Myanmar Pro-Democracy Efforts: Then and Now
Written by Jordan Furtak; Edited by Andrew Ma
Published on January 15h, 2022
Overview
On February 1st, 2021, Myanmar’s tenuous power-sharing agreement (a relationship that emerged in 2015 after nearly sixty years of totalitarian military rule) between military and civilian leaders swung back into the military’s hands as generals detained Aung San Suu Kyi– leader of Myanmar’s civilian government and major political party, the National League for Democracy (NLD)– as well as other prominent members of her party. The outcry from civilians was immediate: millions began to demonstrate in the streets and several professional organizations began to organize work strikes in the weeks that followed. The Burmese military, called the “Tatmadaw,” cracked down with impunity: videos from the ground showed soldiers firing live rounds into crowds of protesters and patrolling the streets to attack people who violated the curfew that was put into effect immediately after the coup. The Tatmadaw have since been engaging in a campaign of internet blackouts and social media tracing to attempt to control the situation and gain international recognition as the legitimate government of Myanmar. According to local monitoring groups, at least 1,300 people (as of December 2021) have been killed by the military and thousands have been detained since the coup. This paper explores how the pro-democracy movement that has arisen since the military coup has adapted to military violence, outlining how the movement has borrowed both non-violent and violent tactics from the past and from across borders to organize massive grassroots support and generate international attention, and how such tactics have been adapted by activists to account for the most notable 21st century development in activist’s repertoires of contention: the internet.
Key Actors and Repertoires of Convention
The non-violent anti-coup movement in Myanmar began with a campaign of mass protests to make it apparent to outsiders that the majority of citizens were against military rule and to push back against the Tatmadaw’s claims that the NLD’s landslide sweep of the January elections was due to election fraud. After the military proved willing to shoot at demonstrators with impunity, activists began to innovate new ways of showing their widespread dissatisfaction with the outcome of the coup by banging pots and pans throughout the night, staging flashmob style protests, and placing objects like stuffed animals in the street to stand in for live human beings. The most disruptive non-violent tactic that activists have implemented in response to military violence has been the national strike movement, which has not only demonstrated how angry a massive amount of people are with the Tatmadaw, but has also shut down the country’s banking system and other infrastructure. This has made it challenging for the military to govern the country and has caused the economy to plummet as many major foreign investors have begun to lose confidence and back out.
While the movement has drawn high participation levels and coordinated massive strikes, the movement intentionally does not appear to have any clear leadership hierarchy. One prominent activist, Thinzar Shunlei Yi, told the Associated Press: “This movement is leaderless — people are getting on the streets in their own way and at their own will.” The fact that social media lends itself to democratization– anyone can join and contribute to the large Facebook groups activists are using to organize protests– has helped with this effect.
On the day of the coup, an aerobic instructor who posts daily workout videos from Myanmar’s capital of Napyidaw accidentally captured a convoy of military vehicles on their way to detain the civilian government. The viral video has been viewed hundreds of thousands of times and has been uplifted into major news outlets such as NPR, BBC, Al Jazeera, and many more. This is one example of the new media landscape— a pipeline that uplifts social media users’ content to global audiences established through mainstream media outlets— that activists have operated within in the 21st century. Pro-democracy activists in Myanmar who lament the outcome of the coup have since utilized this pipeline to make visible harsh realities on the ground, as well as to showcase their efforts to organize massive demonstrations and general strike movements to the international community with the ultimate goal of requesting international actors to pressure military leaders to reinstate the civilian government.
This model of activism is not new, and in fact it is a perfect example of Keck and Sikkink’s “boomerang model” in which activists “bypass their State and directly search out international allies to try to bring pressure on their States from outside.” The internet component of it, however, is a relatively new development that has impacted the networks domestically operating activists are able to use to reach their desired audiences, allowing them to influence how mainstream media shapes their stories and narratives. The non-violent movement has attempted to reach their goals through a combination of the four types of resistance tactics as defined by political theorists Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink: information politics, symbolic politics, leverage politics, and accountability politics.
Information politics is defined as “the ability to quickly and credibly generate politically usable information and move it to where it will have the most impact” (Keck and Sikkink, 16). Activists have used information politics to garner domestic and international support by engaging a range of social media and news networks. The pro-democracy Facebook group “Civil Disobedience Movement” started in 2012 has convened to coordinate massive protests among civilians. Instagram accounts that already had large amounts of followers, like the locally based tourism instagram account @InstaMyanmar, have been speaking out against the military and uplifting images from protests as well as images of the violent military crackdown on protesters to outsiders. The internet hashtag “#SaveMyanmar,” under which there are nearly 300,000 posts at time of publication, began on Instagram to uplift anti-coup content to international audiences in a bid for outside support. News outlets like the New York Times have been relying on local monitoring groups like the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners Burma to track and publish numbers of casualties and arrests.
Symbolic politics is defined as “the ability to call upon symbols, actions, or stories that make sense of a situation for an audience that is frequently far away” (Keck and Sikkink, 16). Activists have used various symbols to create a coherent narrative to attempt to draw support from the international community towards their demands. Images of protests show thousands of protesters holding up a three fingered salute, which has become a general symbol to convey anti-coup sentiments. This symbol, originally from The Hunger Games book series, was adapted from Thai student activists who had been engaged in similar anti-coup protests (the symbol is banned in Thailand). Protesters can be seen carrying signs with the image of the deposed leader Aung San Suu Kyi and wore red (the color of the NLD) to convey their desire for the civilian government’s reinstatement. In the immediate weeks after the coup, protesters wrote #SaveMyanmar on posters and carried them in the streets to demonstrate their desire for the international community to intervene.
Protesters in Myanmar can be seen wearing red, carrying pictures of Aung San Suu Kyi and her father (a martyred national hero of Myanmar), as well as displaying the three finger salute. Photo via The Guardian
The activists’ efforts to engage outside audiences through information and symbolic politics merged into a larger engagement in leverage politics– “the ability to call upon powerful actors to affect a situation where weaker members of a network are unlikely to have influence”-- and accountability politics– “the effort to hold powerful actors to their previously stated policies or principles” (Keck and Sikkink, 16). The ultimate goal of the protests has been to engage the support of powerful international actors in the form of a UN Security Council Resolution condemning the coup and an arms embargo on the military– a classic example of Keck and Sikkink’s boomerang model. Activists had some success in garnering the support from over 200
NGOs, including major human rights group Amnesty International, which pressured their governments to pressure the United Nations Security Council “to use its unique powers to impose a comprehensive global arms embargo in order to try and end the military’s killing spree.” While these efforts did cause the UN to introduce a resolution condemning the coup, it failed to pass due to China’s influence. Moreover, China’s financial support of the Tatmadaw (China has a significant interest in maintaining access to seaports off of Myanmar’s Southern border and has a strong working relationship with the Tatmadaw to construct a freeway through the country) has rendered U.S. sanctions on the Myanmar government ineffective. Activists’ efforts have, however, drawn action from major investors to pull investments out of the country, crippling the economy. But again, because of the military’s close working relationship and support from China, the prospects of these actions placing significant pressure on the Tatmadaw are grim. Activists have continued to call upon the UN to intervene to live up to its stated values to protect human rights; in one notable demonstration, protesters released hundreds of balloons with signs attached displaying messages like “R2P”— a reference to the UN’s stated mission of a “Responsibility to Protect”— while others had the UN logo written on them with the message “How many dead bodies are needed to take action?”
Another notable use of the internet by activists in Southeast Asia is the creation of the #MilkTeaAlliance (MTA) Twitter network. Beginning in Hong Kong in 2020 and gaining momentum in other countries in the region, the MTA is a transnational internet activist network which invites likeminded pro-democracy activists to discuss how to build democracy within their respective countries– one poll on the thread, which has over 2,000 responses, asks “What would we include in a new constitution?”— as well as uplifting news stories relevant to the thread’s transnational message like the Myanmar-Sudan anti-coup demonstration outside of the White House this past November. This thread is responsible for the cross-national adoption and dissemination of the three-fingered salute, implying that a growing desire for transnational solidarity to combat the failures of current conceptions of geopolitics is transferring from online imaginations into real world practice.
A Postcolonial Lens
“A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.”
– Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History
In order to understand the sentiments and tactics of current anti-coup activists, One must not look at the present in a temporal vacuum. Rather, it is necessary to view the events of the past months through the lens of Myanmar’s post-colonial history since gaining independence from the United Kingdom in 1948. In 1962, the Tatmadaw rose to absolute power– a status they maintained until 2015– with the rise of socialist military dictator U Ne Win, who led the country until his resignation in 1988 (after which, the country remained under the rule of a different military leader). During Win’s rule, he implemented policies of appropriating businesses under State control, and he is responsible for thousands of extrajudicial imprisonments and killings for non-compliant citizens. These policies plunged Myanmar into economic despair. Once the largest exporter of rice in the world, the country began to experience widespread food shortages and much of the economy began operating on the black market.
The pro-democracy movement today, which has engaged in both violent and nonviolent methods, has roots in the pro-democracy movement that began during Ne Win’s rule. Ethnic armed groups (EAGs), enclaves of ethnic minority groups which exist on the outskirts of the country and seek independence from the government, formed to combat the Tatmadaw using violent means during this period, many of which only reached a tentative ceasefire agreement with the government in 2015. In the pro-democracy movement of the 1980s– which peaked in power in1988 and is often referred to as the “8888 Uprising”— groups of pro-democracy student activists in major cities coordinated with these groups to fight the Tatmadaw on multiple fronts. EAGs are shaping up to be a major player in the current resistance as there is evidence suggesting that they are harboring NLD members who have fled since the coup. Those members have created a type of shadow government– referring to themselves as the National Unity Government or NUG– that has been communicating to supporters via social media and has been corresponding with major news outlets, encouraging people to seek ‘revolution.’ Moreover, some young men and women from major cities are expressing disenchantment with non-violent tactics after months of organizing and resisting has failed to shake the Tatmadaw’s rule, and they have been reporting to news outlets an increased willingness to flee into the jungle to train with EAGs, a dynamic reminiscent of the past.
The nonviolent movement operating in Myanmar today has used tactics similar to the one that gave rise to the NLD in the late 1980s (although, in a break with the past, the current movement has intentionally remained leaderless, as mentioned before). The NLD, co-founded in 1988 by Aung San Suu Kyi, began as a loose activist network and coalesced into a prominent political party as the pro-democracy movement quickly gained more domestic support. Within a year of founding the NLD, Suu Kyi would be detained under military-supervised house arrest until her release in 2008. Suu Kyi openly discusses the inspiration she has taken from leaders like Ghandi in her decision to root the NLD in strategic nonviolence and would go on to receive international recognition in the form of a Nobel Prize for her non-violent effort while she was still under house arrest.28 She became the de facto leader of the civilian side of the government upon her release, and the NLD would become the major party of Myanmar’s government in the 2000s, achieving over 80% of parliamentary seats in 2015 and sweeping the elections in January 2021. Suu Kyi has come to represent the ideals of the pro-democracy effort, and after the 2021 coup deposed her from office, non-violent protesters could be seen carrying posters with her image.
The simultaneous violent/non-violent effort in the 1980s and 90s reached some success. As a result of the unrest, Ne Win stepped down and was replaced by a military leader who was relatively more open to democratization and liberalization. After securing the rule of the government for the Tatmadaw in 2011 (in an election that was seen by many outside observers as rife with fraud), the new dictator released Aung San Suu Kyi and allowed her to return to politics. It would appear that the more iron-fisted military leaders of today see the allowance of Suu Kyi to come back into politics as a blunder, and perhaps feared that the NLD’s election sweep of 83% of the parliamentary seats in January 2021 was a watershed moment for the pro-democracy movement seeking to push them out, prompting the February coup.
The Dual Winged Non-Violent/Violent Approach
The idea that a movement can employ non-violent and violent tactics to achieve goals is not unique to Myanmar, but this is frowned upon by many leading political movement theorists. While there is a tendency to look back on figures from the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, most notably Nelson Mandela, and hold them up as saints of strategic nonviolence, it is often selectively ignored by this dominant narrative that the ANC had a violent wing working in its favor, one that Mandela himself defended by stating that the violent tactics of the ANC were “was forced on us by the government.”
The People’s Defense Force (PDF), a group of young anti-coup who have formed “a roving gang that tries to protect neighborhoods from marauding security forces,” has begun to engage directly with the Tatmadaw; members have taken a similar route in framing themselves telling the media that, due to the harsh crackdowns on protesters by the Tatmadaw, they have been left with no choice but to take “self-defense” into their own hands.
Protesters march in Yangon on December 7th, 2021. Photo via Reuters
The Future of Myanmar’s Pro-Democracy Movement
Despite military repression and a lack of substantive international response, the pro-democracy movement in Myanmar continues to organize almost a year later. The military court’s sentencing of Aung San Suu Kyi to four years of house arrest (since cut back to two years) on December 6th led to renewed demonstrations. Civilians in the major city of Yangon organized a city-wide strike to observe International Day of Human Rights to call for international attention. The military is continuing to track and arrest social media dissenters and fire rockets at areas where they believe anti-junta forces are hiding out, leading entire villages to flee the violence. The economy is in a downward spiral. The country has been one of the hardest hit by COVID-19 and the Tatmadaw has been accused of hoarding hospital resources.
Civilians are armed with a recent memory of terror under military rule, a host of tactics from their own past and from observing their neighbors, and soft power support from the West. The military is armed with actual weapons and the backing of their superpower neighbor, China. It appears unlikely either force will back down entirely– and it is anyone’s guess what concessions, if any, will come from the standoff in the coming months and years– but it is all but guaranteed that the situation is set to get much worse before it gets better.
