Vol. 50 No. 3 September 2019 ‘Accountability Amidst Fragility, Conflict, and Violence: Learning from Recent Cases’ strikes and protests regularly emanated from Yangon University, whose students first protested against British colonial rule in 1920. Despite the suppression of civil society under Ne Win’s authoritarian rule, disastrous and erratic economic policies led to further protests throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. The most important of these was the ‘People Power Uprising’ in 1988 when hundreds of thousands of people joined students in Yangon to protest against the unbearable economic conditions and authoritarian military rule. Initially, the 1988 uprising appeared successful. When the protests began, the Tatmadaw remained in the barracks, while the police cracked down on protesters. By mid-July, dictator Ne Win announced that he would resign from his position as Chairman of the BSPP, a referendum on a multiparty system would be held, and economic reforms would be implemented. However, a month later, the Tatmadaw violently crushed the protests in what has been described as a ‘self‑coup’, establishing a new military regime: the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC) (Farrelly 2013: 2). Thousands of civilians were killed or imprisoned. Martial law was declared, public participation banned, and political opposition supressed. In 1990, the Tatmadaw surprisingly called for elections, convinced that the result would benefit SLORC, seeing as the opposition movement had been severely repressed. When Aung San Suu Kyi, the daughter of General Aung San and the appointed leader of the democratic movement of 1988, registered her new party, the National League of Democracy (NLD), and won a landslide victory, SLORC refused to acknowledge the result and placed her under house arrest (Maung Aung Myoe 2009: 4). In the wake of the 1988 uprising and the 1990 election, many members of the NLD, as well as NLD-affiliated political activists and civil society actors, fled to the Thai side of the Myanmar–Thai border. They did so at a time of a deepening humanitarian crisis in eastern Myanmar, where the Tatmadaw concentrated its firepower on its arch enemy, the Karen National Union (KNU), after it had concluded ceasefire agreements with most ethnic armed groups in the country’s north. This was particularly so as Myanmar’s army has indiscriminately targeted civilians since the 1960s when it came to adopt the so-called ‘Four Cuts’ counterinsurgency doctrine that aims to ‘cut’ rebels from their four basic support needs from local communities: recruits, finance, intelligence, and food (Human Rights Watch 2005). In regions such as Karen State, where EAOs have embedded themselves in local communities, this meant that the army was displacing local communities on a large scale. Violence in eastern Myanmar escalated even more after internal fragmentation within the Karen rebellion pitched several Karen armed groups against each other. Most importantly, the increasing dissatisfaction of Buddhist members of the Christian-dominated KNU led to a major split of the movement in 1994, which contributed to the fall of the Karen headquarters at Mannerplaw. This sparked an exodus of Karen people fleeing to Thailand, where they joined tens 24 | Brenner and Schulman Myanmar’s Top-Down Transition: Challenges for Civil Society