Episode #168: A Candle in the Darkness
“I couldn't just stand by and watch,” says Shade (a pseudonym), a Burmese who lives in Australia, about witnessing the military coup from afar. “So I began to be involved in various activities, and then some of my closest allies were like, ‘Hey, we're doing this medical network thing back in the Sagaing region. Do you want to help?’”
This is the story of Shade’s journey into activism, a microcosm of how thousands of Burmese and foreign allies have involved themselves in ways they could scarcely have imagined before 2021. “[The coup] did awaken me that this is the time to get involved! Previously, I was just focused on my career, I was doing my own thing. But once the coup happened, now this is the time for me to get things going.” His story also shines a light on the many members of the Burmese diaspora who have been using their freedom and safety to do whatever they can for those struggling back in Myanmar. “It's my homeland, that's where I grew up. I want to see it peaceful and free from the shadow of tyranny and oppression. I want to see it prosper. I want to see it become a proper, peaceful place for all ethnicities… I always ask myself, ‘What more can I do?’ I think that's the question that I keep asking myself.” Shade finds it particularly galling that the despotic military acts with near total impunity while the international community basically stands by and watches. “It's very frustrating that the issue of Myanmar has been swept to the sidelines these days,” he says, but this dynamic lends a sense of urgency to his work.
Being in his 30s, Shade comes from a generation born after the 1988 uprising, and only has childhood memories of the violence that took place in the 2007 Saffron Revolution (an event described in detail in a recent podcast by the monastic leader U Gambira). In other words, while his generation is more than familiar with the history of the military’s oppressive regime, this is the first time that they find themselves actively involved in resisting them. “Now they're back in, back on the throne,” he says about the military taking over again in 2021. “They're doing this! They're going to plunge the country into darkness. That's really what I saw back on February 1st, and I was really devastated. We're going back to when I was young. This is going to be an age of fear.” Immediately following the coup, Shade watched from afar with cautious optimism as massive nonviolent protests took the streets, and suddenly he thought they might have a chance. “This is a time to act! This is a time that we have to act together, and we have to stand together. We have to play our parts and do whatever we can. It may be small. It could be very small. But just doing anything that you can to stand up against a coup, I think that's the most important thing.”
With this motivation animating him, Shade looked at how to best dedicate his energies. He initially supported various fundraising and advocacy efforts in Australia, but soon became particularly concerned about the ongoing violence and destitution in the Sagaing region, an area that has always known hardships even in the best of times. He describes how the military came to enact its infamous Four Cuts strategy, which for decades had been reserved for the country’s ethnic regions, but is now being applied in the Dry Zone. And yet, despite the near constant assaults, Shade notes how people there continue to bravely resist military rule, which in turn has provoked the military into responding with even more ferocity to beat them into submission. Given the terror inflicted on civilians there, Shade realized that providing emergency medical care was the most critical thing he could do to help. “They're living in constant fear of when the military is going to come back or when they're going to attack them aerially with aerial bombs,” he notes. “This is a textbook example of Burmese military campaigns and Burmese military tactics, of one-on-one terror tactics to target civilian populations.”
But he had no experience or knowledge in this field, let alone the logistics of providing care in a hot conflict zone, so he immersed himself in learning all he could to get his mission up and running as soon as possible. “I had to learn the ropes, and it was a pretty steep learning process,” he admits. “But I got there. I guess I kind of rolled with it. The Sagaing region is a really hot zone right now. A lot of conflict is happening. There's a lot of military campaigns and villages being burned down. Even some of my relatives back there had to run flee their homes.”
He and his friends created the organization Healing Hands to help meet the region’s pressing medical needs. Because it wasn’t feasible to try and bring in professional doctors or nurses to those hard-hit rural areas, they reflected on what practical action could have the most beneficial effect. First considering the wide distribution of medicine, they realized that would not be sustainable, and they eventually landed on the idea of administering local training courses that would cover basic medical care and first aid—to date, 150 people have graduated their program. They also worked to establish and stock basic medical stations throughout the region that are overseen by these graduates.
“We could at least provide some sort of relief to the pressures that these regions are having by delivering these courses to the local population,” he notes. (It should be noted that Insight Myanmar’s umbrella organization, Better Burma, has allocated funds to Healing Hands’ mission. We encourage listeners interested in supporting their efforts to consider a contribution of any amount). With the medical mission now successfully underway, Helping Hands is now turning its attention to helping meet Sagaing’s pressing educational needs.
Although medical volunteers are by definition working just to help ease pain, injury and suffering, they have not been spared the military’s cruelty. Quite the opposite, in fact; it was largely doctors, nurses, and dentists who kicked off the Civil Disobedience Movement shortly after the coup, and so the military has gone out of their way to target them. Because of this, Shade and his team must take extraordinary precautions, as it literally becomes a matter of life and death for those on the ground administering care.
“It's really sad to think that people who are saving lives are also being endangered by the military!” he notes. “I know that in some places, they won't even allow you to take paracetamol, because that relieves pain. So they would confiscate paracetamol if they see it, and that's horrifying, really! There's a lot of risk in transporting [other] medicine as well. They won't just confiscate the medical supplies, they will also harm those people who were sending or receiving it! So there's also risks in that. And these rural clinics that we've opened are also in danger of being destroyed, and people who are operating them are being harmed if they practice openly. So we have to do it a bit like an underground sort of movement.”
Making a bad situation worse, the military has been demanding that any humanitarian aid coming into the country be administered through them directly, and they will only support local organizations officially registered with them. On the one hand, this drives organizations like Shade’s underground, while on the other, the military rewards those who remain loyal, by disbursing some of these international funds to them. This situation has caused much debate among large aid organizations. For example, the United Nations prefers to identify “official” channels to work through, which in this way effectively puts them arm-in-arm with the military, at the same time further disadvantaging local groups like Healing Hands. Shade has very strong opinions about this.
“With 100% confidence, I can definitely say that if these international actors try to deliver aid to the military, it's definitely not going to get to where it's needed!” Shade exclaims. “That's a reality, and they have to face it. That's not something that they can dance around. If they try to deliver medical aid through the military or its organs, it’s not going to arrive in the hands of the people. If they try to give aid money via the military, they're going to use it to buy weapons! That's the reality. That's what they have to face if they try if they're trying to deliver any sort of aid to the military, and if think that's going to be effective, they're deluded!”
He advocates that local organizations with a proven track record of on-the-ground success be supported, criticizing the cookie-cutter approach to problem-solving that some in the international community are superimposing onto Myanmar’s situation. “We have to see clearly that the military is the problem!” he says. “It is the root of all evil in Burma, really. So can you have the root of all problems as part of the solution? No, you can't, you have to remove the problem to solve this. You can't have the problem as part of the solution! The international community needs to see that you cannot engage or negotiate the military junta. [They] need to understand that negotiating or talking to the junta is not going to work!
In the end, Shade sees his organization’s small actions, along with those of many others around the world, as a critical force that is checking military aggression. “This a vast amount of darkness!” he acknowledges. “If you can just be a candle in the darkness, and then if we all come together, if we've all become those little pieces of the light, then soon this evil and this oppression will finally be dispelled from Myanmar. No matter how small your act of resisting this tyranny is, it matters.”