Boycotts

Foreseeing an endpoint to the current situation is difficult. The civil disobedience movement combined street protests with an attempt to grind the state to halt through civil servant strikes, supported by a sophisticated underground network. The strikes certainly reduced capacity, but don’t seem to have made the state untenable yet.

Economic boycotts have also played their part, with Tatmadaw- and state-owned companies such as Myanmar Beer and Red Ruby cigarettes—once ubiquitous parts of any local beer stations and tea shops—disappearing from the shelves of retailers who want to show solidarity. Consumers can use mobile apps to identify where products come from.

Other corporations are also under pressure to distance themselves from the junta, and while some have co-signed a public statement of concern alongside foreign investors, others are hoping to keep their heads down to weather the storm. More importantly, ongoing strikes at banks and docks do seem to be playing a significant role in slowing down the state’s operations and are threatening in-country supply chains.

To those on the periphery of the central state, however, in the rural and ethnic areas, the largely urban street protests and CDM movement seem somewhat irrelevant to their needs – needs which hinge on the hope of cultural autonomy and a life without the constant fear of military repression.

The Centrality of the Borderlands

In the borderlands, meanwhile, the scale of violence has been devastating. In early April, the junta launched airstrikes against predominantly Karen villages in the Eastern Kawthoolei region, in which the Karen National Union (KNU) hold a large amount of territory.

The KNU began its rebellion in 1949, and decades of civil war seemed to be at an end in 2012 when a ceasefire agreement was signed. But coup tensions mean the truce has ended. At present, the victims have been Karen villagers, an estimated 20,000 of whom have been displaced, many fleeing to the Thai border. The village of Day Bu Noh—home to the Salween Peace Park, a conservation initiative that aimed to rediscover and safeguard indigenous knowledge production—was among the places targeted by military bombs.

From the perspective of ethnic minority communities, the coup and the ensuing violence is not a rupture with the past but merely the continuation of decades of violent oppression – though perhaps at a higher intensity than usual. It is clear, then, that any satisfactory resolution from the resistance movements must not be a return to the status quo, but a new pact of federalism.

Many of the urban protests have been dominated by the NLD, whose election win last year was the catalyst for a bitter Tatmadaw to launch the coup. For a large proportion of the ethnic majority Burmans, the politics of resistance is centred around the NLD and Aung San Suu Kyi, with many holding banners of Suu Kyi and wishing ‘Amay Suu, Kyan Mar Par Sae’, which can be translated as ‘be healthy mother Suu’.

Since coming to government in 2015 in a constitutionally mandated power-sharing arrangement with the military, the NLD’s record of progressive politics is spotty to say the least. But their years in opposition to the previous junta have enabled them to maintain a party brand of rebellion centred around their leader’s cult of personality, and despite their poor record in power, they are still seen as the only political force that could prevent the military’s proxy party, the USDP, from taking power.

Nevertheless, the violence of the coup has hammered home to Myanmar’s urban population how those in the ethnic areas have felt for decades. This is not to undermine the urban protests, which have been vibrant expressions of liberty against oppression, but instead to acknowledge that any future settlement needs to forge peace collectively. If the movement is not intersectional then it will only become a movement which sustains the status quo and political elite to further exploit the country’s long-oppressed ethnic minority communities.

Unfortunately, it feels as though the coup is spiralling into an all-out civil war. With a force of half a million and access to fighter jets, the Tatmadaw has a huge numerical and technological advantage over the myriad rebel armies and quasi-state organisations that have built bases of support in the borderland regions – but they are not as nimble, and in recent months, organisations such as the KIA and KNU have dealt blows to regional Tatmadaw bases.

There are also growing numbers of youth from rural and urban areas rushing to sign up to rebel armies for training. It almost feels inevitable that the majority of ethnic armies will form an alliance against the Tatmadaw. Many ethnic majority Bamar youth from urban centres are also moving to the borderlands for training.

Geopolitics

The situation on the other side of the borders is much more complex. Myanmar is a strategic territory for China’s Belt and Road, with Chinese state-owned companies heavily invested in controversial hydropower and agricultural projects in northern Kachinland, as well as in consumer goods factories in the urban hubs.

The Chinese government’s early statement that the coup was an ‘internal’ affair did not go down well with protesters, especially those who turned the comment back, threatening to blow up a gas pipeline that ferried fuel from Myanmar to China and claiming that that, too, was an ‘internal affair’.

Western governments and companies have been quicker to condemn the coup, but while it’s easy for them to virtue-signal on liberty, it’s been harder for them to acknowledge their own ‘investments’ in the country: for example, in the garment industry, which both provides jobs for Myanmar’s working class and exploit the labour of those same workers as part of global circuits of capitalism. Soft power overtures like the EU training police in ‘crowd control’ now raise awkward questions, as those same forces are killing pro-democracy protesters.

In many respects, the last decade has been one in which both Chinese and Western powers have attempted to craft Myanmar into a predefined role of an export-based economy within the global system of capitalism, while mostly ignoring the effects this has had on democracy and the ongoing battles for autonomy in the borderlands.

The issue of intervention is one that has been raised, and it’s undeniable that many inside the country are clamouring for an ‘R2P’ (‘responsibility to protect’) intervention from the UN or other powers. There are also murmurs of Chinese intervention. However, the record of intervention around the world is rarely a good one, and it may bind the country even more deeply to an imperialist network. Others, then, see that the only way out is through mass solidarity and self-defence.

There is already a growing political consciousness in the urban population, who are now recognising, with shame, their failure to speak out against the crimes of the previous arrangement, including the genocidal attacks on Rohingya populations. Now that the military force has ‘come home’ to the cities, they are, albeit belatedly, realising that freedom from fear needs to be for everyone – not just those in proximity to social and economic power.

There is, perhaps, an opportunity here to forge a new goal: one that’s not just about removing Min Aung Hlaing and supporting Aung San Suu Kyi, but one that dismantles all the material and social institutions that have kept people divided and oppressed. It’s a chance to end long-held racial hierarchies and embedded sexism, and instead to build a society where political agency for individuals is prized, and where cultures can thrive autonomously.

At the time of writing, such a revolution seems distant, especially as the military looks to consolidate its power through force and fear. Yet if the resistance sets a goal of revolution, rather than a return to status quo, the people and the country will be better equipped not only to fight inequalities in Myanmar, but to fight the tides of imperialism and capitalism in the coming years.