Veronica Pedrosa
(The Philippine Star )
February 9, 2021
Tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of people are gathered and marching in towns across Burma/Myanmar as they did in 1988 and then in 2007. They did not succeed in their protests then, and they may not succeed this time, but they are here, now.
Perhaps, by the time this is published, the situation will have been resolved in some way. What began with a coup by the head of the military has rapidly developed from a few demonstrations calling for a civil disobedience campaign into a nationwide uprising, spreading wider with more and more people joining the crowds that are bringing together people of all backgrounds and professions.
They demand the release of all those detained; they reject the military coup; to achieve true democracy they demand the establishment of a federal democratic union and the abolition of the 2008 constitution that was supervised by the military as a step towards the so called “roadmap to democracy.”
And so in war-torn Kachin state which borders with China’s Yunnan province, young people are marching, dressed in black to signal that the movement isn’t only about the ouster of the National League for Democracy (the party of ousted State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi), but also the need for a radical change to the political system itself.