Burmese protesters hold a candlelight demonstration against the violence in Tamwe township, Yangon, April 3, 2021.
Burma’s junta security forces opened fire in several locations on Wednesday (7), killing 13 protesters. Anti-coup protesters continued to show resilience and determination, with a series of small explosions in Yangon and the burning of a garment factory of Yangon-based Chinese-owned Jiangsu Overseas Enterprise Group Ltd (JOC). The ongoing bloody violence has prompted most Burmese to reflect and wake up.
The owner of the JOC factory said the second floor of the building burned for about an hour, destroying “finished and semi-finished products and machines.
The junta blames all the violence and destruction on the protesters, accusing them of “destroying” the country. But the shutdown of the Internet has cost Myanmar $1 billion so far, and the junta seems more willing to pay the price than the public. The United Nations has warned of growing food insecurity as food and fuel prices soar.
Thitinan Pongsudhirak, a political scientist at Chulalongkorn University, regarded as Thailand’s most prestigious university, says Burma is facing economic collapse, internal strife and division The threat of economic collapse, internal strife and division could even lead to an all-out civil war.
As of April 6, at least 550 civilians had been killed by security forces since the military coup, and the violence has prompted most Burmese to rethink.
Cho, a women’s rights worker in Yangon, said she had never before realized how badly the military was behaving in other parts of the country and is now ashamed of her past ignorance. “We now say injustice is at our door because we ignored it when it was knocking on other people’s doors,” she said.
“We were just so focused on our own lives that we didn’t think about helping others.” Cho, 25, said almost everyone she knows regrets it.
Thurein Hlaing Win, 32, is a doctor by profession and a veteran journalist. He said he had wondered if the army was really committing atrocities against minority groups, especially Rohingya Muslims, as some reports suggest, because they sounded so brutal.
We have seen how brutal and inhuman the army is, even in cities where there is a strong media presence and everyone can see what they are doing,” Win said. I thought, how inhumane would they be to a group of people they hate in a place where there is no media?”
Win recently took to Facebook to publicly apologize for his previous views, a post that garnered more than 8,000 likes and 1,000 shares.
Most Burmese live in the center of the country and, before the coup, largely ignored the plight of ethnic minorities in the mountains and coastal areas and the devastation they suffered from the conflict between ethnic armed groups and the Burmese military. Now, many have apologized for their earlier silence.
“The coup was like a slap in the face of people who were dozing off, and we were woken up.” Khin Zaw Win, 23, said there was a windfall as a result of the coup.
“The military has been spreading the word for years that minority groups, including the Rohingya, are terrorists and saboteurs.” Swe Win, editor-in-chief of Myanmar Now, an independent news outlet that has covered the Tatmadaw’s activities extensively, said that while people hated the military dictatorship (before the NLD government was elected in 2015), they still believed some of the propaganda. But now the bullets have hit their homes and the junta is murdering civilians in order to bring the population to its knees.
Swe Win says the growing unity among the ethnic groups has created a new path for the country, and if the coup is reversed, “we now have the power to build a society based on universal human rights.”
Theo Htet, a Burmese Buddhist working in Singapore, also said that Burma’s anti-coup movement had extended to the former ruling NLD party and that the coup was “terrible” but also “an awakening for all of us.
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