Ethnic Tensions

However, the unity of strategy of the civil disobedience movement elides deeper questions about what is being fought for.

In Myitkyina, the largest city of the northern Kachinland region, anti-coup protesters have marched proudly down the main thoroughfares – but many ethnic Kachins, while firmly opposing the coup, are also critical of any narrative that seeks to lionise the parliamentary era and the track record of the previous NLD government. This is a region that has been the stage for a long-running civil war between the Tatmadaw and the Kachin Independence Army; in the last decade, almost 100,000 Kachins have been made homeless and now live in refugee camps, while local activists have been jailed simply for calling for peace.

For the centralised Myanmar state, Kachinland is a strategic zone for resource extraction: gems, agriculture, and hydropower in particular are at stake, and yet the voices of Kachins who have called for democratic governance have been ignored. One Kachin refugee wrote a statement on social media calling for an end to the coup, but also rejected any return to the ’democratic dictatorship’ of the previous ten years.

Thus while some protesters have made the return of Aung San Suu Kyi their goal, others have underlined the importance of wholesale constitutional reform.

In the west of the country and beyond, where members of the Rohingya ethnic group live in camps after fleeing the Tatmadaw’s persecution, there have been motions of solidarity towards the protesters. These gestures have not gone unnoticed, and there are signs that some Burmese groups have come to regret the ethno-nationalistic support for both the Tatmadaw and Suu Kyi that characterised the horrific acts of genocide in Rakhine State.

‘We were not with Rohingya when they need us. But they are with us when we needed them,’ wrote one commentator. Photos of individuals of different ethnicities and religions marching side-by-side might give some hope for a new era of genuine pluralism.

A Broader History

Dealing critically with the Myanmar coup means moving beyond liberal analyses that see this as a mere game of thrones between the NLD and the military. While the idiosyncrasies of power in the country are not to be underestimated, we must also acknowledge a consistent trend towards a centralising state that remains firmly entrenched in an orthodox mode of capitalist development, which in turn sees Myanmar’s main role in the world as that of an exporter of primary and low-cost goods. The coup, if it continues, will certainly see a withdrawal of some Western capital, but China’s investments—in the Myitsone Dam, among others—will likely remain on course.

Even before the coup, despite their liberatory rhetoric on institutions of the state, the NLD in government seemed unable to put forward any plans for economic democracy. ‘Development’ became a prominent buzzword, at times acting as a proxy for frontier capitalism, with legislation to enclose the vast amounts of traditional communal land epitomising the rush to turn the country into an export-processing zone, and a failure to imagine an economy that worked for people, rather than an abstract idea of growth for growth’s sake.

Myanmar’s garment industry is one of the key spheres in which democracy may be building from below. Myanmar’s strong tradition of organised labour was forged under the colonial period, and hindered by the original military junta – yet despite the lack of a mainstream left-wing political party, labour unions have been building in strength over the last decade.

The garment industry is heavily gendered, with bosses favouring female workers on an assumption of passivity. Those workers are determined to prove these stereotypes wrong, and have slowly but surely been building strong bonds of association and solidarity to demand living wages and better working conditions. Now, in the midst of the coup, they are at the heart of protests, leading what appears to be a general strike of all industries, their bravery an inspiration for workers of both Myanmar and the world.

As one labour activist told me, ‘The lives of the workers under the democratic government were already hard, and now under a dictatorship, it will be worse. That’s why they have to fight against this. The workers are already the most marginalised and oppressed, so they have nothing to lose.’

An International System

It is easy for outside commentators, particularly those in the West, to blame the conditions of Myanmar solely on the historical and political specificities of the country. That lens ignores the ways in which the country is part of an international system of states and capitalist governance.

Indeed, the parliamentary era was a chance for countries in the West to gain a strategic foothold in Myanmar—bordering the industrial centres of China and India—while accessing a new frontier market. Despite the many inconvenient truths of the country’s institutional ensemble and its continued oppression of minority ethnic groups, it was only the attacks on Rohingya Muslims that finally slowed down Western engagement.

With states and international institutions acting as the facilitators of global capital, labour regime formation in Myanmar has often focused on opening up markets, and speaks in the language of investment ‘opportunities’. The EU’s promotion of an ‘Investor Protection Agreement’, for example, was promoted as a way to improve investor confidence; when civil society groups in Myanmar pointed out that such a mechanism restricted local economic democracy, their concerns were largely brushed aside.

While not to deny the positive work that some western development agencies have done in Myanmar, it can at times appear that the role of ‘development’ is to smooth over the contradictions between capital and labour, as well as promoting a state-centric approach to peacebuilding with minority groups.

For those in the West who wish to show solidarity with the workers of Myanmar at this time, looking critically at the way in which Western capital and development institutions engage with the state and the workers is a first step towards meaningful internationalism. In the UK, the Conservatives’ abolition of the Department for International Development, while not welcome, could open up an opportunity for the Left to reimagine a truly internationalist ‘development’ programme.

More generally, supporting the protests in Myanmar can be a case of simple messages of solidarity via the internet hashtags and amplifying voices on the ground. The Burma Campaign UK have called for targeted sanctions on military leaders, and there are places online to donate to the movements mutual aid funds. As the situation becomes increasingly dangerous, we must listen to all voices in Myanmar – especially those from the working-class and the ethnic minority communities leading the struggle.