RAPPER-TURNED-LAWMAKER A RISING STAR IN MYANMAR
Myanmar’s parliament building, constructed by the former military junta in Nay Pyi Daw, is so gorgeous it could be mistaken for a palace. The lawmakers attending sessions there have become more diverse as the country continues its steady progress toward democratisation. They include physicians, lawyers and business executives. But none of them has a more unusual background than Zayar Thaw, a 35-year-old former rap singer.
He ran in the 2015 general election from a constituency in the capital. With military personnel and civil servants making up most of the residents of the planned city, the constituency was considered a stronghold of parties affiliated with the former military government. Nonetheless, Zayar Thaw won the election, beating a rival candidate who was a former commander of the air force. His victory epitomised the rise to power of the National League for Democracy (NLD), which was a turning point in the history of Myanmar.
“There were strong expectations for change,” he said. Delegated by State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi to negotiate with the United Nations, Zayar Thaw has emerged as a possible national leader in the future.
Zayar Thaw formed a hip-hop group in 1998 at age 17, when he was a high-school student. Hip-hop music was not yet popular in Myanmar, where rock music was at its zenith. He had no intention to include any political messages in his songs, but just “wrote my dreams and hopes in the lyrics”, he said.
But his debut album, which included a song with the lyrics, “People for me and I for people”, topped the charts by appealing to teenagers who were chafing under military rule. It was deemed anti-establishment and banned by the junta.
The singer said the real turning point for him came in 2007. That year, the military crushed anti-government demonstrations led by monks. (Japanese photojournalist Kenji Nagai was killed covering the uprising.) Outraged by the brutality, Zayar Thaw “took action, driven by emotions, not reason”, he said.
He created an underground organisation and sold under the counter a CD of his songs criticising the military regime. He and his colleagues also went around putting up stickers saying “CNG”, which most people take to mean “compressed natural gas”, but was intended to stand for “Change Now Government.” He was arrested and imprisoned in 2008.
While he was in prison serving a six-year sentence, he heard a Suu Kyi speech, and one line especially — “Stand up on your own feet if you want to change the status quo” — resonated with him. Suu Kyi made the remark in a meeting she attended during her temporary release from house arrest by the military government.
Aayar Thaw received an amnesty after the country shifted to civilian rule in 2011. He joined the NLD, and after winning a parliamentary byelection in 2012, he was picked as a member of the party’s central committee.
A wave of democratisation swept Asian countries including Taiwan and South Korea after the spark was lit in the Philippines in 1986. In Myanmar, a massive pro-democracy movement spearheaded by Suu Kyi took place in 1988 but the drive fell through, and suppression by the military left thousands of people dead.
The “88 Generation” activists were mostly in prison as political dissidents, so they had a hard time fostering a new generation of pro-democracy activists. “We had no opportunity to learn from our predecessors. We needed to fill a gap,” said Zayar Thaw of the new generation of activists.
Even so, with the military still controlling a quarter of parliamentary seats and key ministries, there are limits on what the Suu Kyi administration can do. Win Htein, 75, a key adviser to the Nobel laureate, has predicted it would take a decade for democracy to fully take hold in Myanmar.