It is increasingly evident to Burmese people that :

• The regime will not reform. All talk of reform by the regime is intended to deceive.
  They make cosmetic changes in an attempt to hide their ugly face.
  Accept them, or fight them.
  These are the two choices.

• The United Nations Organisation is incapable of dealing with murdering gangs once they seize power and declare themselves a government.
  [yet at birth its first task was the destruction of the fascist governments of Germany, Italy and Japan]
• No foreign power, the USA included, has the will to remove the regime by force or even to provide the Burmese people with the means to do it themselves.
  Their vital interests are not at stake, and their economic interests are heavily interlocked with those of China.
  The countries with the greatest vital interest in the regime’s removal are the smaller neighbouring nations whose future security is in peril.
  Even assuming their businessmen-politicians were aware of the danger, circumstances would prevent them from acting decisively.
• The regime cannot be swayed by Gandhian-style non-violence, because it obeys no laws, moral or temporal—not even its own.

To remove the regime at the present time is extremely difficult.
It is necessary to change fundamentally the circumstances, working from the bottom up.

It can only be done by Burmese of all backgrounds and all ethnic origins acting in a mutually-supportive manner;in very different but complementary ways; using whatever support they can get from abroad.

The goal :  human rights and federal democracy.
The means :  progressive loosening of the regime’s grip on the population.

Break the legs that military rule stands on and it can be more easily destroyed, once and for all.

The regime’s ability to stay in power relies not only on the use of force,but also on information-gathering at the grass-roots level,and its ability to use the information.
An army with plenty of fire-power but no information is on the road to defeat.

Corrode, intimidate and destroy their information-gathering apparatus and operatives, and the underground networks will have more space to develop.
This is the first battle to be won.

In parallel with offensive actions, all pro-democracy organisations— especially those acting clandestinely inside Burma— must develop greater security-awareness and introduce rigorous security procedures, and checks designed to ferret out SPDC moles.

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Another area to look into is to get to know the nuts and bolts of the regime’s everyday population control mechanism… The regime is fully dependent on these crude and very primitive mechanisms, and this is their soft spot.
—Dr Chao Tzang Yawnghwe, in private correspondence, 30^th January 2003