Witnessing the Brutality: Reflections on Myanmar's Coup and Future.
Thun Tun is a student at Chiang Mai University. He was interviewed in November 2022.
“If you want to study in Myanmar, you need to have a strong will because nothing is easy and getting a decent education is tough.”
“I believe my story might be different than others’, and maybe I have been less affected in some ways. I was part of the protest movement at the start of the coup in Yangon, but when the crackdown started, I decided to stop. I used to work in the public health ministry before the coup and I witnessed the whole CDM on the inside while I was still working there for a period. Senior doctors mainly led it, and it felt like they influenced others to join the movement. I would like to say it was good, but what I saw was more of a dominant or oppressive system being reproduced inside the institution.
My reality is that I felt very unsafe, and I didn’t know how I could participate or contribute to the revolution. I don’t like the ‘violent’ way, and I didn’t want to live here anymore in a place where our freedom had been stolen overnight. I just wanted to get out and build up my skills to one day be able to contribute more effectively and without needing to sacrifice my life. The Myanmar military does not follow any human rights law, and we know how brutal they are, so I just didn’t feel motivated enough to go up against something like that. I did want to help, but it all felt chaotic, and as a society, we were not united enough. The military has been using divide-and-rule tactics since Myanmar’s independence, and they are still doing it today!
Right after the coup, the Buddhist majority called for ‘union and solidarity,’ but I felt that they would only do it if it were in their interest. For all these years, despite so much discrimination against minority groups, they didn’t care! Still today so many speeches are about Aung San Suu Kyi, but this is not about her anymore: it’s much bigger than that.
When it comes to my eyes opening into the political situation in Myanmar, I would say it started when I joined this school in Yangon and learned about other ethnic groups and the system in place. I felt as if I had been living in darkness all these years and had no idea of the reality. My critical thinking also got stronger.
I have experience working with the Mon Unity Party, in which there were supposed to be no leaders or hierarchy, but actually some people really dominated, which I did not agree with. The National League for Democracy (NLD) was supposed to be the democratic party, but look at what happened with the Aung San bridge in Mon State and the statue in Loikaw: the NLD’s response was so disappointing. We have never really had “free and fair elections” in Myanmar because there was never an equal and fair situation. And the NLD reproduced those hierarchical problems and conflicts. My disappointment also contributed to my reluctance to participate—I didn’t believe it was fair game, not as it is framed now.
People are losing their lives, which has shaken me. I was never at the front line, but just being behind and hearing or seeing such violence froze me. Never in my life before did I witness such brutality on innocent people. I had seen pictures, but seeing it firsthand is something else.
I had planned to go and study abroad before the coup, so I put all my effort into making that a reality. It helped me cope with what was happening and the disastrous news we would hear every day. I had a plan and a project, and I put all my energy into it. Our life changed a lot throughout the months: the banking system, the security in the streets, laws being changed overnight, and our fragile freedom was gone. I felt so frustrated about the curfew: I like go out and meet up with friends, but I had to be back by eight in the evening. We are now under the military’s timeframe: everything is up to them and they do what they want. It felt as though our minds also changed because we had to constantly adapt, following the local news and figuring out how to do things according to whatever was going on.
I eventually got a scholarship and left Myanmar. For the first few days, I was still behaving as in Myanmar: keeping curfew, reading the local news, and checking the streets seemed safe. After a while, I started to relax and fully realize that I had left Myanmar. I became more at peace.
My family is happy that I’m outside the country. I’ve always made my way and lived my own life. Education has been a priority, and I made my way through: earning enough money to pay for my studies and make my own choices. If you want to study in Myanmar, you need to have a strong will because nothing is easy and getting a decent education is tough. Many young people don’t want to pursue their education, they just want to earn money quickly and make a living. I am worried about my little brother because it is easy to get involved in drugs in Mon State, and he is not interested in further studies. There’s so little employment at the moment in Myanmar as well, so young people are losing their way.
I don’t have a sense of belonging to any community. I feel like a free soul and I walk my own path. I have gained this attitude throughout the years and through my life experience. Right now, I can’t predict much about what will happen to our country. How can we survive if we have to live under military rule? I am trying to look at it pragmatically: what can we do? What is in our power at the ground level? We’ve lived under many dictatorships and we’ve managed to cope. It’s the structural violence that is reproduced in all systems in Myanmar that we need to change and break. To me, this is the first issue before even cracking the military system, but most people believe the opposite.
Later, I would like to work as a researcher for communities in Myanmar and help create a new country with new and fairer systems. The communities have many answers to the ground problems, and we need their voices to be heard. For example, I don’t know if we should live separately or together, under the same system—only the people can answer that. So, I’ll educate myself and contribute what I can.”
These stories are collected by the Real Stories Not Tales team. Real Stories Not Tales is a dedicated team in and out of Myanmar that aims to bring awareness to the reality of people's lives since the Myanmar military staged a coup on February 1st, 2021. Stories are collected through interviews with each protagonist by the team, either in Burmese or in English. Each character is drawn by a professional illustrator. RSNT is an anonymous name that is used by the group to guarantee security to all parties involved in the collection of the stories.
