Burma Buried One of Its Greatest Freedom Fighters Yesterday

An image of Burmese pro-democracy campaigner Win Tin at his funeral

Win Tin didn’t want anyone to make a fuss for his funeral. But, for once, the people ignored his wishes. As his coffin was carried to his grave, the large crowd packed into the cemetery in Rangoon – Burma's former capital and still its largest city – heaved and shoved in an attempt to get one last glimpse of the pro-democracy icon being interred.

Win Tin, who was either 84 or 85 (sources vary) when he died of kidney failure on Monday morning, was a prominent journalist who spent years scolding Burma's military government in the face of severe censorship. He threw himself into politics in 1988 and helped Aung San Suu Kyi – later a Nobel Peace Prize winner – found the National League of Democracy (NLD), a grassroots political party, to take on the junta.

A year later, the regime put him in prison on trumped up charges. He spent 19 years there being tortured and was forced to live in a small cell, which had previously been used as a dog kennel.

Aung San Suu Kyi

Suu Kyi – who Tin fought with in the long, nonviolent struggle against Burma's oppressive rulers – stood close to his grave's edge. As the crowd jostled, a ring of bodyguards encircled her while she stood looking solemnly at her friend’s final resting place.

Somewhere in the distance, people were singing a protest song popular in the late 1980s, when thousands of pro-democracy demonstrators were gunned down in the streets by the regime’s troops: “We will never forget.”

“The people love him,” said Ko Htoo, a mourner, as local news crews and others scrambled up nearby trees to get a good view of the grave.

As the ceremony began in the scorching midday heat, it felt a bit like a cross between a music festival and a political rally. Thousands emptied out of trucks and buses at the entrance of the Ye Wei cemetery wearing T-shirts and stickers bearing Win Tin’s distinctive portrait – square-frame glasses and wispy white hair.

His face also dominated a large poster mounted on the side of a truck, which featured a quote in Burmese that roughly translates – I was told – to: “I do not trust the current reformist government.”

Nay Sat Kyar, a 21-year-old activist, pointed emphatically at the poster: “This is what I believe. I agree with this – I want you to know,” he said.

Win Tin was always sceptical of the reform process introduced in Burma in 2010, when the military installed a nominally civilian government and released Suu Kyi from a total of almost 15 years of house arrest. She went on to become an MP in free and fair by-elections in 2012, but many of her supporters have since been bitterly disappointed with her decision to compromise with the military, as well as her silence on a range of controversial ethnic issues, including Buddhist-led violence against Muslims.

A mourner holding a back issue of the newspaper Win Tin used to edit.

Win Tin wasn’t afraid to criticise Suu Kyi in public, even if he did it in good humour. He joked last year that while some wanted to “push the military into the Bay of Bengal”, Suu Kyi "only wants to push them into Kandawgyi Lake", a reference to a well-known site in Rangoon.

"The younger generation in the NLD prefer Win Tin [to Suu Kyi]," said Saw Thet Tun – who met with Win Tin in a prison hospital in the mid-1990s – shortly before the funeral. "We love his ideology. We love his stance."

Win Tin’s death brings to the fore a rift within the NLD that pits his outspoken and sceptical attitude towards the reformist regime against Suu Kyi’s pragmatism. Saw Thet Tun, also a former political prisoner, believes that Suu Kyi’s softer stance towards the government is partly due to the fact that she was imprisoned in her own home, under much better conditions than Burma’s other activists.

"I wish she could understand how the [other] former prisoners feel," he said.

While being tortured, Win Tin lost most of his teeth and – after an operation on his strangulated hernia – a testicle. He also survived two heart attacks in prison. Denied a pen and paper, he ground brick fragments into a paste, which he used to write poems on the wall of his cell.

Tin was released from prison as part of a general amnesty in 2008. However, he kept on wearing his blue prison uniform even after he was freed, declaring that though he might be out of jail, his country was still imprisoned. Saw Thet Tun tugged proudly on the collar of his own blue shirt, which many mourners opted to wear as a tribute to their hero.

"Nothing could break his sprit," said Nyan Aye, an NLD politician who was voted in as an MP in 1990, before the junta annulled the election. "Prison, torture, he didn’t care."

@JoseCarroll