An Outsized Influence (Emergency Edition)
“Thailand, Singapore, these countries are very close to us, these are our neighboring countries, but they don't know Myanmar! So we need to we have to try to express our voice and our feeling about our condition to the world.”
These are the words of a Burmese youth who goes by the Twitter moniker of Little Activist. As someone who had once hardly paid any attention to political matters in his country, he was propelled into action after the 2021 military coup. He dropped out of university, where he was in the process of earning an engineering degree, because he refused to accept any degree offered by what he now saw as an illegal and unjust authority. “For people like me, we will never rejoin a university controlled by Myanmar’s military terrorists!” he exclaims. Instead, he has come to play a leading role in disseminating information about the latest developments in Myanmar, amassing nearly 15,000 Twitter followers. He routinely translates news into English so that outsiders can better understand his country’s horrifying conflict. This is no easy task given that he has been operating entirely in Myanmar, and so is faced with frequent internet outages and safety concerns that put him squarely in the regime’s crosshairs.
More recently, like so many other Burmese, he has grown alarmed and concerned about the junta’s new conscription laws. “With the cover of the law, they [demand] a mandatory military service to everyone in Myanmar!” He attributes this latest development to the heavy losses they have incurred following Operation 1027, and Little Activist wants the world to know that their resistance will never falter. “It is very hard to express our feeling that we will never fall! We never give up, and we'll try every possible way to extract our freedom.”
But the threat to safety has never been worse. The regime is demanding updated ID cards for all citizens that now carry GPS tracking, while new passport applications are being denied. These recent conscription laws are adding yet another level of injustice to the horrifying situation, with soldiers engaging in extortion, threatening families with abduction and demanding increasingly steep bribes for their children’s freedom from what could amount to serving as human shields or minesweepers in active conflict zones. Little Activist says that Burmese youth are now essentially “hostages” of the regime. As a result, there have been lines stretching in front of various embassies in Yangon made up of thousands of people who have been queuing for hours, if not days, hoping for some chance to escape the draft by leaving the country. Things are no better on the Thai side of the border; police and authorities there exploit and harass Burmese seeking safety. “The top military tiers, they talk to each other. They don't look on the citizens and the people of their country. They don't care about us.”
In the meantime, things in Myanmar are getting far more dire with skyrocketing inflation rates (a topic economist Sean Turnell addressed in a recent episode. Little Activist notes that a bowl of mohinga noodles that would have cost 500 kyat before the coup, can now go for more than 3,000 kyat today, while incomes have not increased. “How can they survive in this current situation?” he asks rhetorically of his fellow Burmese. Similarly, the cost of fuel has also spiked, and the electrical grid is all but broken (which Guillaume de Langre spoke to in a past interview), as some days afford only several hours of power. Especially concerning is the heightened cost for internet access and data plans on phones, as this is the primary mechanism for getting news out about the situation in Myanmar, and he adds that sometimes online access gets cut entirely from whole regions. And similar to comment made by Thinzar Shunlei Yi, who recently spoke about how most soldiers lead a life almost entirely separated from the common people of the country, Little Activist points out the significant lack of education that those in the military have, which diverges them further away from civilian life. “They have no empathy and they don't feel sorry for their crimes! They live like kings, that they are privileged to do anything they want.”
But it’s not just issues of general safety that have been deteriorating. “Because of the military junta, the economy, the education and healthcare sectors, everything has fallen bad. But there are some rich men in town,” he adds. “The rich men who follow the military junta are getting rich day by day in this condition, because the country has fallen and the terrorists’ followers are happy, because they can get a lot of money through the situation.”
How has it been possible for even to manage survival in such a situation? “It's like a zombie movie,” Little Activist acknowledges, “Myanmar is now like a dark room with no doors.” He openly wonders how people will respond if the electrical and food shortages become even more severe, and what it will take for people to be pushed past their breaking point. “Three years is not a joke! It is very much time, and everything is stopped, and everything is horrible.”
He also tries not to get too caught up in the hype that can develop among some activists and democratic leaders that the military is on its last legs and will fall at any moment. “I don't really care about expectations,” he says. “The only thing I can say is I will never give up and I will never stop till we win! And the same like me, there are a lot of pro-democracy Myanmar people who are trying on a daily basis for our current region.”
Finally, Little Activist is dismayed that the international community has done so little to stand up to the consistent human rights violations and mass atrocities that the regime continues to commit unabated. “We don't know how to get out of this condition,” he says in closing. “There are no doors, because no one cares. Myanmar is nothing. Myanmar is not a special country for the world. So we have no future. But as I mentioned before, we don't give up! Yeah, we don't give up and we will try everything we can do.”