Episode #62: A History of Violence
Lynn wants to know if anyone can suggest something that hasn’t already been tried.
After an election which all independent observers confirmed as free and fair, the military, under the false pretext of voter fraud, launched their coup. They arrested, tortured, and even killed elected members of parliament. Then, after weeks of strictly nonviolent protests and open dialog with police, soldiers began assassinating bystanders with shots to the head. And after months of pleading for any kind of support from the international community, there continues to be little beyond “grave concerns.”
In contrast to many other protesters who are young, and whose political consciousness was raised only after the coup, Lynn’s own professional and personal background in seeking peaceful solutions to his country’s problems goes back much further. Before the coup, he worked directly on the peace process for years, attempting to bring different stakeholders to the table.
But following the attempted military coup and the aggressive crackdown, everything changed for him. As Lynn says, “A lot of us decided that the same manner of language must be used to make [the military] understand, because the only language that they were using was violence.” Reaching this sad conclusion, Lynn decided to join a training camp hosted by one of the armed ethnic groups, where for the first time in his life he learned such skills as handling firearms and explosives.
Lynn estimates that hundreds of thousands of Burmese have secretly received such training. Although mostly attended by younger, Generation-Z activists, he saw his share of older people as well, including one 65-year old man. “They want to contribute in building a military-free, tyranny-free federal democratic Myanmar, with the principle of equality and equity for ethnic minorities, and religious minorities as well,” Lynn explains.
Armed with their new skills, many returned back to the cities and tried to join up with the People’s Defense Force (PDF) or Special Task Force (STF). However, they were unable to do so, partly due to a general sense of distrust within the opposition movement due to leaked information and the prevalence of spies, and continuing disagreement about what role, if any, violence should play in the movement. This left those newly-trained citizens with basically just one option to use their new skills: forming their own regional groups to begin operations. Although no one knows the exact numbers, Lynn estimates there are now over 10,000 such groups throughout the country, which are known as the UGs (“မြေအောက်တော်လှန်ရေးအင်အားစုများ” in Burmese, often translated as “Underground Revolutionary Forces). Lynn is now the leader of one such prominent group, “targeted at ungovernability, so that the SAC [State Administration Council] has no control of the country, and demoralizing SAC forces.”
Abandoning his lifelong pacifist values was no easy task for Lynn, and he still struggles with his new role. Significantly, he sees this violent extension of the resistance movement not as the main or most vital means of overthrowing the regime, but as one important activity happening alongside, and often in cooperation, with many others. He cites examples of these different elements of the opposition, such as the Civil Disobedience Movement (CDM), depriving the Tatmadaw of their financial resources, gaining support of the international community, etc. Lynn notes that many of these UGs are careful to follow the Code of Conduct established by the National Unity Government (NUG), and that he personally sees the “violent option” as a temporary tool only to be used while securing freedom, to be relinquished as soon as possible. However, he also openly recognizes the danger that institutionalizing violence in any form might become a barrier to building the free and progressive society he still dreams of after the Tatmadaw is destroyed. “We are going to face a lot of problems,” he admits. “Once this military dictatorship is over, I believe we will have to build the country from the scratch.”
Lynn is pained that a handful of journalists and scholars living outside of Myanmar are openly denouncing the UG network and rejecting outright any use of violence by a non-state actor as problematic. As Lynn’s personal life and professional career have demonstrated, his life has been shaped around nonviolent ideals; he openly states how much he would rather find peaceful solutions to the current problems, and how hard he has tried to seek them. Yet he doubts that there is any non-violent suggestion left that hasn’t already been tried, and wonders if those launching this criticism from their places of freedom and safety may not entirely be in touch with the reality of the terror currently being waged against the Burmese people. Now in his 40s, Lynn was in the streets during the last two protests of 1988 and 2007, and he doesn’t want his country to slip once again into the dark ages.
The role of violence within the resistance has been one of the most important recent developments in the opposition, but given the shadowy nature of the activists and groups beginning to implement such operations, mainstream news organizations and foreign governments have struggled to understand what is happening. This is our first episode exploring this issue in the depth that it deserves.