By Kristin Lin Opinion Editing Fellow |
In November, my friend Thet voted for the first time — not in the United States, but in Myanmar. After casting her ballot, she dipped her right pinkie in indelible purple ink, a customary procedure meant to prevent repeat voting. Over 70 percent of eligible voters in Myanmar turned out for the election — a wave of violet-stained fingers that chose the National League for Democracy and its leader, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, in a landslide victory. |
On Monday, the ink long faded, Thet woke up at 6 a.m. to a coup. Contesting the election results, Myanmar's military, the Tatmadaw, declared a state of emergency and arrested Aung San Suu Kyi. "I honestly feel like our democracy was stolen in the course of three hours," Thet told me from Yangon. (She asked that I only share her first name to protect her family.) |
Around the same time and in the same city, Aye Min Thant, a journalist who was part of the Reuters team that won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting, woke up to a call from their mother bearing the same news. Afterward, when they tried contacting their aunt, they realized their phone had stopped working. "I was terrified. The authorities had blocked mobile phones and the internet but not completely," they write in their Op-Ed, a powerful first-person account of the hours following the coup. Eventually, they discovered that their broadband internet was working and were able to reach friends. |
Thet's and Aye's stories paint a striking picture of how military rule has shaped Myanmar's residents for generations. Aye writes, "During the student-led uprising in 1988 against the dictatorship, my mother and her siblings alternated between marching in the streets and diving into sewers to avoid gunfire, facing the crackdown led by President Sein Lwin." Thet told me Monday's coup was the fourth in her father's lifetime, the second in her mother's. Thet was in middle school during the Saffron Revolution in 2007, when Buddhist monks led mass protests against the junta. |
Both she and Aye wonder whether the coup signals a return to isolationism and increased censorship. "As I listened to my family talk, I felt a distinct sense of being transported back to the old, isolated Myanmar," writes Aye, "when foreign travel was almost impossible and communication with the outside world was expensive and illegal." |
Thet is already preparing for the possibility of an internet blackout, contacting friends and loved ones overseas and posting frequently on social media. "There may come a day where I won't be able to contact people on the outside if they cut off Wi-Fi completely," she said. "If the day does come, I hope you and the rest of the world will still be able to watch over us, speak out for us and encourage your political leaders to do something for us." |
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