Episode #257: Through Hell And High Water
This is a story about how the Burmese are willing to pass through hell and high water in order to evict the military from their seat of power, and achieve their democracy.
Lorcan Lovett, a seasoned journalist, has spent significant time covering Myanmar. Starting his career in South Wales, he later moved to Vietnam before settling in Myanmar in 2017. “Actually, [my arrival] was [just before the day that] U Ko Ni was assassinated outside Yangon airport when he was cradling his grandson,” he says, referencing the shocking murder of a close advisor of Aung San Suu Kyi. “That happened on the 29th of January, which was my birthday. And I happened to move to Myanmar a few days after that.” This marked the beginning of his deep dive into Burmese politics and society.
Lorcan began working as a reporter with The Irrawaddy; his early days in Myanmar were marked by a sense of potential in the new transitional period. “There was a real dynamic energy, and things were starting for the first time,” he recalls. He traveled extensively throughout the country, covering a wide variety of stories across Myanmar's multifaceted cultural landscape, from exploring the country’s budding new surf scene to delving into the ethnic diversity of Mogok and Shan State. Through his reporting, Lorcan found Myanmar to be a rich tapestry of stories waiting to be told—and for the most part, at that time, many now could be. His career flourished.
Yet it was not always a smooth professional ride for Lorcan as a foreign journalist in Myanmar. This was certainly the case when covering sensitive topics like the Rohingya crisis. “It was a very difficult topic to discuss between foreigners and Myanmar people. Not all Myanmar and also not all foreigners, obviously, there's always going to be a mix of opinions on both sides. But in the media realm, there were some tensions in our newsroom at the time (2017), and probably in others, about how to report what was going on in Rakhine,” he says. On the flip side of being a foreign journalist, he also recalls that interacting with foreigners from Western countries was challenging, too, due to their differing opinions on the role of the media in a democracy, especially with regards to topics like minority persecution. While they expected no-holds-barred journalism on any topic, their Burmese counterparts, who had long endured life under an oppressive regime, were less open when writing about sensitive topics.
In response to the need for more nuanced media representation, Lorcan started a website called Myanmar Mix. “I designed it as a platform for young Burmese writers, photographers, and even cartoonists, to give them more of a voice,” he says. The platform balanced serious issues with lighter, culturally engaging content, capturing the essence of life in Myanmar during that time. Myanmar Mix grew to be quite successful, especially in a media landscape which was stifled by government regulations and a culture of avoiding controversy.
The military coup on February 1, 2021, marked a significant turning point for Myanmar and for Lorcan's work. “I got a text message quite early in the morning on the day of the coup to say that [the junta] had seized power,” he says. “Within a few days, it became clear that any plans that I had, and everybody else had as well, were totally transformed.” The subsequent military crackdown on peaceful protesters dramatically changed the atmosphere from one of cautious optimism to one of fear and resistance. Lorcan continued to cover the unfolding events, witnessing the transformation of young protesters into armed fighters who formed the People's Defence Force (PDF).
He recalls that the early days of the protests were a mix of nostalgia and foreboding. “It was a weirdly fun time, with people holding meme signs, and there were a lot of jokes and banter against Min Aung Hlaing,” he recalls. “The bodybuilders would do their own march, but there was [also] definitely this undercurrent of a foreboding sense of doom and darkness, especially among the older Myanmar generation who knew what was coming down the line.”
Lorcan, true to his journalist roots, stayed in the country to document the unfolding crisis, but he was not naïve about the inherent risks. He describes covering protests and initially staying away from the center of the action, influenced by his knowledge of past events like the Saffron Revolution and the 88 Uprising, and the history of military violence following such nonviolent gatherings. “I'd find an empty building, and I'd go into the sixth floor,” he says. “Then I would just look to see what was happening, right? Because I didn't want to be like the person at the front who was shot.” Then as he attended more rallies, he grew more confident in mingling with the protestors.
Lorcan recalls witnessing a particularly pivotal moment during that first week of protests. He had heard rumors about a massive march heading towards Sule Pagoda. To verify the reports, he rode his bicycle to the location and witnessed tens of thousands of people marching downtown. “I was like, ‘Oh, my God, what is going to happen now?! Are these people going to get mowed down by the soldiers? How can I tell people about this when there's no internet?’” Unable to make phone calls to local contacts, he finally reached a friend whose girlfriend worked at an embassy with internet access. He described the scene over the phone, and his friend relayed the information to his girlfriend, who in turn relayed it to The Guardian. “We were doing a live blog of it through that. Like saying, ‘Hey, this is it! People aren't accepting the coup.’ This is the first realization of this huge protest. And from here, there's no going back.”
Soon, however, the military began to attack protests with live ammunition, killing many, which quickly put a damper on large gatherings. “I would go out and suddenly, instead of being tens of thousands, it was down to a few dozen protesters who would quickly run away.” He describes the military's heavy-handed repression, which was meant to scare parents who were veterans of previous protest and revolution movements, so out of fear, they would prevent their children from joining in.
Lorcan witnessed all manner of violence in the early months of the coup, and much of it stays with him today. “Around downtown, we saw some people getting caught by the police, and getting bloodied and beaten up and then taken away. We saw the stun grenades and they were shooting towards a small group [I was part of]. They would shoot towards us, then we'd all run in different directions.”
Eventually, though, Lorcan saw the people’s resolve grow firmer; they were starting to stand their ground, even in the face of military violence. “I sensed that the initial reaction, naturally, was to panic and run. Then quickly after that, there was a sense of defiance and resilience. People started to make shields and helmets, they got slingshots out, and they even filled up packets of chilli sauce! They started to make improvised tracks on the roads, digging in nails to stop vehicles. It was very quick, like, ‘OK, let's do some active defense here!’ The streets were blocked. The paving stones were ripped up, the rubbish bins were pushed into the middle of the streets. On my own street, there was a kind of blockade on either side, and community-watch groups used to get together and then patrol the areas because there was so much confusion at the time."
In the midst of the unfolding chaos, Lorcan truly saw how history repeats itself. “Funnily enough, during that time, I was reading ‘Outrage’ by Bertil Lintner, about the ‘88 Uprising, and it was so uncanny to see his description of the aftermath of those protests, and the military's response and what was happening in real time. I could read a few pages ahead, and no exaggeration, like that thing would happen!”
As the situation in Myanmar worsened, weeks into the violence, soldiers began marching through the streets at night. People would turn off their lights to avoid detection as the soldiers shone flashlights into rooms. During these raids, doors were broken down, and journalists, NGO staff, and party officials started to go missing or were taken away. Meanwhile, the clanking of pots and pans continued as a form of protest. “This huge metal clattering orchestra erupted everywhere!” Lorcan exclaims. “You think, ‘How can the military possibly suppress the spirit of the people here?!’ It felt so powerful, so enormous!”
But the dangers eventually got too close for comfort, and Lorcan decided to leave Myanmar a few months after the coup, when soldiers were smashing down doors and harassing his own neighborhood at night. While some local journalists chose to stay, showing great bravery, most foreign journalists, including Lorcan and his colleagues, felt it was prudent to depart. He flew to Bangkok on the 8th of April, 2021. As fate would have it, one of his colleagues did not make it out in time. “Our good friend, Danny Fenster, we [told him], ‘Hey, we should all leave now.’ And he's like, ‘Well, you know, I'm low profile. I'll stay for a little bit and then I'll go.’ But he was arrested at the airport a few weeks later.”
Despite the physical distance, Lorcan's commitment to reporting on the situation in Myanmar remained strong. He continued to follow and document the resistance, providing valuable insights into the evolving conflict. Lorcan points out that while international attention was largely focused on Yangon, the more compelling story in the first year was actually emerging in the ethnic areas, where insurgents were training demonstrators who had fled the regime's violence but were determined to continue their resistance. “Because I was following it every day, I started to sense and feel more confident that the resistance forces were actually liberating some areas,” he notes. His analysis was tracking with much of the optimistic reporting from late 2021 onwards (readers are invited to check out our related, past episodes with Matthew Arnold, Anthony Davis, Saw Htee Char, and Zach Abuza), and Lorcan wanted to go a step further in his own reporting. “If there's a liberated area, there's no reason not to go there, because that's where you see actually what's happening,” he remembers thinking to himself. “Sometimes you can be all talk about, like, ‘Oh, yeah, the resistance is doing a great job and everything's liberated.’ And I say, ‘Well, why didn't you go there then? If it's that great, you should go and check it out.’”
So Lorcan decided to cross back over the border in September, 2022 for The Telegraph. He returned in early 2023, this time travelling deeper into Kayah and southern Shan states for The The Guardian. “The first time after the coup of going into a liberated area, it was nerve-wracking, because we didn't know what to expect, or whether we would have trouble at the border, or what the realities were in terms of ambushes or airstrikes,” he says. “There's always an unpredictable element of what can happen, and you want to get away from the border as soon as you can.” Once inside Myanmar, they were confronted by a shocking sight: “There were about four or five thousand displaced people who we'd met, and they'd just done this huge walk from around the Hpruso/Loikaw/Demoso [area] towards Thailand. They were families, elderly people, disabled people, who had been walking for 10 days, sometimes longer, and they were exhausted. They had barely any belongings, and were trying to build huts in this IDP camp.” As Lorcan ventured deeper into the country, he witnessed the harrowing scene of large numbers of displaced people. Many were seen walking through the jungle at night, carrying their babies and stumbling over tree roots, lacking sufficient food and shelter, exposed to the harsh elements, and struggling just to find safety. Lorcan made successively deeper treks into Myanmar over the next number of months, and he recalls how, “it started to sink in what we were seeing in front of us, which was indeed, a lot of territory that had been liberated from the regime.”
Liberated by whom though? Many groups may be united to fight the military, but they remain independent , which was literally visible in some of the territories freed from military control. Lorcan provides one telling anecdote from a visit to a village that illustrates how varied and complex those fighting forces could be. “There was the Kawthoolei Army, the KLA, and there was PLA, the communist groups. There's PDF, and there's a local militia. Then there's always that lingering threat of the military in the towns.” Yet despite the resistance groups’ autonomy, Lorcan found a high degree of cooperation and mutual respect between them, He also points to a surprising yet revealing situation: In a given township, there can be upwards of four thousand resistance fighters going against just a hundred or so military soldiers! Given the disparity in numbers, a coordinated resistance could easily overpower the soldiers and fully liberate the township… but they don’t. Instead, he explains, the remaining soldiers are used as a cover. As a Kawthoolei army commander pointed out to him, the full liberation of a town would draw immediate retaliatory air strikes, and a full scale evacuation of civilians would then have to be arranged. So small pockets of military are intentionally kept within townships as a sort of hostage. What is more, they are sometimes granted permission by the resistance forces to go to the market unmolested, in the hope that this goodwill might protect the civilians from the military’s more horrific reprisals.
Yet there is another reason, too, why outposts are not completely overrun, even when the manpower is there. “[The resistance] doesn’t overrun [the military] because they know that there'll be a vacuum of power as soon as they've gone,” he explains. “When those soldiers have gone, there'll be a higher likelihood of the resistance forces fighting against each other for control of different roads or different resources.” Although Lorcan stresses that this is by no means a widespread situation, it is a reality that has occurred in numerous townships. In general, he finds that fighters from different groups largely see eye-to-eye; indeed, they come from the same village in many cases, and even when they don’t, there is a shared perspective focused on the broader goals of the revolution. But in some areas, and between some larger groups, relations may be more tense. Lorcan notes that many experienced commanders on the ground recognize that hasty actions can lead to power vacuums and internal conflicts within the resistance. When the military leaves, there's the risk that resistance forces might end up fighting each other for control over resources and strategic positions.
“The fact that some military bases continue to exist, although the resistance could probably capture them in some areas, is not testament to the military keeping the country together at all,” Lorcan explains, refuting an apologist narrative that as bad as the regime is, they are still the one strong man that can hold the country together. “They [the military] are the ones who have caused all of this carnage and people on the ground understand that more than any of us do!”
In some cases, however, the resistance has decided to fully liberate a region from military control, and Lorcan was especially keen to visit them. “Is this going to look like a kind of crazy conflict zone with people running around and skeletons of buildings and the whistling of artillery?” he asked himself beforehand. But when he visited such a town in southern Myanmar, he found something quite different: “a set of riverside villages, palm-flanked rivers, silhouetted mountains, the smell of dried fish and cheroots. And you think, ‘Well, where’s the conflict around here?!’”
Appearances notwithstanding, the conflict is ongoing and the impacts of the protracted fighting can be seen in every town and village if one cares to look. “You just need to scratch the surface slightly,” Lorcan explains. He relays the types of conversations he had with villagers: “‘[Why is] there an empty house there?’ ‘Oh, a dalan, a military informer, used to live in that house. But then they escaped.’ Or, ‘Why is the hospital empty?’ ‘Because the military would bomb it if there were people in the hospital.’ ‘Who's in the police station?’ ‘Oh, the PDF are living in that police station now.’ ‘Is this a fire station?’ ‘Oh, no, it's a prison now for drug abusers and dalan,’ and whoever.”
It wasn’t just places that caught the attention of such a keen observer as Lorcan. He shares his observations of a fascinating array of individuals, of varied ages, backgrounds, and personalities, all brought together, for better or worse, by the coup. “Colorful characters,” he calls them. But despite their camaraderie and resilience, the sheer brutal realities of young civilians stepping up to fight a war machine cut through at every turn. “There are people who are deeply traumatized, with tics, and are unable, understandably, to process their experiences, who have had their limbs blown off or have lost friends,” he says. “The local guy who I was with was always cracking jokes. But a lot of those guys aren't really able to get the jokes, because their life has become so serious, so much about life-or-death in those areas. They would point out an abandoned house where they had to sleep for five days, or they would reminisce, like, ‘When we had no weapons, that's where we hid for three days behind that tree.’ For them, the landmarks around them, they all tell this crazy story.”
Lorcan also goes into the complexities of trying to report on the conflict. Considering the regime’s well-known cruelty, there was never any doubt in his mind as to who the “good guys” and “bad guys” were. Nonetheless, he discriminates between being understanding and empathetic on the one hand, and actively partisan on the other. “Journalists aren’t resistance fighters; you shouldn’t be a cheerleader for the resistance,” he asserts. Instead, Lorcan emphasizes that accurately reporting the reality on the ground is enough.
And this is a story Lorcan Lovett feels compelled to share, and to keep sharing. As a journalist, he feels that his mission is to report the realities on the ground to a world that has largely lost interest in Myanmar. In doing so, he underscores the importance of international attention and support for Myanmar's quest for democracy. He believes that sustained global awareness and pressure are crucial for the success of the resistance and the establishment of a democratic government. “The resistance overall is ready. They are on a journey of figuring out what the future looks like, from village to township to state or region to a country as a whole.”