Myanmar (Burma) - news and discussion

[Idris2002]

From Judith Beyer's twitter feed:

Like I said upthread, Judith B. does know what she's talking about. She uses this image to argue that federal democracy is coming as a result of the revolution. Well, hopefully. . .

 

[Riklet]

Scratch a liberal find a genocidal maniac.

Still, all power to the protestors. Brave people.

 

[teqniq]

 

[hitmouse]

More from local unions: Burmese Union Federations Call for International Support Against Coup

 

[purves grundy]

Heavy-handed response continues across towns and cities today. Hundreds of young protesters currently trapped in apartment blocks in one area of downtown Yangon - can't go out because it's after curfew + dozens of waiting cops, can't stay indoors because there's a 'no unregistered overnight guests' law.

When the military regime was installing itself in the 1990s they hired US PR firms like Jefferson Waterman International to polish their image. Nothing on that scale this time round, but they're still trying:

Lobbyist says Myanmar junta wants to improve relations with the West, spurn China

An Israeli-Canadian lobbyist hired by Myanmar's junta said on Saturday that the generals are keen to leave politics after their coup and seek to improve relations with the United States and distance themselves from China.

www.reuters.com

And threats by activists to push China's 'internal affairs' argument in a direction they presumably didn't intend:

Myanmar Protesters Say an Attack on China’s Pipelines Would Be ‘Internal Affair’

They mocked Beijing’s dismissal of the coup as an internal affair not requiring foreign intervention.

www.irrawaddy.com

 

[hitmouse]

Workers in Myanmar Are Launching General Strikes to Resist the Military Coup

Despite a vicious crackdown that has left scores of protesters dead, the worker-led movement against the military coup in Myanmar continues to rock the country. We spoke with three female garment workers who helped organize another general strike this week.

jacobinmag.com

 

[teqniq]

Cloudflare not exactly covering themselves in glory here:

 

[purves grundy]

This kind of solidarity is really turning the screws on the regime.

‘Nothing is moving’: CDM freezes foreign trade, raising fears of shortages

Striking truck drivers, bureaucrats and bank workers have brought international trade through Yangon’s ports to a standstill, with exports estimated to be down as much as 90 percent since February 1.

www.frontiermyanmar.net

 

[hitmouse]

Primark supplier reportedly locks workers in factory to stop their anti-coup protest in Myanmar

Garment workers in Yangon say they were dismissed for breaking out to take part in civil disobedience movement

www.theguardian.com

 

[hitmouse]

UVW launching a crowdfunder for the Myanmar strikers: Support workers in Myanmar resisting the coup!

UVW launches strike fund for workers in Myanmar resisting the coup

UVW

www.uvwunion.org.uk

 

[teqniq]

Another 44 people killed over the weekend also:

The declaration of martial law comes after Hlaingthaya recorded the highest share of Sunday’s death toll, with a doctor stating to Reuters that at least 37 protesters in the area had been killed. Chinese media claims that Chinese-owned factories in the townships had been set ablaze on Sunday. While it was not immediately clear as to who the perpetrators were, with no individuals or groups claiming responsibility, a Chinese worker at one of the factories is said to have accused security forces of starting the fires.

Myanmar's Military Declares Martial Law In Yangon Townships

The Tatmadaw has also ordered the shutting down of cellular internet access across Myanmar, following a crackdown on Sunday protests that killed at least 44

www.overtdefense.com

 

[yield]

Myanmar garment workers urge global brands to denounce coup
19/03/2021

NEW YORK (AP) — Tin Tin Wei used to toil 11 hours a day, six days week sewing jackets at a factory in Myanmar. But she hasn’t stitched a single garment since a coup in February.

Instead, the 26-year-old union organizer has been protesting in the streets — and trying to bring international pressure to bear on the newly installed junta.

Her union, the Federation of Garment Workers in Myanmar, and others have been staging general strikes to protest the coup and are urging major international brands like H&M and Mango, which source some of their products in Myanmar, to denounce the takeover and put more pressure on factories to protect workers from being fired or harassed — or worse arrested and killed for participating in the protests.

“If we go back to work and if we work for the system, our future is in the darkness, and we will lose our labor rights and even our human rights,” said Tin Tin Wei, who has been a clothing factory worker since age 13.

 

[yield]

Good piece in the LRB

What next for Burma?
Thant Myint-U. 18 March 2021

The Burmese army, founded by Aung San Suu Kyi’s father, General Aung San, in 1941, has been fighting non-stop since the Second World War: eight decades of combat, in towns and jungles, on tropical islands and Himalayan mountains, burning villages and killing civilians with impunity, taking as well as inflicting enormous casualties. Its enemies have ranged from from Washington-backed Chinese nationalist armies in the 1950s to Beijing-backed communist forces in the 1960s, from drug lords to ethnic minorities struggling for self-determination. By the late 1970s most of the fighting took place in the eastern uplands towards Thailand and China. The army became primarily an army of occupation over ethnic minority populations, which every now and then – in 1974, 1988 and 2007 – descended into the cities of the Irrawaddy Valley to crush dissent.

 

[teqniq]

Police randomly killing people continues:

Girl shot dead by security forces in Myanmar military crackdown

Seven year old is youngest of at least 20 children aid group says have have been killed following February 1 coup.

www.aljazeera.com

 

[purves grundy]

It’s getting quite obscene. An astute and well-placed friend reckons this situation has another two weeks left to run before there’s a major change... but then he also says a lengthy civil war is also likely, so not much of an oracle.

 

[Dystopiary]

It's been awful today (27th).

 

[Yossarian]

 

[teqniq]

I take from this that people are really angry. Civil war maybe?

Fear turns to fury in Myanmar as children shot by military

Bloody crackdowns and massacres initiate anger and stronger desire for a future without the Tatmadaw

www.theguardian.com

 

[yield]

Myanmar refugees flee to Thailand after military attacks
March 29, 2021 Outline - Read & annotate without distractions

At least 3,000 people have fled Myanmar’s eastern Karen state into Thailand to escape military air strikes, marking the biggest movement of refugees since the February 1 coup that overthrew the government of Aung San Suu Kyi.

The cross-border exodus will fuel growing concerns that the conflict caused by the military’s seizure of power and attacks on civilians could have spillover effects in neighbouring countries.

Non-governmental organisations and the Karen National Union, a rebel group representing Myanmar’s Karen ethnic minority, said people had crossed the Salween river separating the countries on Sunday.

According to NGOs in the area, the military dropped bombs and fired automatic weapons the previous day in territory held by the Karen National Liberation Army, the KNU’s armed wing, after the KNLA over-ran an army post.

The Karen are one of several minority groups in Myanmar’s uplands that have been fighting the country’s military for decades. The KNU signed a ceasefire agreement in 2015.

The KNU has denounced the coup and lent its support to the mass civil disobedience movement opposing it. This has included allowing hundreds of people fleeing Myanmar’s ethnic Burmese heartland to shelter in the territory it controls.

 

[teqniq]

Grim and crazy:

Troops in Mandalay fire single shot at couple on motorbike, killing woman and injuring her husband

Rescue workers describe the city as ‘a killing field’, and say they had to wait nearly one hour before retrieving 19-year-old Htet Htet Win’s body from the street

www.myanmar-now.org

Burma Army Plans To Attack RCSS Along Thai-Burma Border, According To Alleged Letter - Shan Herald Agency for News

SHAN tirelessly produce multimedia platform including online daily news in English, Shan and Burmese; TV news; monthly magazine; and a 24 hour online radio program.

english.shannews.org

 

[teqniq]

Lots of reports in this thread of clashes between militias, the police, troops and civilian protestors. Casualties on all sides.

 

[purves grundy]

The massacres are now occuring on a disturbingly regular basis, scattered across Myanmar's smaller towns and cities.

At Least 60 Killed During Myanmar Regime’s Massacre at Anti-Regime Strongholds

Perhpas as many as 80 dead in day-long attack in Bago on Friday; people saw bodies thrown into a dump truck.

www.irrawaddy.com

 

[not-bono-ever]

rifle grenades FFS

 

[not-bono-ever]

I take from this that people are really angry. Civil war maybe?

Fear turns to fury in Myanmar as children shot by military

Bloody crackdowns and massacres initiate anger and stronger desire for a future without the Tatmadaw

www.theguardian.com

events have been spilling into localised ethno grouping beefs - shan state is a running battle between RCSS ( i think ) and virtually all the the other EAO 's in the hood.local groups carrying out regular asassination runs against regular army personnel and gaffs

 

[hitmouse]

This looks interesting:

Dead Generations

What brought Mya Thwe Thwe Khaing, Wai Yan Tun, and Thet Naing Win into the streets? To read most of the coverage of the coup, you’d think they’d found themselves on one side of an old story: liberal democracy imperiled by authoritarianism. Yet Myanmar’s working classes had seethed under the...

nplusonemag.com

 

[yield]

This looks interesting:

Dead Generations

What brought Mya Thwe Thwe Khaing, Wai Yan Tun, and Thet Naing Win into the streets? To read most of the coverage of the coup, you’d think they’d found themselves on one side of an old story: liberal democracy imperiled by authoritarianism. Yet Myanmar’s working classes had seethed under the...

nplusonemag.com

To read most of the coverage of the coup, you’d think they’d found themselves on one side of an old story: liberal democracy imperiled by authoritarianism. Yet Myanmar’s working classes had seethed under the previous National League for Democracy (NLD) government’s concessions to global capital; during five years of NLD rule, strike wave after strike wave convulsed Yangon’s industrial zones.

It would be a mistake to read today’s resistance simply as an attempt to restore bourgeois democracy. Even so, it was the old story my dad turned to, which says that time should flow easily beyond authoritarian pasts. As February turned into March, and March into April—and as blood began to run freely, far too freely, in the cities and towns of Myanmar—I found myself wondering about scars past and present, about how they form and how they are carried. I found myself wondering what the old story can accommodate, and what it cannot.

According to the old story, history should work like clocks and calendars, simply marching forward from past to present. This is the temporality of bourgeois progress—what Benjamin called homogeneous, empty time. For him, this story about time was an object of critique, not a claim about how it really works.

It's good, ta

 

[purves grundy]

This looks interesting:

Dead Generations

What brought Mya Thwe Thwe Khaing, Wai Yan Tun, and Thet Naing Win into the streets? To read most of the coverage of the coup, you’d think they’d found themselves on one side of an old story: liberal democracy imperiled by authoritarianism. Yet Myanmar’s working classes had seethed under the...

nplusonemag.com

Thanks for highlighting this guy, hitmouse Seems to be one of the new generation of Myanmar scholars coming through.

This interview is very good too, illuminating areas where most Myanmar academics and media figures generally fear to tread.

 

[hitmouse]

Thanks for highlighting this guy, hitmouse Seems to be one of the new generation of Myanmar scholars coming through.

This interview is very good too, illuminating areas where most Myanmar academics and media figures generally fear to tread.

Thanks - I found him cos he's just done a radio/podcast interview: Alive With Resistance: Diasporic Reflections on the Revolt in Myanmar | The Final Straw Radio Podcast
They usually transcribe their interviews after a while so I was gonna wait until the transcription's done before posting, but might as well put it up now if anyone's interested. The actual interview starts at about 11 minutes in, so feel free to skip the first 11 minutes if you're not interested in the show covering non-Myanmar stuff.
More from February in Chuang: Until the End of the World: Notes on a Coup

 

[hitmouse]

Also from the interview, I don't think I would've heard about this incident otherwise:

Attack on Tamu police outpost ends with six officers dead

Five regime police officers were killed in the attack, and another police officer who had joined the anti-coup movement died when soldiers retaliated with machine gun fire

www.myanmar-now.org

Supporters of the anti-coup movement in Sagaing region’s Tamu township killed five police officers during a grenade attack on a police outpost on Thursday.

Another police officer, who took part in the attack after defecting to the the Civil Disobedience Movement (CDM), was killed when soldiers at the Nan Phar Lone outpost retaliated with machine gun fire.

When the police become so unpopular that you have other police officers attacking police stations then, well, that's quite something.

This is also quite encouraging in its way: Nine civilians in Kalay released in exchange for captured police

 

[mx wcfc]

Not sure whether this is right for this serious thread, but



all power to them.