San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Burmese rapper led democratic resistance movement
Phyo Zeya Thaw, a Burmese hip-hop pioneer whose democracy-affirming lyrics led to a career in parliament and, after Myanmar’s military coup last year, as a resistance leader, was executed July 23 in Yangon, Myanmar, by the country’s military junta. He was 41.
His execution, and those of three other political prisoners, were announced in the juntacontrolled news media Monday. His mother, Khin Win May, confirmed his death.
The four men were convicted of terrorism charges in trials widely denounced as a sham. The four executions were the first to be carried out in decades in Myanmar.
Toward the end of the military’s first round of iron-fisted rule, in the early 2000s, Phyo Zeya Thaw fronted one of Myanmar’s first hip-hop groups and co-founded a collective of rappers, activists and other young people who used music as a medium of dissent.
“With hip-hop, we can express ourselves without fear,” Phyo Zeya Thaw said in a 2011 interview, shortly after he was released from his first stint in prison. “Music can make us brave.”
As the ruling generals began to open up the country and allow members of the long oppressed National League for Democracy to run for parliament in a 2012 by-election, Phyo Zeya Thaw reinvented himself as a politician.
He won a seat in parliament for the NLD. His was a rare young face in a political party whose stalwarts had grown old battling the military generals who had ruled Myanmar for nearly five decades.
Phyo Zeya Thaw was born March 26, 1981, in Yangon. His mother, Khin Win May, survives him, along with his father, Mya Thaw; his sister, Phyu Pa Pa Thaw; and his fiancee, Thazin Nyunt Aung.
After the military responded to 2007 Buddhist monk-led protests with gunfire, Phyo Zeya Thaw co-founded Generation Wave, a secret band of antigovernment hip-hoppers and youth activists.
He was arrested in 2008 and convicted of violating a lawand-order statute and of illegally possessing the equivalent of about $20 in foreign currency.
After his release from prison in 2011, he still performed at occasional gigs, but he began to focus on promoting the National League for Democracy.
With the military agreeing to power-sharing with a civilian authority, he was elected to parliament in 2012 and reelected in 2015.
Phyo Zeya Thaw busied himself as an assistant to leader Aung San Suu Kyi. He remained loyal, even as she earned international condemnation for supporting the military’s campaign of ethnic cleansing against Rohingya Muslims.
During parliamentary season, Phyo Zeya Thaw lived in an austere concrete dormitory for legislators. There was little evidence of his life as one of Myanmar’s most renowned hip-hop artists.
“He liked singing more than politics,” said Thazin Nyunt Aung, his fiancee. “But he did his duty to the end.”
Phyo Zeya Thaw declined to run for reelection in 2020, hoping to return to rap. The National League for Democracy won an even bigger margin of victory that year.
The putsch came less than three months later, and the country’s top leaders were quickly rounded up and imprisoned.
Phyo Zeya Thaw joined the rallies against the new junta, but with soldiers killing unarmed protesters, even targeting small children, he and others went underground.
His activities in the resistance are not publicly known. He was arrested in November when 300 soldiers descended on the Yangon housing project where he was in hiding.
The military accused the four men executed Saturday of being responsible for the deaths of at least 50 civilians, as well as soldiers, but it has not publicly presented any evidence of that.
In January, the junta’s court sentenced Phyo Zeya Thaw and the three other activists to death. All four were hanged before dawn Saturday.
“I will always be proud of my son because he gave his life for the country,” Khin Win May said. “He is the martyr who tried to bring democracy to Myanmar.”