YANGON, MYANMAR—I was awoken at 7:00 a.m. on February 1st, 2021 by my wife Haymar and her younger sister whispering that the internet and phone lines had been disconnected. My sister-in-law had been staying with us in a small, rental apartment in the capital city. I was out picking up some breakfast snacks for everyone at Nya Zay market, when I overheard some shopkeepers saying that the military had taken over the government early that morning and arrested President U-Win Myint and “Mother Suu,” as the shopkeepers referred to State Chancellor and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. When the internet connection came back on around 9am, my phone was flooded with messages from friends outside Myanmar warning me that there had been a coup.

We later discovered that in the early morning hours of February 1st, General Min Aung Hlaing, Joint Chief of the Burmese Armed Forces (Tatmadaw) ordered troops to occupy the parliament residence quarter, where newly-elected Members of Parliament were sleeping. He ordered the arrests of dozens of ministers and party leaders from the National League for Democracy (NLD), as well as prominent activists and artists throughout the city. At 9am, just as I was reading texts from friends outside Myanmar, General Hlaing unilaterally announced a yearlong State of Emergency. I whispered to myself: “Oh fuck, another '88 is coming.”

Haymar and I were born in the 1990s. Our generation had been taught the histories of 1962, 1988, and 1991 coups, but we weren't prepared to respond. On February 1st, Haymar, then three months pregnant, marked her 30th birthday. One friend bravely showed up. It turn out to be a day we would never be able to forget. Instinct told me to withdraw all the money from our bank account from the ATM nearby, which proved wise because it soon became nearly impossible to access money.

The nation was in a collective state of shock. No one expected that an event like this could occur after ten years of transitioning towards an albeit limited democracy. Before the coup, my wife and I had been living in Rakhine State for the previous two years, working with civilian aid organizations responding to the 2017 Rohingya humanitarian crisis. We'd left behind our chaotic lives in Myanmar’s most socially and politically unstable region and moved to the capital Yangon, expecting to settle into a cozy, urban life. Instead, we had found ourselves targets of a military insurgency.

On February 2nd, the nation erupted in a din of iron and brass and stainless steel as protesters flooded the streets in a mass “pot banging” ceremony aimed at mobilizing public resistance. Traditionally, “banging the pot” is believed to drive out evil spirits. That night at around 8pm—at precisely the moment that my wife, sister-in-law, and I were discussing how our neighbors might respond to us banging pots in our apartment—a deafening, metallic explosion echoed down our street. We ran out to the balcony and couldn’t believe our eyes: the streets were full of people, everyone was holding a pot, and it felt like the entire world was making noise. Where there had been silence and fear was now a scene of solidarity and opposition to the military coup. I can still hear the banging pots in my mind.

The coup was particularly difficult on civil servants, who found themselves forced to engage in subversive forms of civil disobedience. Teachers, doctors, bus drivers, civil administrators, and bank employees refused to work, sacrificing their futures to march in the streets. Two days later, a wave of protesters led by female industry workers from the outskirts of Yangon descended on Hledan Square, one of city’s busiest junctions. Their courage and brazen act of dissent sparked protests in every city and village across Myanmar, catalyzing millions to take to the streets. Demonstrators shut down traffic. Revolutionary slogans were draped across buildings. For three weeks the architecture of Yangon was a canvas for the resistance movement.

In mid-February, a brutal crackdown by the military culminated with mass arrests and clandestine murders of demonstrators. But it did little to quell the demonstrations. On March 27th, 2021, the military escalated the violence. Hundreds of protesters were massacred in major cities across the country in a single day. Approximately 80 people were killed in Pegu. 30 people were killed in Kalay. And countless others were targeted and murdered in Yangon and small towns. The urban resistance movement was forced to go underground as war broke out between the military and armed ethnic militias across the country, who had been fighting the Tatmadaw for decades.

During these chaotic weeks, my wife and I spent our time mobilizing our cell and responding to the political turmoil to support the resistance. At the time, my wife was involved with a group called 

 (“Let’s get out of the darkness”), which provided financial support to civil servants participating in the civil disobedience movement. I was involved in organizing protests outside Yangon until mid-March, when it became necessary to focus our energy on urban resistance within Yangon. Our world changed on April 26th, when most of our network were arrested in Pago, an hour north of Yangon. Our cover was breached; we couldn't go back to the city. Among those arrested were Ar-ker and BK, my closest friends.

At that time, we were in my wife's hometown Thaton, not far from Myawaddy, which has a border crossing to Thailand. When Ko Thin, a fellow activist and supporter of our group, called me the following morning and confirmed the news, he told me: “I'm running and you should too.” I knew it was risky, but the gravity of the news—the fear I felt for my brothers—filled me with terror.

We had two options. The first was to migrate to liberated areas along the border controlled by ethnic militias, primarily the Karen State Army. Many people targeted by the military made this choice. The second option was the clandestine route into Thailand. We choose to leave our country in large part because my wife was nearly eight-months pregnant at the time and there were no adequate medical facilities in the jungle. We contacted our network and found a way to cross the border with the help of an old colleague we knew from our work years before with the Rohingya in Rakhine State. She put us in touch with an activist, Mya Nandar Thint, who ultimately orchestrated our escape.

On 29th April 2021, we left Haymar’s hometown and drove to Pha-An. Mya arranged for a man and woman to meet us at a secure location in town, and then drive us to a safe house in Myawaddy, a town on the Myanmar side of the border. There we met many politicians and activists whose lives were in imminent danger. We stayed only one night. Later we would discover that our driver, an amputee who had lost her leg to a landmine, was arrested two months later for helping people like us escape.

We left the safe house the following afternoon and were driven the short distance to the border, which is basically a narrow river, on two motorcycles. We got in a boat that was attached to the Thai side of the river by a rope and were pulled across to the other side. An older woman escorted us to the Border Guard Force (BGF) base located in the no-man’s-land between Myanmar and Thailand. Although the BGF is officially affiliated with Myanmar’s military, their primary interest is profiting off human trafficking, illegal casino operations, illicit cross-border trade, and kickbacks for looking the other way while people like Haymar and I escape political violence.

As we approached the base, our elderly escort coached us how to act like locals and instructed us walk to the Thai police checkpoint with a group of small children. We were terrified at this point. If we got caught, the consequences were unthinkable.

Fortune smiled on us in the form of a deluge of rain that suddenly shut down the police checkpoint, giving us a window to cross the unguarded border. Once safely on Thai soil, we quickly made our way to a side road where a taxi was waiting to pick us up and drive us to the boss, a skinny middle-aged man who soon began arranging our next move. We paid him $10,000 baht ($265 USD) and he handed me a “police card,” which is basically a receipt proving that we'd paid off the police. We were told to show the card to any Thai police officer if we got stopped, and we'd be let go. We were then driven to another safe house in a small tuk-tuk. The safe house turned out to be Mya’s home.

We spent two months in Mya’s safe house. There was nothing to do but stay inside and help with household chores while we waited on Haymar’s American friend to convey our situation to their contact at the US Embassy. It took seven weeks, but the US Embassy was able to broker a meeting for us with Thai Intelligence to tell our story. A couple days after that meeting, a US Embassy van picked us up and drove us and 13 others to Bangkok, where we spent three days waiting to obtain parole visas to enter the U.S. On June 15th, 2021, we flew from Bangkok to Boston, and then to Indianapolis, one of the largest communities of exiled Burmese in the United States. Ten days later, Haymar gave birth to Tsawm, our baby girl. She is an American citizen.

Our decision to leave Myanmar meant we had to abandon our lives, our professions, families, friends, and our communities. It’s uncertain if or when we can ever go back. We never imagined ourselves escaping from Myanmar or seeking asylum in Thailand or the United States. It has been more than a year now...we have so many people to thank for helping our family on this journey.

But the coup leader Min Aung Hlaing is still in power and terrorizing people across the country. War between the military and newly formed civilian militias, known as People’s Defense Forces, are taking place in many parts of the country. My two friends Ar-ker and BK were sentenced to three years in jail. Our amputee driver was sentenced to eight years in prison. My friend, Ko Thin, is in Karen State where anti-junta resistance is strong along the northern Thai border. Mya arrived in New York three months after we left Thailand. More refugees from Myanmar keep coming to Thailand legally and illegally, and it’s gotten much harder for them to stay there. This summer, the military sentenced four democracy activists, including a well-known politician, to the death penalty. Our dream to return home to Myanmar is slowly fading away.

*The illustrator prefers to remain anonymous due to potential retribution to family and friends.

Myanmar

Memories Of A Coup

Nyi’s story and the video montage that follows was told in his own words from an undisclosed location in Myanmar. 

Before graduating high school, I didn’t understand the meaning of art. Even now, I don’t know exactly what it means. After high school, I enrolled in Their Khar Institute’s teacher training program to study social sciences and art.

At that time, mobile phones were just becoming popular (and available) in Myanmar, and I brought mine to Taunggyi where I would be studying so I could take pictures of my new mountainous surroundings. Some of my classmates really liked the images, and that’s what encouraged me to go deeper into photography.

The knowledge I gained during that time helped me earn an invitation to National Geographic’s Photo Camp Myanmar, and later enter my work in the Yangon Photo Festival competition, where my photographic story won first prize for the Shan State region. I received a camera and I immediately went out and started shooting photographs around Mandalay.

I worked freelance for a while, hiring myself out as a photographer for print journalists. It was mostly just for fun. It gave me the opportunity to wander around taking street photography and to focus on photojournalism, which I came to prefer because it allowed me to document reality. In the following years, I produced two documentaries about human rights abuses in Myanmar.

After completing my fellowship in Taunggyi, I returned to Mandalay to continue my studies at the University of Foreign Languages. My life during that time was pretty normal. That was until the middle of my third-year exams, when the country went into lockdown during the Covid-19 pandemic and suddenly all schools and universities were closed for a year.

In February 2021, the military coup took place. Although young people like myself had no idea what to do with themselves while schools were shuttered during a pandemic, the psychological shock of the coup was far worse. We nearly lost hope.

The coup occurred during the early morning hours of February 4th, and almost immediately afterwards protesters started mobilizing across Mandalay. These events would mark a turning point in Myanmar’s history, and I realized that we needed the world to see and hear people in Myanmar express the injustices they were facing directly.

After several days of strikes, it was no longer safe for me to stay in my apartment. My neighbors had become aware of my clandestine activities, so my friends and I decided to rent an apartment closer to town so that we could keep protesting and demonstrating without interference.

After soldiers began brutally cracking down on protestors, some friends decided to join civilian defense squads. Some even prepared molotov cocktails to counter the crackdown. It got to a point where we could no longer stay in town when the military police started targeting protestors young protestors, like us. After that, we realized we needed to fight back.

At first, we thought we could defeat the military using urban sabotage techniques. We organized short training courses on guerrilla warfare in the jungles around town, but the plan didn’t succeed. I joined one of trainings myself and it was a failure because we lacked weapons, in addition to several other factors. We finally came to the conclusion that a strong regular army was needed to defeat the junta. So we left the city and came to this region controlled by an armed ethnic militia.

I have two reasons for joining the revolution. One is to be a part of history; the other is to record this moment in Myanmar’s history for posterity.

When I left for this military camp, I wasn’t allowed to bring my camera. I just concentrated on doing the work that was assigned to me that was needed in the camp. When I managed to get my camera from back home, I started taking pictures again. I don’t shoot street photography anymore. I live next to a basic training facility on a military compound documenting our resistance and our rebellion.

As you read this, countless thousands of young people are training in jungle camps hidden in the forests of Myanmar's vast frontier lands preparing or currently fighting the military junta. Many more are joining them as a result of the junta's policy of forced conscription. Among them are the first female soldiers permitted to serve in a fighting force in Myanmar's history.

*All images are the property of Nyi Myo Set and may not be reproduced or republished without his consent.

Portrait of an Artist as a Revolutionary

The moment occurred in February 2021, not long after the coup, as the junta tightened its grip on Yangon’s seven million increasingly agitated citizens. One afternoon around 2 p.m., a group of political dissidents convened in the modest apartment that Hemant and I shared. They had been invited by a friend we knew from our time working with Rohingya communities in Rakhine State. Our thoughts burned with anticipation as our living room turned into a debate floor and those gathered argued and strategized ways to resist the police and the junta’s military and intelligence apparatus.

Hours passed before a consensus was reached to organize a fundraising campaign to support the civil servants who had bravely gone on strike in protest of the recent military takeover. Courageous workers from the transportation, education, health and postal sectors were in dire need of safe houses and food as they attempted to evade the junta’s soldiers and police patrols. The military was working ruthlessly to identify and arrest anyone involved in the strikes. As punishment for subversive actions, police were evicting demonstrators’ families from their homes.

Amid the fiery discussions, one figure stood out: a Burmese man in his 30s, bespectacled and bearded, his voice booming across the room like a clarion call to action. His name was Ko Tint.

Out of the shadows of that turbulent March—as police tightened their grip on the city, more people disappeared and the methods of interrogation grew more brutal—Ko Tint unexpectedly appeared on our doorstep one evening and asked to spend the night. We quickly welcomed him into our home, and later he told us that he no longer felt safe in his apartment. He’d been moving from place to place, sleeping on couches, never staying too long in one location.

I had seen him at public demonstrations before, fearlessly addressing massive crowds. But it wasn’t until I joined the General Strike Committee for Nationalities (GSCN) on the frontlines of the protests that I discovered his true importance. Ko Tint was deeply committed to any activity he believed would help end the junta’s rule of oppression. As co-founder of 

, (“Let’s Step Out From this Regime”) and a representative for Burmese youth in the GSCN, a prominent strike committee, he stood among the vanguard of the resistance movement.

By day, Ko Tint maintained a public personae. By night, he worked with the Yangon underground, preparing molotov cocktails and conducting sabotage missions on the military cordon that now encircled the city. A month after the coup, although demonstrators showed no signs of relenting, some within the resistance began questioning the effectiveness of non-violence. It had little effect on the military’s brutal suppression of dissent and a shift in strategy began to gain traction. The situation reached a boiling point in March when more than 100 protesters in several cities were murdered in broad daylight by junta soldiers. A cynical, cold-blooded attempt to intimidate protesters ended up galvanizing a collective sense of desperation and courage across Myanmar. For those in the resistance, it meant they must now fight the regime by any means necessary.

The following month, Ko Tint arranged for a group of student-rebels to travel to one of Myanmar’s liberated frontier regions, where they would receive military training, food, and shelter. They never made it. They were arrested before they left the city. Later that day, I received a frantic phone call urging me to flee immediately. I’d been sending money to one of the young men who’d just been arrested while hiding out in Yangon, and it was likely that my identity was now known to his interrogators. They must have had him under surveillance, and they wouldn’t hesitate to use torture to get whatever information they wanted out of him. In a matter of seconds, our situation had become perilous. We had to act quickly and decisively to have any chance of protecting ourselves or our loved ones.

For Hemant and I, that included our soon-to-be-born daughter. Hemant was eight-months pregnant at the time—our decision to escape from imminent danger in Yangon and seek refuge abroad meant we didn’t know if or when our parents would ever see their granddaughter. She was born two weeks after we arrived in the United States as asylum seekers. We were not the only ones who were forced to flee our homeland—to flee the fight—but there is little solace in knowing that others were forced to do the same.

Meanwhile, Ko Tint embarked on a very different journey. He made his way from Yangon to the Karenni (Kayah) State, a region with a reputation as one of the earliest and most formidable rebel strongholds in Myanmar. Its inhabitants had opted to take up arms rather than kowtow to Burma’s (Myanmar’s) seventy-year succession of oppressive regimes. It was within this hostile, volatile, rebellious environment that Ko Tint continued his obsessive pursuit of  justice and democracy for the people of Myanmar.

Beginning in October 2022, the conflict intensified between the junta’s armed forces (known as the Tatmadaw) and a defense coalition comprised of the Karenni National Defense Force (KNDF) and the Karenni Army. Sources reported that platoons of soldiers were attacking Karenni villages, massacring residents, and setting homes ablaze as punishment for supporting the rebels. Ko Tint went to help rescue the villagers who’d managed to flee the violence. A few weeks later, a mortar shell nearly struck his tent. He was wounded, but thankfully with non-life threatening injuries. In late March, just as this essay was about to be published, fighter jets strafed the rebel base where Ko Tint lives. He was wounded again, but he continues to fight. The trauma, he admits, will take much longer to heal than the wounds.

Late last year, the Tatmadaw shifted tactics and began bombing public spaces, hospitals, and schools from the air. They also target medics, like Ko Tint and his team. When they hear the roar of jets, they’re taught to rush toward the nearest bunker system, but often they must wait out the bombings as Air Force pilots decimate the surrounding tree cover and pin them down. Between air raids, Army forces fire a constant barrage of 120mm mortars and howitzers at the rebel base, but the ethnic militias don’t possess the long-range artillery to strike back. Every day, the Tatmadaw selects a different location to bomb. From Ko Tint’s vantage point, it all depends on fate. In the revolutionary areas, known as “Black Areas”, the junta doesn’t care about the public. Everyone is the enemy.

The committee that oversees Kayah’s Medical Division, on which Ko Tint serves, plans to open a medical college at the base that will receive training and support from doctors who studied at some of Myanmar’s most prestigious schools of medicine. The field hospital at the base is currently staffed with a general surgeon, a neurosurgeon, a trauma surgeon, and an OB/GYN, but it lacks critical medical equipment.

To those who know him, Ko Tint is an inspiration and a beacon of hope in the struggle against tyranny and oppression. In the last two years, he has launched Federal FM, a radio station that disseminates crucial news to villagers living in rebel-controlled areas of Myanmar. He also co-founded an educational institute for internally displaced people (IDPs), of which Karenni State alone has approximately 100,000. Today, Ko Tint and his colleagues are working tirelessly to establish an organization called 

 (“Masters of the Spring Revolution”) that educates and trains youth about democracy and civic engagement so that they may one day help steward Myanmar’s future.

Rebel With A Cause

Multimedia reportage produced by young revolutionaries who were forced to choose between imprisonment, exile or armed resistance against the military junta in the wake of the 2021 coup d'etat.


Myanmar Triptych