[Myanmar’s military — on full display at Saturday’s Armed Forces Day parade in which hundreds of soldiers marched in formation across a vast ground and fighter jets streaked overhead — attempts to portray itself as an illustrious fighting force, the only group capable of holding a fractious nation together.]
By Timothy McLaughlin
Her work carries an added risk: Her
husband is a soldier in the very army that deposed the civilian government. He
is unaware that she is aiding those resisting against his commander
in chief, now also head of state, and fellow soldiers, she said.
May’s secret activism since the
coup — and her break from the role she is meant to play as a dutiful military
spouse — has left her straddling two worlds in conflict. One is with the protesters,
a vast majority of the country. The other is within the bubble of Myanmar’s
military, which remains in many ways isolated and shaped by a worldview of
indoctrination and incessant propaganda.
The wives of other soldiers have
warned May, who spoke to The Washington Post on the condition that a nickname
be used and her location not be disclosed for security reasons, that her
support of the protests could put her husband’s career and their lives at risk.
At least 114 people, including some
children, were killed in anti-coup demonstrations that coincided with Armed
Forces Day on Saturday, according to the news website Myanmar Now, after a warning from the military on state
television that protesters could be “shot in the head.”
The U.S. ambassador to Myanmar,
Thomas Vajda, denounced the latest bloodshed as “horrifying.”
“On Myanmar’s Armed Forces Day,
security forces are murdering unarmed civilians, including children, the very
people they swore to protect,” Vajda wrote on Twitter.
Many spouses think what the
military is doing is right, May said, and even those who disagree are often too
frightened to speak up. So far, May’s husband has not been involved in
operations against protesters.
“There are very few people [in
military families] who will risk expressing the truth openly because there are
many consequences,” she said.
Security forces have detained more
than 2,900 people since the Feb. 1 coup and killed more than 400,
including the deaths on Saturday, according
to human rights groups.
With a mobile phone and an unstable
WiFi connection — sometimes drawn from her neighbor’s house — May has
documented street protests and distributed relief funds to workers on strike.
As she expanded her roles in the
protest movement, she helped police officers who ignored the Army’s orders to
fire on anti-coup demonstrators. Money was funneled to the defiant police and
safe houses arranged for their families once they fled the force.
The junta has unsuccessfully tried
to justify the coup by claiming widespread corruption and voter
fraud in elections last November that saw a landslide win for Aung San
Suu Kyi and her party.
The military force has not quelled
the popular uprising. International efforts to pressure the military, known as
the Tatmadaw, into reversing course have also come up short.
“The demonstrations have not yet —
and may never — reached critical mass, whereby there are enough people taking
up the cause to make the movement self-sustaining,” said Lee Morgenbesser, a
senior lecturer who studies authoritarian regimes at Griffith University in
Australia.
“This means the coup will only be
reversed by a split within the Tatmadaw,” he added, “which comparatively has
been one of the most cohesive and durable militaries anywhere in the autocratic
world.”
[Myanmar
is descending into chaos. A Yangon neighborhood is in the eye of the storm.]
Myanmar’s military — on full
display at Saturday’s Armed Forces Day parade in which hundreds of soldiers
marched in formation across a vast ground and fighter jets streaked overhead —
attempts to portray itself as an illustrious fighting force, the only group
capable of holding a fractious nation together.
Military leaders are deeply
entrenched in the country’s politics and economy, controlling a quarter of
parliament seats even before the coup despite a quasi-democratic experiment
that put Suu Kyi and her National League for Democracy in charge of the civilian
government.
The military is also mired by
decades of corruption and rampant human rights abuses, including torture, arson
and rape. Most seriously, it faces charges
of genocide over a 2017 operation against Rohingya Muslims.
Two large conglomerates controlled
by the military were sanctioned
by the United States and Britain on Thursday.
Yet in the country, the military
operates with near complete impunity. The highest-ranking officials have
amassed fortunes and live in sprawling compounds in Yangon, the commercial
capital. Their family members openly flaunt their wealth on social media.
Despite their proclamations about
foreign forces attempting to split and conquer Myanmar, many send their
children abroad for education and travel to Singapore for medical treatment
when needed.
Life for rank-and-file officers is
far different. Soldiers are sent on long deployments. Even when they return
from the front lines, living conditions are difficult.
May said that while her husband was
deployed in northeastern Myanmar in recent years, she lived in a military
compound that had no electricity, Internet or running water.
“Even in the modern world, the
military still cannot meet even the basic needs for its personnel,” she said.
[In
Myanmar coup, Suu Kyi’s ouster heralds a return to military rule]
Senior officers have “no sympathy”
for those under their command, according to May.
She recounted an incident in which
soldiers came home from a long tour of duty but were forced by commanding
officers to clean their compound despite injuries among the group. She said she
watched as soldiers with sores on their feet hobbled around to finish the task.
“They could hardly walk,” she said.
Life for military wives mirrors in
many ways that of their husbands. Wives of lower-ranking soldiers are put to
work doing chores by those of senior officers, who dictate even the smallest
details of their lives, such as clothing choices.
“Some of the people are
bootlickers,” May said. “They are only concerned about their husbands getting a
higher rank. Others are not as interested in that, instead, they just do what
they think is right.”
Sometimes, May said, wives of
lower-ranking officers pay bribes to the wives of their commanders, hoping
their husbands’ units will be recalled from the front lines earlier.
Many wives also run small
businesses off base to supplement their husbands’ paltry incomes, just a few
hundred dollars a month.
The military championed this
approach in the late 1990s and early 2000s to create a level of self-reliance
as it raced to expand despite the country’s economy being in ruins, according
to Gerard McCarthy, a postdoctoral fellow at the National University of
Singapore who has studied the military’s business interests.
While this has brought some
integration, the armed forces remain quite insular, with existing parallel
services, from banks to hospitals, available to members of the armed forces.
Social circles remain tight, with military families often intermarrying.
After the 2015 elections, May said,
she and others were told by a general that the military was keeping tabs on
voting, instilling a sense of fear and paranoia among those supporting Suu Kyi
and her party.
“The propaganda in the military is
very successful since they are isolated and cut off from the outside world,”
May said. “They just think the military is right and say this coup will simply
end after one year.”
Recently, the anti-coup movement
has launched an online “social
punishment” campaign to denounce family members of the military and
junta, particularly ones that reside abroad in democratic countries.
“They don’t care about anyone apart
from their family,” Maung Saungkha, a poet and free speech activist, said of
the efforts. “So the family is an Achilles heel for them.”
May, too, said she supports these
activities. The “revolution,” she said, had brought new scrutiny of and anger
toward the military.
“The whole institution itself needs
to change,” she said.
Kyaw Ye Lynn in Yangon contributed
to this report.
