‘Now We Are United’: Myanmar’s Ethnic Divisions Soften After Coup

The New York Times

By Hannah Beech
May 3, 2021

Amid the resistance to military rule, some are saying that democracy can’t flourish without respecting the minorities that have been persecuted for decades.

A student protest against military rule in Yangon, Myanmar, earlier this month.Credit...The New York Times

The Myanmar military’s disinformation was crude but effective.

Army propagandists claimed an ethnic group called the Rohingya was burning down its own villages and wanted to swamp Buddhist-majority Myanmar with Islamic hordes. The Rohingya were spinning tall tales, the military said in 2017, about soldiers committing mass rape and murder.

The truth — that troops were waging genocidal operations against Myanmar’s ethnic minorities — was perhaps too shocking for some members of the country’s Bamar ethnic majority to contemplate.

But as Myanmar’s military seized power this year and killed more than 750 civilians, Daw Sandar Myo, an elementary-school teacher, realized that the decades of persecution suffered by the Rohingya and other minorities was real, after all.

Myanmar’s Ethnic Chinese Deny Allegiance to Beijing as They Risk Lives Against Junta

THE IRRAWADDY 

18 March 2021

Kyal Sin (left), Khant Nyar Hein (middle), and Kyaw Win Ko (right)

“Please don’t hate Chinese in Myanmar. We were born here,” a mournful mother of an ethnic Chinese teenager appealed to the people of Myanmar shortly after her son was shot dead by police in Yangon.

An ethnic Chinese, Khant Nyar Hein or Lin Yaozong, 18, was shot down on the street by the military regime’s security forces on Sunday in Tamwe Township while he was taking part in a protest. He became one of more than 200 civilians killed by police and soldiers in a flurry of lethal force unleashed on peaceful protesters following the Feb. 1 coup.

Those who learned of the fate of the first-year medical student were saddened and sympathetic to his mother, who has lost her only son.