February 19, 2021
Innovative grassroots resistance grows despite mounting regime intimidation.
Editor’s note: The names of the journalists who worked on this article have been withheld for safety reasons.
Since a junta ousted Myanmar’s civilian government, on February 1st, the citizens of Yangon have roared back each day by staging massive and raucous pro-democracy rallies. The largest occurred on Wednesday, when hundreds of thousands marched to reject new criminal charges lodged against the country’s democratically elected leader, Nobel Peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi. In the daylight, civilians mock the generals for seizing power after an election in which their proxy party was crushed at the polls. After dark, the city’s power dynamic transforms. Under the cover of an 8 p.m. curfew imposed by the military, police “snatch teams” deploy in Yangon’s eerily empty streets, breaking into homes to haul away opposition politicians, activists, and civil servants who defy the generals with stay-at-home strikes. The spate of arrests has climbed into the hundreds in recent days. Last Friday, the coup’s diminutive leader, General Min Aung Hlaing, stoked nighttime unease by freeing more than twenty-three thousand inmates from the country’s prisons. It was, the general insisted, an act of mercy to honor Union Day, a holiday celebrating the country’s unification in 1947.
“Old playbook,” said a filmmaker in his thirties guarding a residential street corner. “It’s the same damned thing every time. They send drugged-up thugs into our communities to burn houses or poison our water. They’re trying to make us scared. They’re trying to make us sleepless.” The filmmaker, who asked not to be named, noted that Myanmar had endured two military crackdowns in his lifetime, in 1988 and 2007. Armed with what looked like a wooden axe handle, he was guarding the sidewalk near his home on Valentine’s Day night. This year’s hottest gifts for lovers, he joked, were bats and clubs. A hipster in clunky glasses, he stared ruefully at the crude weapon in his hands. “Why does the military force me to do this?” he said. “What am I doing out in the dark with a stupid stick?”
The filmmaker was doing what thousands of other citizens of Yangon have resorted to on recent nights: improvising neighborhood defenses that have morphed into yet another, lesser-seen front in the increasingly tense standoff between Myanmar’s army and its people. When cops arrive, enraged civilians spill into the streets, banging pots and pans to sound the alarm in time for opposition members to flee. An Internet meme—“Our nights aren’t safe anymore”—saturates Myanmar’s Twitter feeds. The night before, residents of the filmmaker’s neighborhood had swarmed pell-mell out of their homes, teahouses, and bicycle-repair shops to chase three prowlers into a nearby park. Suspected to be released criminals, the intruders escaped.
The next night, eight of the filmmaker’s friends and colleagues, all in their twenties and thirties, gathered in his modest film studio to plot new, nighttime tactics to match the savvy of their daytime protests. (The latest innovation: coördinated car “breakdowns” in Yangon streets to bottleneck police vehicles. Even rickshaws have been enlisted.) The group included sound technicians, scriptwriters, the owner of a covid-shuttered bar, and a fledgling poet. Hunched over smartphones in a room that resembled a dishevelled coed dorm, they listened to crackly security reports on walkie-talkie apps that evaded the junta’s attempt to block social-media communications. Scattered among two sleeping dogs and eight parked bicycles were new plastic hard hats, orange reflective vests, bullhorns, and flashlights bought for an expanding number of night patrols.
When the curfew began at eight o’clock that night, the group had joined hundreds of senior citizens and children outside for fifteen minutes of hammering on pots, cans, and steel salad bowls in protest. Some in the group serenaded neighbors with guitars.
At 10:05 p.m., a volunteer watchman clad in a lyongi, the sarong-like national skirt of Myanmar, poked his head through the studio doorway to warn that “tanks”—armored personnel carriers—were heard rumbling through a nearby intersection. “They may be on a raid trying to detain our doctors,” the filmmaker said, referring to local medical staff who had boycotted their hospital jobs to participate in the civil disobedience. “Tanks are hard. Tanks are unhelpful. If it’s confirmed, we will go out to face them. If one of us goes out, we all go out.”
At 10:30 p.m., social-media platforms—accessed through virtual private networks, or V.P.N.s—erupted with reports of police or soldiers firing at protesters in the northern city of Myitkyina. (They proved to be warning shots, but many people were detained.)
At 11:12 p.m., a middle-aged truck driver took his turn manning a makeshift alarm system at a neighborhood corner that consisted of a steel car rim hung from a fig tree. If police or released inmates arrived, the truck driver was to bang the rim like a gong. “The crackdown back in 1988 was different,” said the man, who asked not to be named. “Back then, there was little information going around. There was no strong organization. Now we rely on our young generation—our Generation Z. They use Facebook. We older people support them.” Bureaucratic-looking stacks of papers lay inside a crate under the tree. Neighborhood leaders had drafted and photocopied them hours earlier: makeshift community booking sheets for any interlopers captured in the neighborhood. They included questions about “prison of origin,” weapons carried, and category of drugs ingested.
Back in the studio, a young artist staying up late on watch said that, no matter what becomes of the civilian resistance against the coup, Myanmar could never go back to its status quo ante, a hybrid democracy where the military retained enormous political privileges, such as guaranteed seats in parliament. Too much new raw energy has been released, she said. Aung San Suu Kyi, whose international reputation had been tarnished by her defense of the army’s ethnic-cleansing campaign against minority Rohingya, was still revered, added the artist, who asked not to be named. But she hoped the civilian leader, if freed from house arrest, would tear up the old power-sharing constitution with the generals who, zombie-like, haunt Myanmar’s history. “This really is a fight to the end,” said the artist. “There is no middle way. Last week I was giving us odds of fifty-fifty. Now I’m, like, more optimistic. Seventy-thirty.”
A few hours later, the sun came up over a city that seemed pre-modern in its silences. There were no motor sounds. Later, after curfew was lifted, the filmmaker recorded neighbors giving food as a peace offering to patrolling police. The officers handed it back.
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