On July 23, 2022, the military in Myanmar secretly executed four leaders of the country’s freedom movement. The martyrs’ families, like the men themselves, were not given advance notice. Final goodbyes were never said. Only after the dictatorship publicly announced the hangings two days later, on Monday, July 25, did the families and the world learn about these cold-blooded murders. To add to the pain, the remains of the deceased have disappeared.

The regime is being as brutal as possible in order to make clear that opposition to their rule will result in maximum pain and suffering. Among those killed were some of the most loved and popular leaders of the ongoing movement to overthrow the dictatorship: hip hop artist and elected parliamentary representative, Phyo Zeya Tha, leader of Generation Wave that followed the 2007 Saffron Revolution; Hla Myo Aung;  Aung Thura Zaw; and Kyaw Min Yu—better known to his friends, among whom I count myself, as Jimmy.

Jimmy was the pride of “the 8888 generation.” At precisely 8:08 am on August 8, 1988,  a synchronized and coordinated nationwide uprising broke out  and established a de facto government. Neighborhoods governed themselves, students directed traffic, and councils comprised mainly of monks and students served as judges and peaceful arbiters of disputes. A general strike shut down the economy. But the military struck back with an iron fist,thousands of people were killed, and even more arrested.For weeks, the military roamed the country, arbitrarily murdering activists, until the general strike collapsed on October 3.

Having survived the massacres, Jimmy counted himself among the “lucky ones.”Along with thousands of other courageous souls, he was imprisoned for years. Released in 2003, after democracy had been temporarily restored,Jimmy was sentenced to another five years in prison in 2007 for leading protests against fuel price hikes. He was released in 2012 as part of a mass pardon, and we met the following year. Despite having spent nearly 20 years in prison, he exuded happiness and confidence. When he walked smiling down the street, strangers bowed with respect and admiration. His colleagues treated him with affectionate attentiveness.

I asked him how it was possible that, unlike so many others whom I’ve known that had spent years in prison, he was able to emerge with such dignity and ebullience. His smile broadened as hereplied, “You must understand. Yes, we were the ones sentenced to prison, but the warden had to ask me and my colleagues if he wanted anything done.The prisoners all respected and listened only to us. Inside the prisons we had the power, and the warden was our servant who carried out tasks we assigned him. Actually, we felt pity for the warden,” he grinned.“ Continuing in a more sober tone, he told me that poems written to him almost daily by his wife, who was also imprisoned, had sustained his emotional well-being.

Jimmy chose his nickname because of his admiration for the human rights policy of US President Jimmy Carter. He and I had more than one go round about this!  Our many laughing banters back and forth saw him chiding me for not accepting that the US could play a progressive role in the world, while I brought up the Carter administration’s bloody suppression of the 1980 Gwangju Uprising in South Korea, secret support for Pol Pot, and stepped up military aid to Indonesia after the genocide in East Timor. Jimmy jokingly announced to his colleagues that I was the enemy of my own government, which they regarded as a friend.

How ironic that the country Jimmy admired is doing so little for the democratic aspirations of the people he died for.  The U.S., unlike the  European Union, has yet to recognize the National Unity Government (NUG) made up of elected officials overthrown by the military junta that’s now refusing to give Jimmy’s family his ashes. 

When I probed Jimmy’s loyalty to Aung San Sui Kyi, he stated simply that she was the leader chosen by the people, that he would follow her as long as her leadership was popularly accepted.  Today it is the NUG and its armed wing – the People’s Defense Forces – that represent the popular will of the people of Myanmar.

At our finalface to face meeting, he came to my hotel to give me a copy of his wife’s poemsthat had just been published as a book. Even though it was in Burmese and I could not read a word of it, his gift and kind inscription touched me greatly.

Jimmy was arrested for the final time on October 23, 2021, eight months after the military again overthrew a constitutionally elected government. In January of this year, he was sentenced to death along with more than one hundred others, but few believed the sentences would be carried out. Capital punishment had not been used in his country for more than three decades.

Since learning about his execution, I haven’t been able to talk much. I’ve lost loved ones and friends to diseases including AIDS and drugs and violence. Unjust state-sponsored execution is probably the very hardest category of death to come to terms with. I alternate between burning anger and deep grief but I know what direction Jimmy would tell me to take, activism to continue the struggle for which he paid the ultimate price.

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August 1, 2022, Oakland, California

George Katsiaficas is author of Asia’s Unknown Uprisings.

The post Rest in Peace “Jimmy” Kyaw Min Yu- by George Katsiaficas appeared first on Void Network.

Breaking with his principal focus on Southeast Asia, in September of last year, he published his ninth book, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States. In it, he interrogates long-held beliefs about how early civilizations formed. The book also serves as a blistering critique of the supposed function of states as “civilizing” instruments. Scott, who is the Sterling Professor of Political Science and director of the Agrarian Studies Program at Yale University, lives on a farm outside of New Haven, Connecticut, where he tends to his hens and Highland cattle.

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FRANCIS WADE: What first drew you to your field of inquiry — the question of how states develop, how they control their subjects, and how they are then resisted?

JAMES C. SCOTT: Originally, this goes way back to my period as a graduate student and a Southeast Asianist when I was speaking against the Vietnam War. I was mesmerized by Sékou Touré, Ho Chi Minh, Mao Zedong, and others, and it was only toward the end of the 1960s that I realized that all these kinds of revolutionary struggles led to a stronger state that was able to batten itself on the population in a more authoritarian way than the state that it replaced. My first book, The Moral Economy of the Peasant, was an effort to understand peasant rebellion. That led to subsequent works on forms of resistance that were not revolutionary — everyday forms of resistance. Most recently I’ve become interested in the deep history of the state, and a previous book relevant to that question was a history of the hill people in Southeast Asia. Against the Grain was a natural progression from this, but I wanted also to give an ecological side to this. Scholarly work is infused these days with a deep sense of doubt about the place we’ve gotten to, and how we’ve gotten there — whether it’s global warming or extinction of species. Just this morning I was thinking that all the studies on how animals think and reason, and how they are agents, provides an interesting angle for a species — ourselves — who think of themselves as a class apart in terms of our intelligence. At some deep level I share this worry that the state forms and ecology of agrarian life that prevailed until fossil fuels were used are partly responsible for some of the problems we now face. So I was determined to go back as far as I could to look at how this thing called the state and its concentration of animals and crops and people in sedentary spaces got established in the first place.

Some reviews of Against the Grain have accused it of going too hard on the state. Can the state be the provider of freedoms as much as it can limit them?

I try to think about this question carefully in terms of the French Revolution, because that was the first time that an entire, at least male, adult population was enfranchised. And it was the first time that anyone anywhere in France, no matter their estate or property or occupation, was equal before national French law. France after the revolution was a great emancipatory state, but prior to it, the state only had access to the population through the different parliaments and different estates of the feudal order. Once the revolution occurred, the state for the first time had direct access to every citizen. That was the birth of citizenship, and that made possible the total mobilization of the population under Napoleon. So you had organization and mobilization of total war and emancipation being linked integrally to the achievements of the French Revolution.

What I object to in some of the critical reviews of Against the Grain is that they seem to assume that hunters and gatherers had the option of either continuing with their existence or joining the Danish welfare state. They’re choosing, or more likely being forced to join, an agrarian autocracy of one kind or another. Insofar as the state has any welfare aspects, it’s only what is necessary to hold a population at the center that can be useful for them.

Weapons of the Weak explores the material and ideological ways in which elite power is resisted by society’s most vulnerable. Had you gone to this Malaysian village specifically to look at these tools of resistance?

Actually in some respects Weapons of the Weak is the book I’m proudest of, partly because it’s based on two years of fieldwork in this Malaysian village where nothing revolutionary was happening. And I found that it’s not just ideological, subtle ways of resistance that the villagers were using. Struggles for people with no citizenship rights, which is to say most of the world’s population most of the time, are always material in a sense. Between 1650 and 1850 the most popular crime in the United Kingdom was poaching. And there were never any great marches on London, no parliamentary petitions, no riots — this was a struggle over common property that went on for two centuries and yielded real benefits on a daily basis for the peasantry. Similarly, look at the difference between a land invasion on the one hand, and squatting: squatters don’t make any public claim; they’re interested in de facto results. The same is true for army desertions as opposed to mutiny, because mutiny makes a public claim. So it dawned on me that most resistance in history did not speak its name, and actually a lot of it was cloaked by an apparent loyalty to the king or the tsar. It seems to me that the historians, by paying attention to formal organization and public demonstrations, have missed most acts of resistance throughout history.

Are these everyday “weapons” used by the Malaysian villagers — foot-dragging, evasion, gossip — in use at home too, in a developed country like the United States with robust political institutions?

If we’re talking about developed countries, we’re talking about an overall alienation from politics and an unwillingness to give one’s heart and soul to struggle in an arena that one sees as deeply corrupted and compromised. That alienation and withdrawal are the most common forms of resistance. In Eastern Europe they used to call it internal migration — you’d find something else to think about because it was hopeless to think about the public sphere. It was Hobsbawm who said that the peasants’ goal is to work the system to their minimum disadvantage — they can’t beat it but they can nibble around the edges. The other thing I discovered in this Malaysian village is the way in which people misrepresent themselves before different audiences — how the poor misrepresent their agreements and complicity with the elite of the village, how they talk among themselves as opposed to how they talk to power. This is something that happens in daily life everywhere. When the disparities in power are great, the misrepresentation is correspondingly greater. These are the “hidden transcripts” I’ve written of.

But remember that foot-dragging is not just a skill of the powerless; it’s used by bureaucracies too. A long time back in Massachusetts the state government decided it wanted to reduce welfare expenditures. But it didn’t have the courage to do so openly, and it would’ve been too politically difficult to formally change the welfare criteria and welfare stipend. So what they did was to essentially make the bureaucratic process so onerous by using lengthy forms, to make the opening hours of the welfare office as inconvenient as possible for mothers with children — to use a whole series of subtle obstacles, or everyday resistance by elites, if you like, to make sure most people never made it to the candy store. So while that kind of resistance may be the only weapon of the powerless, it is one of the many weapons that elites have.

You’ve devoted entire books to exploring state resistance in Southeast Asia. But I often sense an almost conditioned desire among some communities there for strong authority, without which society might break apart. Thailand and the Philippines are two recent examples that come to mind.

I don’t claim to be a specialist on public opinion but it strikes me that the cosmopolitan, educated middles classes of Thailand have turned against a populist, elected government and are very happy to have military rule. Likewise, the fact that there’s not an uprising against Duterte in the Philippines is part of the same desire for law and order at the expense of democratic freedoms. In Myanmar, one of the military’s long-range goals, in terms of public opinion, is to make people fear the country will fall apart unless a strong military is confirmed in power and has a free hand. This desire is cultivated from the top. I have a feeling that Aung San Suu Kyi wanted to extend ceasefires to all the peripheral nationalities because she wanted that major issue of national security under control and I think the military was perfectly happy to have that break down and conflicts flare — it was in their interests to have it so.

Can these supposedly benevolent campaigns — ceasefires in Myanmar; Duterte’s war on drugs in the Philippines — instead be strategies to project state power into regions of these countries where it lacks?

Every state intervention and extension of power is seen by state elites as a benevolent move in the interest of the population. Even if the rationale is not cynical, it is still likely to result in an amplification of state power at the expense of its subjects. In the Philippines the effort to extend state power in Mindanao and the Sulu Archipelago is something that characterizes Philippine regimes back to President Magsaysay in the 1950s and the relocation of peasants into previously Islamic areas. So this effort to move what are seen to be friendly populations to the periphery of a state, among people who are seen as potentially hostile, happens all over Southeast Asia. You saw it with the transmigration efforts in Indonesia, and the efforts of the Vietnamese to move the Kinh majority ethnic group into the hills. This is something that is almost national policy. Some of it is stimulated and subsidized, some is voluntary.

Early states had to deal with a periphery of other peoples, with which they either had to make allies, or turn into mercenaries, or keep at arm’s length. Now, the population explosion of the last century and a half has meant there are land-starved lowland populations that can be used both to create plantations in the hills and new settlements and so on. In a sense the periphery can be controlled in large part through transplanting majority populations to the periphery. But now, modern technology and roads and transport allows the state to project its power in ways that weren’t previously possible. I think the degree to which the state has this control however varies a good deal across Southeast Asia. Most of Laos, for example, except for a few valley areas, is a non-state space.

Could there be something in the early processes of state formation there that accounts for this frequent pendulum swing between authoritarianism and democracy in Southeast Asia?

I guess if I were to address this question I’d want to look at World War II and postwar early independence history. In Myanmar in particular, it’s clear that military mobilization was an absolutely crucial part of the early creation of the Burmese state. Some of that is true in Indonesia too, and in spades in Vietnam. It seems that a lot of these places got a kind of muscle-bound military early on in the game that was accustomed to rule and in many cases to running the economy. They are the major economic interest as well. In that respect I think there’s an institutional military dominance that goes back a long way and the military then represents itself as the savior and soul of nation.

With that swing comes acute anxieties about the stability of society, and nationalist leaders are skilled at propagandizing on the fear that democracy will upend longstanding social orders, whether ethnic, religious, and so on. We’re seeing the lethal results of that in Myanmar right now.

If you ask which countries have the deepest and longest experience of open democratic politics in Southeast Asia, the answers would have to be the Philippines and Thailand, and Indonesia to some considerable extent now as well. The point is that a longer experience of relative stability under peaceful democratic political competition will reduce the fear that the nation will fall apart. I think of open democratic politics as a process of gradual education. On the other hand, if you have a continuous period of authoritarian rule then the only forms of opposition have to be deeply subversive or armed, and that’s a self-fulfilling prophecy if the only kind of opposition that the Burmese military permits to its rule is armed secessionist movements. Then, in fact, the country will fall apart. It is, in a sense, a characteristic of politics that military rule has itself created.

On the question of Myanmar, this so-called pacted transition to democracy that Suu Kyi hopes to preside over raises a problem: the military has leased much of the natural resources to foreign companies, and they have grabbed lands and enterprises all over the country and deeded it to themselves and officers. It’s not clear to me, even if this transition were successful over the next eight years or so, that there would be a lot left that hadn’t been seized and made the property of the military or foreign companies with long leases. It’s turned out to be a bad bargain for the democrats.

You’re a longtime Myanmar watcher. Are you surprised at the intensification of ethno-religious violence there during democratization?

I have always remarked ever since I first went to Burma on what I thought as an irrational fear of Muslims in general. It’s a kind of hysteria — that these people are stealing our women, as if women are the property of Burmans [majority ethnic group] only. There’s a deep cultural fear of extinction, especially linked to males and Buddhism in its Burma guise, and it always seemed to be totally out of proportion to any real danger that the Burmese state faced.

There is no doubt that we have a massive humanitarian tragedy unfolding, the likes of which Southeast Asia has not seen at least since the massacres after 1965 in Indonesia. It seems to me that the Indonesians will be dealing with those massacres as a national stain for the next century, in the way that the Turks have to deal with the Armenian massacre. Whatever else one has to say about the Rohingya, they are human beings and they have been treated like cattle or worse — more than half a million have been driven away, their houses burned, their lives destroyed. When the dust settles, any Burmese regime is going to have to deal with this huge humanitarian tragedy for which the military and their allied militias will always be held responsible. This is one of those national stains. I’m not speaking from a positon of a nation that doesn’t have lots of genocides that it has to explain — the United States certainly does. But Burma has a genocide it needs to explain as well.

How does such a vast cross-section of a population come to rally in support of ethnic cleansing? It can’t just emerge from thin air.

I’m actually mystified by the deep suspicion and fears of Muslims that goes back long before the Rohingya crisis. I confess to not understanding this. There are all these links to the Indian population in Rangoon and dockworkers strikes and violence during the colonial period. There is a history there, but I am mystified by such a widespread fear of Muslims among ordinary Burmans, so I throw up my hands. But it’s been fanned and cultivated and whipped up by Buddhist nationalists who have their own particular agenda, and by Rakhine who have their own history and anxieties that are deeply rooted and realistic, and by the military, for whom all this helps to solidify their claims to power and control of the economy and state. These attitudes are there and they are deeply rooted but they have been politically mobilized like no one has ever seen. The Rohingya were quite passive historically but now they have become a point of public mobilization. Yet if one wanted to get upset about an “outside” economic threat in Myanmar then the Yunnan Chinese population, and the Chinese companies that control all of northern Burma, would be the source of a more realistic and palpable concern of economic domination than the Muslims have ever posed.

Is this perhaps a by-product of the creation of a new society — statecraft as pursued by a majority long denied the capacity to do so?

There are lots of groups in Southeast Asia that, like the Rohingya, spill over national boundaries. Outside of Southeast Asia, the Kurds are the most striking contemporary example. It seems to me that if you don’t want wars of secession then the only way to avoid them is for the international system to invent forms of association across borders on questions like culture, language, education, and so on — a whole series of issues that have to do with the cultural cohesion of a people that do not threaten the sovereignty of the nations across whose borders they spread. We need to invent something like that for the Kurds, the Rohingya, the Hmong, and lots of smaller ethnic groups.

The Burmese military could have gotten away with this assault on the Rohingya 30 years ago and the international press would have scarcely noticed. But the world is more closely integrated, such that every nation is going to have to answer for their treatment of helpless minority populations. The only thing that offers an even minor restraint on what is happening in Myanmar is this international scrutiny, and the more scrutiny the better. When it comes to the violation of essential human rights, there should be no place to hide.

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Francis Wade is a journalist and author of Myanmar’s Enemy Within: Buddhist Violence And The Making Of A Muslim Other (Zed Books).

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source: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/most-resistance-does-not-speak-its-name-an-interview-with-james-c-scott/

The post Most Resistance Does Not Speak Its Name: An Interview with James C. Scott appeared first on Void Network.

The 23-year-old, who like every other protester in this article has been given a pseudonym for their safety, uses a shield fashioned from a SkyNet satellite dish for protection against rubber bullets. The activist also wears a yellow plastic hardhat and goggles to protect his eyes from tear gas and smoke.

 “We are frontliners. We know that we can be arrested or killed by live rounds when the soldiers shoot at us, but we have to protect our friends,” he said.

While the early street protests against the February 1 military takeover remained largely peaceful, attracting people from all strata of society, the police and army have violently broken up more recent demonstrations, killing more than 70 so far. This has whittled down protests to younger, more daring groups engaging in cat-and-mouse games with security forces: making tactical retreats and reassembling the moment forces move on. To avoid death, injury or arrest, they have had to quickly adopt new methods and tools.

Mayangone Township resident Ko Phyo Tin, 25, who joins the Kyun Taw protest group every day, uses a shield improvised from a piece of steel as protection against rubber bullets and live rounds, and dons a Chinese-made combat helmet.

“Most of us are using protective equipment made in China. We don’t trust its quality but we have no alternative,” he said, adding that the group would gladly accept donations of quality gas masks, hard hats and body armour.

Women have also taken up positions as “frontliners”, the protesters bearing the brunt of the police and army assaults and shielding those behind them. They include Ma Thu Thu, 23, a founder of a team of frontliners that operates in Hlaing and Kamaryut townships, where such groups proliferate.

Thu Thu said her team comprises a core group of more than 10 people that is supported by about another 50 volunteers, who have learned from the street tactics used in dissident movements overseas.

“I saw the protests in Hong Kong and they gave me ideas about how we could defend ourselves,” said Thu Thu, whose small frame belies a capacity to endure gruelling confrontations with security forces.

She has been protesting against military rule since February 6 and is increasingly convinced that the people need protection from the lethal force police and soldiers used against striking dockworkers in Mandalay on February 20, when security forces fired live rounds on a crowd of more than 1,000 demonstrators at a shipyard, killing two and injuring dozens.

On February 26, Thu Thu watched a violent crackdown by police on big crowds of protesters at the Myanigone and Hledan junctions in Yangon.

“Police opened fire to disperse protesters, who fled in chaos. Some were arrested. When I saw that, I thought we needed to be able to protect protesters during demonstrations planned for February 28, Milk Tea Alliance Day,” she said, referring to a loose alliance of pro-democracy movements in Thailand, Hong Kong, Taiwan and now Myanmar.

“I posted [these thoughts] on Facebook and one of my friends said she would donate 30 shields. I talked with some of my male friends and we decided to volunteer as frontliners,” she added.

“When we first started posting [about our plan], about a hundred people contacted us [wanting to join]. Members of our group are from many different townships in Yangon.”

Retaking the streets

On Milk Tea Alliance Day, the group had intended to use wooden shields to defend protesters at Hledan junction, but the police and army opened fire with rubber bullets and some live rounds before Thu Thu and her team arrived, killing two kill people.

Hearing this, they discussed whether to abandon their plan, knowing that their wooden shields weren’t bullet-proof, but they decided they had a duty to protect other protesters no matter what. They took their positions at the frontline and, fortunately, police did not open fire again that day at Hledan.

The next day, they turned to homemade remedies when tear gas was thrown at protesters on a section of Insein Road, near the Butaryone bus stop in Hlaing Township.

“[At first] we suffered a lot from the tear gas so we each carried with us a can of Coca-Cola, […] prepared bags of water and wore towels around our necks,” Thu Thu said, explaining that because “many gas masks on the market are useless against tear gas”, protesters learned to douse their faces with liquid or apply a wet towel instead.

“We also switched our wooden shields for steel shields,” she said, describing how the group created a front line of shield-carriers called the “Tank” group – a reference to a battle role taken in online smartphone game Mobile Legends, which is popular among youth across Southeast Asia.

Behind the Tank is a group charged with countering tear gas volleys, including by smothering the discharging cannisters with bags of water and soaked pieces of cloth, and in some cases by dousing the cannisters with a fire extinguisher.

The frontline groups also try to erect two makeshift barriers to separate security forces from protesters.

“We need two so that when police destroy the first we can fall back to the second,” Thu Thu said, adding that they had improvised the strategy themselves.

Despite the police and army’s use of brute force, she said experience had taught the protesters that they “needed brave people more than physically strong people” to serve on the front line.

“At first, we chose the physically strong, but when police started shooting, they ran away,” she said, laughing. “In our Tank group none of the men are taller than five feet eight inches.”

“When we end a day and both the frontline defenders and ordinary protesters are okay, we regard that as a victory,” Thu Thu said, adding that they found it hard to forgive themselves whenever a protester was hurt or arrested. “We think about it until late at night. Sometimes I cry.”

Frontliners told Frontier they are not scared of the police, but if soldiers are deployed, they flee.

“If it’s just tear gas, rubber bullets or stun grenades, we aren’t afraid. But we are afraid of real bullets. That’s why we switched to steel shields,” Thu Thu said, though conceded that even those may not protect them from live rounds. This was proved on March 11, when a protester in Yangon’s North Dagon Township died when a bullet penetrated his makeshift metal shield.

While the security forces have been unable to break the resolve of protest groups like Thu Thu’s, they have increasingly cleared them from the main roads and junctions and pushed them into residential lanes. This has allowed them to hide in the apartments of supportive residents during crackdowns, but it’s also put those residents and their homes in danger. On March 10, police in Sanchaung began raiding the apartments of people suspected of sheltering protesters.

Thu Thu said this risk to ordinary city residents made it more important for protesters to reoccupy the major roads.

“On March 1 and 2, we can say that we won; the protesters owned Insein Road,” she said, referring to the major thoroughfare. “But then police fired tear gas and bullets and destroyed our barricades, so people became too afraid to protest on the main roads.”

Some want to protest from what they think is the relative safety of their living rooms, Thu Thu said, but if they do that, “police will shoot into their homes”. That’s one reason she said she wants to see more people out on the streets.

“I believe that a revolution is not won without bloodshed, but as long as the protesters are on the streets, we will help to defend them,” she said, adding that frontliners are thinking hard about ways to offer more protection so that “the people have the courage to go back out”.

“If we do not get back on the main roads, we will lose,” she said. “There are about seven million people in Yangon; if they all take to the streets it will not be easy for the police to crack down on them.”

The frontliners know they are risking arrest, and even death. Thu Thu said she had told her friends, “If I die, please give everything I have to my parents.”

‘We know we are risking our lives’

Hlaing resident Ko Thiha, 22, is a frontliner active in his township. He wears a red flannel shirt and carries a steel shield that he hits with a short length of plastic pipe as he and other frontliners chant, “The revolution must win!”

He said the first time he served as a frontliner at the junctions of Baho and Hlaing River roads on March 2, he was both excited and scared. “Now, I am more confident,” he told Frontier three days later.“We ask the protesters to stay behind us and not be afraid because we will protect them from the riot police.”

When army units advance, he said, the instructions are different: “run”.

Thiha and his friends learned their tactics, including the use of metal shields, from watching other protest groups in Yangon. They’ve also drawn inspiration from the Hong Kong uprising, where protesters erected barricades, used homemade shields, wore hard hats and found inventive ways to neutralise tear gas cannisters.

But Thiha’s group has also claimed their own innovations. “We make the shields ourselves using polished steel, meaning we can also use them to reflect sunlight onto the eyes of police when they are advancing towards us,” he said proudly. “This was our idea.”

Thiha, who said he had also watched a documentary about the so-called Revolution of Dignity in Ukraine that began in November 2013 and took 91 days to overthrow an oppressive regime, said the steel shields only protected against rubber bullets that police use. “If soldiers are involved, we must run ­– they use live rounds,” he said.

He also acknowledged that his hard hat and cheap gas mask offer little protection against rubber bullets or tear gas at close range, but are still better than nothing.

“We know we’re risking our lives, but we must protect peaceful protesters. That’s why I decided to join the front line,” he said.

“They can arrest, injure or kill us, but if we get democracy, it all will have been worth it.”

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source+ more info: FRONTIER / Myanmar- Independent Journalism

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