🇲🇲 'At the point of no return'

The resistance takes up arms

June 24, 2021

Hello friends,

I have a short update here from Myanmar. 

Before we crack in, I again want to make it abundantly clear that Myanmar is not one of the areas I’ve spent the last few years obsessively reading about. Myanmar updates from Dari Mulut ke Mulut depend entirely upon the brilliant work of the tough journalists of Myanmar and the insightful analysis from academics and other thinkers. 

As a result, this is nowhere near an exhaustive account of Myanmar in the last few weeks. Instead, it’s a collection of what’s caught my interest in a murky, complicated and deeply saddening story. 

Stay safe out there everyone,

Since we last spoke, the resistance in Myanmar has taken on a very different look. The banging of pots in the night across the country has been joined by armed militias and people’s armies. 

In Mandalay, a major hub of resistance since February, the Mandalay People’s Defence Force (PDF) are waging a bloody war with the Tatmadaw. Myanmar Now reports on the death of a junta officer shows how complicated and high stakes the battle is there. With multiple players involved it’s no longer the Tatmadaw versus CDM/ordinary people we saw on the streets in the early days of the coup. Now, it’s more similar to insurgencies we’ve seen elsewhere in the country with many fronts and differing aims. 

That is probably not a surprise. The stakes are higher as the Tatmadaw tightens its grip and it becomes clearer that the international community won’t be intervening dramatically. This report from BBC explores the link between the evolving resistance to revolutionary groups and long-running ethnic armed groups. We’ve definitely discussed this one before, but this from Frontier Myanmar looks at who these young urbanites leaving the cities for training are. I also really like this one on ‘sauk kyaw tin Monywa.’ Stubborn, indeed. 

Thant Myint-U has a nice long one in Foreign Affairs (online now, lucky!). It’s a typically excellent look at where exactly Myanmar is now, the historical elements that have created this specific moment months after a coup and what happens next. In the lede, he warns that ‘a revolutionary energy that will be nearly impossible to contain’ has been unleashed and makes the strong case — backed up by the examples from on the ground reporters above — that ‘Myanmar is at the point of no return.’ It’s longer than most links we usually have but a must-read, so find some time to sit down with it over the weekend.

🇷🇺

General Min Aung Hlaing and friends went to Russia this week. He didn’t meet the big man himself, but with Russian Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev. The pair pledged to strengthen ties between the two militaries etc. That Putin didn’t pop his head in has been read by some as not wishing to legitimise the coup at the highest level, but when it comes to Russia I have no idea I’m sorry. 

“We are appalled that Russia is hosting Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, a war criminal who continues to command the Myanmar military to commit atrocity crimes. The trip legitimizes Min Aung Hlaing’s brutal and unlawful attempted coup that has been rejected by the Myanmar people,” Justice for Myanmar told the Moscow Times in a statement. 

🇦🇺

Vice Admiral David Johnston, second in command of the Australian Defence Forces, used a phone call with his Tatmadaw counterpart to call for the release of economist Sean Turnell. Australian national Turnell has been a close confidante and economic adviser to Aung San Suu Kyi for years (and also has a handy Five Books contribution) and was arrested in Yangon in the early days of the coup. He faces charges of violating state secrets laws. 

Reading list:

The former general, who previously served as military judge advocate-general and deputy chief justice of the Supreme Court, was notorious in his new role for allowing blatant vote-stealing by the military-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP), which went on to win the election.

“I don’t think there’s any need for me to say what kind of man he is. Everyone knows that already,” said Mya Nandar Thin, the founder of the Myanmar Network for Free Elections. 

There were more than 40 confirmed cases of fraud in Yangon and Bago alone when Thein Soe last served as the UEC chair, she recalled. 

It was Thein Soe, she said, who was chiefly responsible for the disappearance of ballot boxes from polling stations in 2010, and the equally mysterious appearance of huge quantities of USDP votes that usually turned up in the middle of the night.

All three were the subject of a complicated conspiracy theory, mostly spread through Facebook, that tried to place Aung San Suu Kyi at the center of a plot where she accepted bribes through her charitable foundation, in part, to sell Myanmar off to George Soros. Around the time of the 2020 election, articles and videos explaining how everyone was in on this plot — from private school founders to World Bank officials — were published to a military-linked news website and widely shared on Facebook. The website has since been taken down. 

Matt told Rest of World that, at the time, “I was barely aware of these conspiracy theories.” He added, “That conspiracy theory was so stupid and so thin that I never gave it much credit when I first heard about it in November. Even now, it’s only resurfaced indirectly, but it does seem like there’s a broader strategy to legitimize their coup by applying multiple discursive pressures, drawing multiple narratives to paint an overall picture of dark murky practices by the NLD government.”

Most troubling, the evolving crises facing the long-suffering people of Myanmar are not just framed by political repression and violence. They include the heavy burdens of poverty, food shortages and unemployment, along with the collapse of the healthcare and education systems.

The coup-makers have put their own narrow interests — eliminating the NLD and retaining absolute power — in front of everything else. Even the COVID-19 pandemic receives almost no attention under the current conditions.

It is no wonder millions of Myanmar people are so angry and fed up — and why some are looking for more violent solutions. There is now potential for the country’s smouldering civil wars in its mountainous borderlands to spread into its major cities.

Among the posts featured on one of the pages was an image of a “wanted” poster offering a $10m bounty for the capture “dead or alive” of a young woman. The post claimed she was among protesters who had burned down a factory following a military crackdown. Images of the woman’s face and a screenshot of what appeared to be her Facebook profile were posted alongside a caption reading: “This girl is the one who committed arson in Hlaing Tharyar. Her account has been deactivated. But she cannot run.”

Global Witness said that its report demonstrated that self-regulation by Facebook was not working, and called for Facebook’s recommendation algorithm to be subject to independent audit.

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