffron is the descriptor that will go down in history, and it really doesn’t matter that the exact hue was slightly different. By contrast, the second point is important. To me, this was not a revolutionary moment sweeping up much of the nation in insurrectionist fervour. It never had time to become that. Rather, it was an uprising focused mainly on Yangon, Mandalay and a few other urban areas and rapidly quelled by the state. Without doubt, 1988 was a revolution – but 2007 was not.

This is of course not to say that the saffron uprising was insignificant. Burma VJ, which I’ll look at tomorrow, opens with some excellent footage from 1988. In a voiceover, the narrator says this: “These people were so brave, but sometimes I feel they died for nothing. There is nothing left from ’88. It’s like everything has been forgotten.” We now know that’s not the case. The courageous, defiant movements formed in both 1988 and 2007 remain decisive episodes in the country’s modern history.