Title: The View of the Coup from the Camp: Myanmar’s Emergent Trans-Ethnic Solidarity

Dust continues to settle on the shocking February 1 military coup that delivered the death knell to Myanmar’s already moribund democratic transition. The world has watched transfixed as mass protests congealed in Myanmar’s urban areas, centered around the Civil Disobedience Movement (CDM), a spontaneously emergent social movement against the junta. Yet, as protesters continue banging loudly on pots and pans in the cities, a disquiet is looming for Myanmar’s ethnic minority groups, especially the 700,000 Rohingya in Bangladesh’s Cox’s Bazar refugee camp and the approximately 100,000 Karen, Tai (Shan), Kachin, and other ethnic groups encamped along the Thai-Myanmar border. 

For many of Myanmar’s non-Burman groups, life under the auspices of democratic transition never improved but rather precipitously worsened, in some cases bringing genocide, and in others intensifying dispossession and protracting civil war. Since the return to junta rule, how are Myanmar’s displaced peoples reacting to the coup, and more importantly, what hopes and fears do they harbor for the future of Myanmar? 

Certainly, there is fear that the military’s return to power, without any democratic transition or peace process to constrain it, will exacerbate ethnic minorities’ misery. Yet the collapse of the military-civilian hybrid system in Myanmar has also left a sense of opportunity, namely, a sense that the country should not restore rule by mainstream liberals who would sacrifice the needs of ethnic peoples, peasants, and workers, for the sake of Burman bourgeois supremacy and enrichment. Thus, a new horizon of trans-ethnic and pro-poor solidarity is emerging in the country, and it may hold the key to a future when power is finally claimed by all the peoples of Myanmar.

The Vexing Coup
Prior to the February 1 coup, Myanmar’s democratic transition appears to have been headed exactly where the Tatmadaw, Myanmar’s Armed Forces, desired. Military elites both continued accumulating capital by selling-off of the country’s natural resources and consolidated power over various perceived enemies—from armed ethnic groups to the persecuted Rohingya—while allowing civilian leaders such as Aung San Suu Kyi to deal with the daily challenges of governing and the international opprobrium over the Rohingya genocide. Hence the shock: why would the military want to upend this seemingly beneficial status quo? 

While the military cites election fraud as the official reason for the coup, as other struggling democracies around the globe have also recently illustrated, these claims are unsubstantiated. Instead, many see the coup as channeling the political ambitions of the military’s Commander in Chief, Min Aung Hlaing. However, given his responsibility for a vast organization of capital accumulation and violence, reducing the coup to his personal whims is difficult to prove. Burmese politics have long been reduced to palace intrigue and individual scheming. Yet even if individual ambitions are significant, the senior generals’ interests are circumscribed by other factors, including the desire for increased control of natural resources and an appearance of power in which losses to Suu Kyi, coupled with progress toward national reconciliation with ethnic groups that ultimately sidelines the military junta, are too diminishing to tolerate. 

Betrayal of Myanmar’s Ethnic Peoples
Regardless of the junta’s motives, many Burmese are understandably devastated. Despite the democratic transition’s manifest failures, people still harbored hopes that the structural conditions of diarchic rule could be overcome through democracy. With the coup, it appears that the nation’s political situation has reset to where it was a decade ago. 

Except, however, a genocide has occurred since then. In the “clearance operations” of September 2017, more than 700,000 of the mostly-Muslim Rohingya minority were driven over Myanmar’s northwest border into Bangladesh. An estimated 24,000 perished at the hands of marauding soldiers who raped with impunity as they burned hundreds of villages. When the country was taken before the International Court of Justice to face accusations of genocide, Suu Kyi shamelessly defended the very junta that has now imprisoned her again. The irony here is plain. Many Rohingya, viewing the coup from refugee camps in Bangladesh, have interpreted the event as comeuppance for a coward who sold her soul for power, which she has now lost. As a Rohingya refugee commented: 

“Aung San Suu Kyi has been detained by genocidal military she shamelessly defended. She betrayed Rohingya and the world […] I hope now she can understand the pain of being betrayed.”     

Moreover, many refugees and other ethnic minorities worry that their situation will only worsen following the coup. Saw Kwe Htoo Win, vice-chairperson of the Karen National Union, summarized this position: “whether the NLD is in power or the military takes power… [we] will continue to suffer.” Indeed, as a Tai (Shan) former refugee camp resident tells us, the coup will inevitably “bring more refugees.” A research collaborator of ours in Shan State imparts, “My worry is if the coup forces people to leave the country there is no way to flee because COVID-19 is affecting all neighbor countries too.” This fear of continued hardship and repression is particularly acute given escalating violence against civilians coupled with the recent displacement of 1,000 civilians in Karen State following hostilities with the Tatmadaw. 

But despite these fears, some ethnic minorities are using the coup as an opportunity to forge a politics of trans-ethnic solidarity. Rohingya poet Mayyu Ali has made such calls: “The people in Myanmar didn’t feel sympathy for us when we were suffering. But I feel sympathy for them.” These transethnic appeals are strategic efforts to foster solidarity across groups in a common struggle with other Burmese subjects against a shared enemy, the military. In these appeals, the Rohingya use themselves as a cautionary tale regarding the potential violence to come when Myanmar’s anti-dictatorship activists and masses face head-on a junta that detests the aesthetics of what it calls “undisciplined democracy.” In so doing, the Rohingya show Myanmar’s other peoples that they are all subject to the junta’s extra-judicial state of exception—to invoke philosopher Giorgio Agamben, everyone right now feels they are in “the camp.”

Hence, in a perverse sense, the coup may actually improve longer-term prospects for the Rohingya, or at least provide a shred of hope that did not appear to exist just days before the coup. At that time, Aung San Suu Kyi and the military walked in lockstep over the dead, Buddhist monks brayed for Rohingya blood, and the public mostly endorsed the genocide. Now, Rohingya openly self-identify as they protest on the streets of Yangon, while more and more non-Rohingya stand in solidarity with them, holding signs declaring their remorse. The circulation of inclusionary protest signs on Facebook points to the possibility of a more capacious political community being imagined in Myanmar.