Episode #341: The Unfriendly Skies
In recent exhibitions in Thailand, the artists’ resistance group A New Burma highlights the military’s systematic air strikes against civilians that show the regime’s weakness as well as its cruelty: Fear as a weapon against a defiant population.
The sound of airplanes signals terror in towns and villages across Myanmar, as the military relentlessly targets schools, hospitals, churches, and pagodas at the heart of community life.
That horrific, daily reality is the inspiration of a recent exhibition in Chiang Mai, where organizers shared about the effects of air strikes on civilians and their project to raise awareness and solidarity. Relating their stories through photography, paintings, documentary, performance, and other artworks, the campaign “When We See the Planes” highlights violations of international law, serves as a record for transitional justice, and remembers those who have lost their lives.
In most countries, images of airplanes conjure happy, almost magical, thoughts of travel. Now, for so many people in Myanmar, they are an omnipresent source of fear. “When we look at a plane, we think about going abroad, studying, vacations or travel, something very positive, very bright and very hopeful,” says May Thu. “But after the coup, after the suffering and the air strikes, for our people, the civilians, the message and the narrative has been changing. Right now, in rural parts in crisis in Myanmar, if you ask a little child, how do you feel when you see a plane, the whole narrative is totally upside down. We want to showcase that.”
That inspiration is behind their exhibitions. A New Burma co-founder Hnin, who has previously spoken to Insight Myanmar in an interview titled Shaken, Not Silenced, relates how these events are part of the organization’s diverse and ongoing efforts, including support for strike committees inside the country and other campaigns.
Their work is bound together by tragic threads. Another exhibition focused on the education sector in Myanmar, but also exposed the devastating impacts of air strikes, such as the story of a CDM teacher who had lost his wife and children in attacks on an IDP camp. “I’m talking to humanitarian groups that are digging [shelters] in the ground to create safe environments to teach where the kids can learn,” Hnin says. “How this is not being internationally talked about is crazy, like not talking about air strikes in Myanmar is becoming so normal.”
May Thu shares the story of an aerial attack hitting a primary school when children were studying in class, killing many of them, and the impacts on survivors. “A lot of kids died during the event,” she says. “I saw a video after of seven-, eight-, nine-year-old kids writing down wishes for their deceased friends. For them, if you look at their faces, they know what happened, and at the same time, they don’t! They’ve grown up in this kind of crisis, like air strikes, attacks, having to hide, burning of their houses. These kinds of things are almost day-to-day in their lives. They haven’t been outside of that little world.”
At the Chiang Mai event, the works of more than 20 artists from across Myanmar and in exile were on display, backed by a team of researchers and Thai curators to compose a multimedia and performance ensemble. “In our revolution, our kind of resistance, we want to use storytelling,” May Thu says. “It is not only the spoken word, it is gesture and performance. We use sound effects so you can literally hear the kind of noises from a strike. You can feel it – we enclose the whole space so that you to feel trapped, because that is exactly what people have been feeling. We’re bringing the essence, communicating human-to-human.”
Another motivating force behind the exhibitions is the realization that the stories of people in Myanmar are too often ignored or under-covered by international media. “There are a lot of photographers on the ground covering day in and day out mostly for Burmese news, not necessarily in the foreign news,” Hnin says. “These frontline photographers are risking their lives producing such great work, but most of it does not get out. Another concept behind this exhibition was to collaborate with them.”
In the six-month gap between the first exhibition in Bangkok and the second in Chiang Mai, the number of air strikes had doubled, according to Hnin’s assessment. One of the team’s researchers agrees that air strikes increased significantly after Operation 1027, the offensive by several armed ethnic groups initiated on October 27, 2023, because the military had faced major losses and had to rely on bombing campaigns. The team estimates that aerial attacks have occurred on about 80 percent of days since the coup.
One of the worst attacks in terms of fatalities occurred at Pa Zi Gyi village in Kantbalu Township in April 2023, when at least 165 people were killed. Alex, a German artist contributing to the project, was inspired by the previous exhibition in Bangkok seeing depictions of the destruction and began thinking of the weapons used against defenseless villages and bamboo huts. “How could anybody get an idea to actually throw such a bomb onto somebody else?” he asks. “I wanted to create something that looks as close to the original as possible. I found through some connections information that the KAB 500 bomb was used on the Pa Zi Gyi attack.” He built a replica that stands as a tactile representation of the horrors of war, now meant to inspire peace.
The team’s approach depends on the venue. In Bangkok, they sought to convey the pain and loss to share with people who may not know much about what is happening in Myanmar, reaching embassies, schools, academics, and international journalists to amplify the message abroad. Since attendance in Chiang Mai is made up mostly by the Burmese diaspora, the focus was on providing a sense of hope, as well as standing in solidarity. In both venues, they balance the strictly political and free artistic expression.
In discussing the trauma experienced by people on the ground, and the secondhand trauma experienced by her and her colleagues tracking events, May Thu points out that air strikes are one aspect of a campaign of fear combined with landmines in another dimension. “We stand on the ground and we live under the sky, and the attacks are coming from both ways,” she says. “The military uses fear as a weapon. They’ve been ruling with it for ages, very successfully. During this revolution, they still think fear is the biggest threat to the civilians. But now it is not that effective! Of course, we stay human beings, we feel it, but we’ve learned how to live with it and keep fighting.”
For Hnin, greater international attention and sanctions on jet fuel is urgent to stop the strikes. “When we do this kind of work, we want to have this be empathy-driven,” Hnin says. “We want to talk about this topic, not to give knowledge, but to speak to your heart, so then you talk about it in your conversations, in your community. That’s what’s more important for us, the new way that we want to continue through empathy-driven advocacy.”