Was Burma's 1988 uprising worth it ?

On 8 August 1988 cities across Burma were packed with demonstrators.
Hundreds of thousands of people marched through the then capital, Rangoon, calling for a transition to democracy and an end to military rule.
They were the largest mass protests in the country since independence in 1948 - and it looked for a while as though they might achieve results.
But six weeks later, at least 3,000 protesters were dead, thousands more were jailed and the military was firmly back in control.
Aung Din, then an engineering student at Rangoon Institute of Technology, was involved from the start.
Like many, he was angry about tight military control, economic crisis and nonsensical currency reforms that had wiped out most people's savings.
On 13 March 1988, he took part in a protest at his university. Riot police reacted with force. Three students were shot, and one, Phone Maw, was killed. Three days later, another student demonstration was brutally crushed.