100 days in power, Myanmar junta holds pretense of control
BANGKOK >> After Myanmar’s military seized power by ousting the elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi, it couldn’t even make the trains run on time. State railway workers were among the earliest organized opponents of the February takeover, and they went on strike.
Health workers who founded the civil disobedience movement against military rule stopped staffing government medical facilities. Many civil servants were no- shows at work, along with employees of government and private banks. Universities became hotbeds of resistance, and in recent weeks, primary and secondary education has begun to collapse as teachers, students and parents boycott state schools.
One hundred days after their takeover, Myanmar’s ruling generals maintain just the pretense of control. The illusion is sustained mainly by its partially successful efforts to shut down independent media and to keep the streets clear of large demonstrations by employing lethal force. More than 750 protesters and bystanders have been killed by security
forces, according to detailed independent tallies, and there have been numerous arrests and human rights violations.
“The junta might like people to think that things are going back to normal because they are not killing as many people as they were before and there weren’t as many people on the streets as before, but ... the feeling we are getting from talking to people on the ground is that definitely the resistance has not yet subsided,” said Thin Lei Win, a journalist now based in Rome who helped found the Myanmar Now online news service in 2015.
She says the main change is that dissent is no longer as visible as in the early days of the protests — before security forces began using live ammunition — when marches and rallies in major cities and towns could easily draw tens of thousands of people.
At the same time, said David Mathieson, an independent analyst who has been working on Myanmar issues for over 20 years, “Because of the very violent pacification of those protests, a lot of people are willing to become more violent.”
“We are already starting to see signs of that. And with the right training, the right leadership and the right resources, what Myanmar could experience is an incredibly nasty destructive, internal armed conflict in multiple locations in urban areas.”
The junta also faces a growing military challenge in the always restive border regions where ethnic minority groups exercise political power and maintain guerrilla armies. Two of the more battle-hardened groups, the Kachin in the north and the Karen in the east, have declared their support for the protest movement and stepped up their fighting, despite the government military, known as the Tatmadaw, hitting back with greater firepower, including airstrikes.