March 29, 2022
14 months after the coup:
continued struggle against the military in Myanmar
by Pete Brown, Detroit Workers’ Voice, and Frank Arango, Seattle Workers’ Voice
The majority of the world's people today live under authoritarian governments, with the trend of recent years being toward more authoritarianism. Last year there were military coup d'etats in five countries, including Sudan and Myanmar (also called Burma). But inspiring democratic movements of millions have risen against the new military dictatorships in the latter two countries, and all oppressed humanity has a stake in their success. Following is an update on the struggle in Myanmar.
After suffering a crushing defeat by Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy (NLD) in the November 2020 election, the Myanmar military, called the Tatmadaw, seized power on February 1, 2021. Senior General Min Aung Hlaing became head of state. But despite the generals having 406,000 active-duty soldiers, thousands of police and spies and control of the mass media, they are still unable to suppress the peoples' democratic rebellion that immediately erupted against the coup. Indeed, while aspects of this rebellion have temporarily been beaten down, 14 months later others are growing. Suu Kyi is still under house arrest, and many officials from her party are constantly being arrested and jailed, charged with corruption. (1) Several have even been executed for “treason.” But many of them continue to secretly support the struggle against the military, including the armed struggle.
Last spring millions of people participated in protests everywhere in the country. A civil disobedience movement developed in which civil servants and other government employees refused to go to work. Garment workers, rail workers, health care workers, port workers, teachers, miners, and other contingents of the working class waged many strikes, with young women garment workers prominent in the strike movement and urban protests. (2) This powerful movement, along with international sanctions and a domestic boycott of products from Tatmadaw-owned businesses, paralyzed Myanmar’s economy. The World Bank estimates the economy has shrunk by 30 percent since the coup and the COVID-19 pandemic. Today thousands of civil servants and other striking workers have had to return to work in order to eat. But for large numbers of others there are no jobs to return to. For example, the garment industry employed some 600,000 workers before the economic collapse, most of them women. But in June the International Labour Organization reported that 250,000 garment workers had been laid off, and more than half of the rest were working at reduced hours.
Faced with the spring uprising, the Tatmadaw resorted to brutal repression of the movement. It killed at least 114 civilians on March 27 of last year, and it has now murdered over 1,550 people, detained some 9,000 and tortured unknown numbers. This has made organizing large demonstrations in the cities impossible. Nevertheless, urban activists continue to keep the movement alive there by organizing "flash mobs" where scores or a few hundred people secretly agree to meet at a location, unfurl their banners and signs, march and shout slogans, then melt into the neighborhoods when the authorities begin to arrive. Along with this, underground organizing continues.
But Myanmar has a population of 55 million people, with two thirds of them living in rural areas -- mountains and plains, jungles and rice paddies. It's impossible for the Tatmadaw and police to be everywhere at once. Thus, the daily-occurring protest marches and other anti-junta activities in the rural areas often go unmolested. The many thousands of women who've returned to their home villages due to layoffs in the garment industry are playing a significant role in protests there. And now, the Tatmadaw must deal with a shadow National Unity Government (NUG) and a people's war aimed at overthrowing it.
- The National Unity Government (NUG)
- jThe Peoples Defense Forces
- Fierce Fighting
- Who are the corrupt ones?
- Support for Ukraine
- Mptes