[Despite the danger, women have been at the forefront of the movement, rebuking the generals who ousted a female civilian leader.]
By Hannah Beech
Ma Kyal Sin loved taekwondo, spicy food and a good red lipstick. She adopted the English name Angel, and her father hugged her goodbye when she went out on the streets of Mandalay, in central Myanmar, to join the crowds peacefully protesting the recent seizure of power by the military.
The black T-shirt that Ms. Kyal Sin
wore to the protest on Wednesday carried a simple message: “Everything will be
OK.”
In the afternoon, Ms. Kyal Sin, 18,
was shot in the head by the security forces, who killed at least 30 people
nationwide in the
single bloodiest day since the Feb. 1 coup, according to the United
Nations.
“She is a hero for our country,”
said Ma Cho Nwe Oo, one of Ms. Kyal Sin’s close friends, who has also taken
part in the daily rallies that have electrified
hundreds of cities across Myanmar. “By participating in the revolution, our
generation of young women shows that we are no less brave than men.”
Despite the risks, women have stood
at the forefront of Myanmar’s protest movement, sending a powerful rebuke to
the generals who ousted
a female civilian leader and reimposed a patriarchal order that has
suppressed women for half a century.
By the hundreds of thousands, the
women have gathered for daily marches, representing striking unions of
teachers, garment workers and medical workers — all sectors dominated by women.
The youngest are often on the front lines, where the security forces appear to
have singled them out. Two young women were shot in the head on Wednesday and
another near the heart, three bullets ending their lives.
Earlier this week, military
television networks announced that the security forces were instructed not to
use live ammunition, and that in self-defense they would only shoot at the
lower body.
“We might lose some heroes in this
revolution,” said Ma Sandar, an assistant general secretary of the
Confederation of Trade Unions Myanmar, who has been taking part in the
protests. “Our women’s blood is red.”
The violence on Wednesday, which
brought the death toll since the coup to at least 54, reflected the
brutality of a military accustomed to killing its most innocent
people. At least three children have been gunned down over the past month, and
the first death of the military’s post-coup crackdown was a 20-year-old woman
shot in the head on Feb. 9.
The killings have appalled and
outraged rights advocates around the world.
“Myanmar’s military must stop
murdering and jailing protesters,” Michelle Bachelet, the top human rights
official at the United Nations, said Thursday. “It is utterly abhorrent that security
forces are firing live ammunition against peaceful protesters across the
country.”
In the weeks since the protests
began, groups of female medical volunteers have patrolled the streets, tending
to the wounded and dying. Women have added spine to a civil disobedience
movement that is crippling the functioning of the state. And they have flouted
gender stereotypes in a country where tradition holds that garments covering
the lower half of the bodies of the two sexes should not be washed together,
lest the female spirit act as a contaminant.
With defiant creativity, people
have strung up clotheslines of women’s sarongs, called htamein, to
protect protest zones, knowing that some men are loath to walk under them.
Others have affixed images of Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, the army chief who
orchestrated the coup, to the hanging htamein, an affront to his
virility.
“Young women are now leading the
protests because we have a maternal nature and we can’t let the next generation
be destroyed,” said Dr. Yin Yin Hnoung, a 28-year-old medical doctor who has
dodged bullets in Mandalay. “We don’t care about our lives. We care about our
future generations.”
While the military’s inhumanity
extends to many of the country’s roughly 55 million people, women have the most
to lose from the generals’ resumption of full authority, after five years of
sharing power with a civilian government led by Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. The
Tatmadaw, as the military is known, is deeply conservative, opining in
official communications about the importance of modest dress for proper ladies.
There are no women in the
Tatmadaw’s senior ranks, and its
soldiers have systematically committed gang rape against women from
ethnic minorities, according to investigations by the United Nations. In the
generals’ worldview, women are often considered weak and impure. Traditional
religious hierarchies in this predominantly Buddhist nation also place women at
the feet of men.
The prejudices of the military and
the monastery are not necessarily shared by Myanmar’s broader society. Women
are educated and integral to the economy, particularly in business,
manufacturing and the civil service. Increasingly, women have found their
political voice. In elections last November, about 20 percent of candidates for
the National League for Democracy, Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi’s party, were women.
The party won
in a landslide, trouncing the military-linked and far more male-dominated
Union Solidarity and Development Party. The Tatmadaw has dismissed the results
as fraudulent.
As the military began devolving
some power over the past decade, Myanmar experienced one of the most profound
and rapid societal changes in the world. A country that had been cut off from
the world by the generals, who first seized power in a 1962 coup, went on
Facebook and discovered memes, emojis and global conversations about gender
politics.
“Even though these are dark days
and my heart breaks with all these images of bloodshed, I’m more optimistic
because I see women on the street,” said Dr. Miemie Winn Byrd, a
Burmese-American who served as a lieutenant colonel in the United States Army
and is now a professor at the Daniel K. Inouye Asia-Pacific Center for Security
Studies in Honolulu. “In this contest, I will put money on the women. They are
unarmed, but they are the true warriors.”
That passion has ignited across the
country, despite Tatmadaw crackdowns in past decades that have killed hundreds
of people.
“Women took the frontier position
in the fight against dictatorship because we believe it is our cause,” said Ma
Ei Thinzar Maung, a 27-year-old politician and former political prisoner who,
along with another woman the same age, led the first anti-coup demonstration in
Yangon five days after the putsch.
Both Ms. Ei Thinzar Maung and her
fellow rally leader, Esther Ze Naw, protest by day and hide by night. About
1,500 people have been arrested since the coup, according to a local monitoring
group.
The pair were politicized at a
young age and spoke up for the rights of ethnic minorities at a time when most
people in Myanmar were unwilling to acknowledge the military’s ethnic cleansing
campaign against Rohingya Muslims. At least one-third of Myanmar’s population
is made up of a constellation of ethnic minorities, some of which are in armed
conflict with the military.
When they led their rally on Feb.
6, the two women marched in shirts associated with the Karen ethnic group,
whose villages have been overrun by Tatmadaw troops in recent days. Ms. Esther
Ze Naw is from another minority, the Kachin, and as a 17-year-old she spent
time in camps for the tens of thousands of civilians who were uprooted by
Tatmadaw offensives. Military jets roared overhead, raining artillery on women
and children, she recalled.
“That was the time I committed
myself to working toward abolishing the military junta,” she said. “Minorities
know what it feels like, where discrimination leads. And as a woman, we are
still considered as a second sex.”
“That must be one of the reasons
why women activists seem more committed to rights issues,” she added.
While the National League for
Democracy is led by Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi, its top ranks are dominated by men.
And like the Tatmadaw, the party’s highest echelons have tended to be reserved
for members of the country’s ethnic Bamar majority.
On the streets of Myanmar, even as
the security forces continue to fire at unarmed protesters, the makeup of the
movement has been far more diverse. There are Muslim students, Catholic nuns,
Buddhist monks, drag queens and a legion of young women.
“Gen Z are a fearless generation,”
said Honey Aung, whose younger sister, Kyawt Nandar Aung, was killed by a
bullet to the head on Wednesday in the city of Monywa. “My sister joined the
protests every day. She hated dictatorship.”
In a speech that ran in a state
propaganda publication earlier this week, General Min Aung Hlaing, the army
chief, sniffed at the impropriety of the protesters, with their “indecent
clothes contrary to Myanmar culture.” His definition is commonly considered to
include women wearing trousers.
Moments before she was shot dead,
Ms. Kyal Sin, dressed in sneakers and torn jeans, rallied her fellow peaceful
protesters.
As they staggered from the tear gas
fired by security forces on Wednesday, Ms. Kyal Sin dispensed water to cleanse
their eyes. “We are not going to run,” she yelled, in a video recorded by
another protester. “Our people’s blood should not reach the ground.”
“She is the bravest girl I have
ever seen in my life,” said Ko Lu Maw, who photographed some of the final
images of Ms. Kyal Sin, in an alert, proud pose amid a crowd of prostrate
protesters.
Under her T-shirt, Ms. Kyal Sin
wore a star-shaped pendant because her name means “pure star” in Burmese.
“She would say, ‘if you see a star,
remember, that’s me,’” said Ms. Cho Nwe Oo, her friend. “I will always remember
her proudly.”
