An ethnic environmental lawyer taking part in protests in Yangon hopes this can be an opportunity to heal the country’s divisions and create a unified future.  

You ask if I had ambitions before the coup. So many. 

Where I come from there are conflicts between the ethnic armed group and the Bamar military (Tatmadaw), which led to many cases of human rights violations and people fleeing wars. Those who fled the fighting lost their land. I moved to Yangon to work on those cases, the network is much bigger here and you can make connections not just locally but regionally, nationally and internationally too. 

Our country still doesn’t have full democracy. We were still in a transition period, with many things needing to be fixed, like the laws that were enacted to oppress the people and are unjust and the 2008 Constitution. There is also the land law, which is a source of never-ending confusion. We’ve been working on better laws and advocating for the land rights of the indigenous peoples. There are many attempts to amend these laws at the community level as well as national level in the Parliament. 

There are many areas we’ve been working on like taking responsibility for human rights violations and environmental damage. 

But now that the military has unjustly taken power in the coup, all of that has disappeared. All the laws are now under the junta. We can no longer see our future. 

I’m just taking part in this as a human being. I fought injustice in the past. I’m still fighting it and I will continue to fight it. 

Police and soldiers are always involved whenever there is a protest but this is the worst. You can even see it on international news. At night we can’t sleep, we have to protect ourselves, we don’t feel secure in our own homes. During the day on the street, we worry when we will be hit. Police and soldiers use all sorts of weapons. They use snipers. They use rubber bullets. They use real bullets. They even use slingshots. They commit widespread violence against unarmed civilians protesting peacefully. 

The civil disobedience movement (CDM) is very important. I support it wholeheartedly. If we want the dictatorship’s administration and services to collapse, it is key for public servants to refuse to work under them. I really appreciate and recognise those who are taking part and would like to call on those who have yet to take part to do so. 

We have the same dream and the same goal. Right now, the whole country is fighting. We are all fighting to overthrow the dictatorship. This is great. But in our ethnic areas, the evil military dictatorship has dominated (for many years) and we have suffered the consequences. 

Before the coup there were a lot of conflicts in the (ethnic) states. They didn’t start now. They’ve been happening for about 60 years. Women were raped and murdered. After fleeing their homes, people have been forced to live in refugee camps. I don’t want more people to die. 

Even laws passed by the NLD parliament, which has support of the majority Bamar, ignored the rights of the minority groups. 

So the people involved in this current uprising need to speak not only for the people in urban areas but also for the states and ethnic groups. Because our ethnic states have been suffering for many years now. 

We are calling for the abolition of dictatorship, whether it’s military dictatorship or a majority ethnic Bamar dictatorship under the guise of democracy. The most important thing to do to achieve this is to abolish the 2008 constitution. If we don’t, we will keep experiencing coup after coup. This constitution was enacted by dictators themselves to ensure the system would endure. Only after it is abolished can we really build a genuine federal democracy. We also want the release of everyone who has been unjustly detained since the coup. 

Now we can all empathise with each other. So I would like to call on the Bamars to establish a federal democracy based on compassion, equality and self-determination after we succeeded in overthrowing the dictatorship. 

Protest photos courtesy of Richard Horsey. Protest art courtesy of Art for Freedom Myanmar https://www.threefingers.org/