The Daily - The Army of Poets and Students Fighting a Forgotten War

Episode Date: June 24, 2024

Warning: this episode contains descriptions of injuries.Myanmar is home to one of the deadliest, most intractable civil wars on the planet. But something new is happening. Unusual numbers of young people from the cities, including students, poets and baristas, have joined the country’s rebel militias. And this coalition is making startling gains against the country’s military dictatorship.Hannah Beech, who covers stories across Asia for The Times, discusses this surprising resistance movement.Guest: Hannah Beech, a Bangkok-based reporter for The New York Times, focusing on investigative and in-depth stories in Asia.Background reading: Rebel fighters have handed Myanmar’s army defeat after defeat, for the first time raising the possibility that the military junta could be at risk of collapse.What’s happening in Myanmar’s civil war?For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.

From The New York Times, I'm Katrin Benhold. This is The Daily. Myanmar is home to one of the deadliest, most intractable civil wars on the planet. But something new and remarkable is happening. An unusual wave of young people from the cities, including students, poets, baristas, have joined the country's rebel militias. This coalition is now making startling gains against Myanmar's military dictatorship.

Today, my colleague Hannah Beach takes us inside this surprising resistance movement. It's Monday, June 24th. Hannah, you've been covering a war that is barely getting any attention in the world. We hear a lot about Gaza and Ukraine, but you've been covering this war in Myanmar. And now, three years in, something is shifting in a really unexpected way. Tell us what's happening. I think when we imagine a civil war in Southeast Asia, we expect, I don't know,

guerrillas in combat fatigues fighting in the jungle. And yes, you do have those longtime rebel fighters. But what's happening now is that these veteran soldiers have partnered with a new and exciting force, which is young people from the cities who have joined together with these old guys, and they've decided to fight the good fight for an ideal called democracy. And remarkably, three years after the civil war began, they're starting to win. Wow. And just for context, remind us how this war started. Where are we in this story? So for about 50 years, Myanmar was stuck in this kind of awful, preserved in amber military

dictatorship. And then about a decade ago, the Myanmar military leaders, they started to peacefully transfer some of the power to a democratically elected leadership. And that civilian leadership was led by, I think, the one Burmese person that people might know, Da Aung San Suu Kyi. She's a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, and she's very eloquent in English. And she was this kind of paragon of democracy and nonviolent resistance to this big, bad military dictatorship. Yeah, I remember actually how she was celebrated. There were sort of pop art posters of her for sale, and she gave lectures in Oxford.

And of course, even Obama visited her. Exactly. She was up there with the Dalai Lama, with Nelson Mandela. And so, yes, you're right. President Obama visited not once, but twice. I mean, to this little country in Southeast Asia that people had barely heard of. But then the Myanmar military unleashed an ethnic cleansing campaign against the ethnic minority Rohingya Muslims. And Aung San Suu Kyi, who was constantly under pressure from the military, goes to an international court and defends the military against charges of genocide.

And it's at that moment where all these world leaders who'd wanted to associate themselves with the great things that were happening in Myanmar were a little bit embarrassed. And foreign governments just sort of backed away. Right. So Aung San Suu Kyi, who represented in a way the hope of democracy to many in the West, sides with the military on persecuting the Rohingya. And it's a real embarrassment for all the people that endorsed and supported her. Yeah, and I think that's the context in which this coup happens, right? So February 2021, the military arrests the civilian leadership of the country, puts Don Sonsuchi in jail, and the people who suddenly lose so much from the resumption of military rule go out on the streets,

and there are millions of people on the streets. And there are millions of people on the streets who are peacefully protesting. And the military does what it has done over and over and over again with pro-democracy movements in Myanmar, which is to shoot people on the streets. And that catalyzes a lot of young people, you know, doctors and lawyers and engineers and airplane mechanics and poets and civil servants, to do something unprecedented, which is to escape from the cities and make their way to the borderlands of Myanmar, where a bunch of ethnic militias have for generations been fighting the military junta. And they join these ethnic militias and form a unified armed resistance. So students and other young people from the cities join this armed

resistance against a real army with a brutal history. It doesn't really sound like they stand a chance. It doesn't. And I think those of us who've watched Myanmar for a while sort of expected it to be a David and Goliath story in which Goliath wins. But a few months ago, I started hearing something that surprised me, which is that a coalition of these resistance groups, these militias, had launched an offensive. And within a few months, you had dozens of towns that changed from junta control to rebel control. You had hundreds of Myanmar army outposts that changed hands to resistance control. And so by the time the kind of dust settled, you had a situation in which more than half of the territory of Myanmar is now in resistance hands. Wow.

It is an unprecedented rate of success for a ragtag group, some of whom two years ago had never even picked up a gun. I mean, that's incredible. So they basically won back more than half of the territory, and they did so in just a few months. How is that possible? I mean, what are these rebels doing? Yeah, that's the question that I really want the answer to as well.

And that's the main reason that I worked with our security team and my editors to be able to organize a trip back to Myanmar. We're traveling on a road that is often mined, so the driver is trying to be as careful as possible. To actually get there, we went in a pretty convoluted route because the main roads in the area where we were, which is called Kirani State, are mostly within sights of the Myanmar military. And so we were worried about being targets. And so we had to take back jungle roads. and all of a sudden I see in front of me a very brown flat river and I'm looking at it and I see absolutely no bridge and we're in this pickup truck and I think how in the world are we going to cross this river so here is a boat and here is our car and I see in front of me these sort of long boats with engines on the

back. And in between these boats, they have kind of pieces of wood, like planks. And apparently our car is going to go on there, which seems like a mathematical impossibility, but we'll see how it goes. And we go over these two planks. I hope he's got good driving skills. Whoa, here we go, here we go, here we go. And suddenly we have landed on top and we're balanced in between the two boats.

And this is our car ferry. A car ferry, Karenny style. This is the kind of ingenuity that happens in times of war. So we're back on these jungle roads and our destination is a place where a rebel group called the KNDF, the Karenian Nationalities Defense Force, is setting up a functional government in a place that, until really recently, had been the site of incredibly intense fighting. And after hour after hour of going either through jungles or passing these empty villages, suddenly we started seeing people, and we started seeing livestock, and we started seeing people and we started seeing livestock and we started seeing cars and we pull up in sort of like a parking lot and a guy comes up to me and he uses the former name

from Myanmar which is Burma and he says welcome to free Burma. Wow so you are now in rebel held territory. And what does Free Burma look like? Free Burma is this weird combination of young students who really want to engage in deep conversations about Marxism and about democracy. Except you're in the middle of the jungle and, you jungle and you hear mortars every now and then. And they've had to build everything themselves. They've set up refugee camps for displaced people, a whole functioning government administration in the jungle hills of the poorest state in Myanmar. And the amazing thing is they've built all of this without a functioning power grid. There's no running water, there are no phone lines, and there's no normal internet. And so photographer Adam Ferguson and I traveled around and we went to wedding parties

and we met with young girls who are singing resistance songs. I don't speak Burmese, but I'm listening to these songs and the melody is sort of transporting me. And then as I was listening to the lyrics, it was Burmese, Burmese, Burmese, and all of a sudden I hear the words democracy. I heard it in songs, and I heard it in basic training by these recruits to the KNDF. And I asked around, and it turns out that the phrase democracy doesn't really have a translation in Burmese.

This is something that people were laying their lives for, but they were also singing it and saying it in English, and it kind of underscored to me how powerful this ideology was for them. And so I wanted to go and embed with this force and see what they were doing and understand the motivations of some of these people who had joined this rebel force. We'll be right back. Hannah, you said you wanted to embed with these rebel forces. Where did you end up going?

So for all of Khorani State, there's essentially one hospital to which all casualties are taken. And to get there, you travel down a jungle path and you bump, bump, bump, bump in. There are buildings, some of them are made of brick, but mostly it's bamboo. This is a secret hospital in the jungle somewhere in Kareni state. And sort of out of nothing, out of the forest, they've built an emergency room over there. Here's an operating theater. hospital that has been built by young doctors and nurses and medics from the cities who all came with a common purpose, which was to join the resistance movement. And one of the people who made the biggest impression on me was a young woman named Lin Ni Zuo. And she worked as a medic treating wounded soldiers and victims of landmines. She's been part of the resistance in Kareni since the very beginning,

and she was really striking. We were in the canteen, which was this shack with a dirt floor, and she was wearing these pink pajamas and fluffy slippers. So she has a very big social media presence. And Lin was from a big city in Myanmar. How did you decide to join the resistance movement and what propelled you to do that? the resistance movement and what propelled you to do that? Um, you know, like, I am just 25 years of youth. She describes herself as just a normal kid.

Makeup, K-pop, you know, all these things. She sold cosmetics online, she went to med school. Yeah. On 2021 February, I joined to the protests and, like... On 2021 February, I joined the protest. When the coup happens, she joins the protest movement, like many young people. They started shooting and started killing the people, you know. But when the crackdowns happened, most of her friends, she says, just went home and kept their heads down. So they told me not to do so, just go back to the university and just finish your degree.

And there was something in Lin that was not able to just go back to her old life. So I choose my way, you choose your way. And so she made this decision to run away and became part of this resistance movement. And what was that transition like? I mean, that's quite a big thing to go to the jungle and completely change your life. I think it was really, really hard. I mean, it is an intense experience for a comfortable city girl to end up in the middle of jungle warfare. And she has been working. She actually doesn't have her medical and getting pieces of shrapnel out of wounded soldiers. She has a saw that she uses for amputations for the victims of landmines. A saw? A saw, yes. Everybody has their own saw. And she is getting kind of a medical education that you would never get in the theoretical world of a medical university.

She is trained to plunge her hands into the chest cavities of wounded soldiers to extract pieces of shrapnel. to extract pieces of shrapnel. And what she has is a commitment to this idea of democracy that I think is extraordinarily powerful. And she is literally laying down her life for that cause. And Lynn is just one member of hundreds of groups with tens of thousands of people in them in this resistance, which at this moment of time seem to really be turning the tide against the military. It's so clear that these rebels are fighting for something they really believe in. they really believe in. But how is this coalition, how are these groups like the KNDF you spent time with, actually winning territory back from a professional military? Yeah, I mean, you're right.

The Myanmar military is very well equipped. It has fighter jets, it has big, bad war-making machines. But one of the things that the rebels have is kind of a game changer and an equalizer in modern warfare. And that's a cheap, homemade drone. You mean like a very simple drone, the kind that I bought for my daughter at Best Buy? Yeah. So if you take that drone that you got for your daughter at Best Buy, Yeah. So if you take that drone that you got for your daughter at Best Buy, and you hand it to a Karenin rebel soldier, and they go on the internet, and they start communicating with somebody in Ukraine, they take that very simple drone, and they start adding bits and pieces to it, and they change something that is used for photography, and they turn it into a machine that can drop bombs on the enemy front lines. Wow. So they're actually communicating with other pro-democracy fighters, if you will, in Ukraine and other places about how to do this. Yeah, and it was really remarkable because when I went to the drone base

of the KNDF, they were using laser cutters, they were using 3D printers, and they were creating kind of a modern fleet of drones that has the potential to fight against something like a fighter jet. And that really is a game changer. It's interesting. So these rebel drones are clearly proving to be a real headache for the military. Is that the main reason? Or is there anything else that explains the rebel success? I think the main reason is this really unlikely alliance that has formed between the kids from the cities who have come to the jungles and this array of ethnic militias. Some of these ethnic militias, in a complicated way, don't like each other. And so not only are they fighting the junta, but they're also fighting themselves. And what has changed for the first

time since the coup is that these ethnic militias that had these kind of internecine problems have decided to unify for a common goal, which is to fight the junta. And they're beginning to train and help the young people who are coming from the cities. And that's really something that's never happened before. Most of these young people from the cities may have played video games. That was their experience of war beforehand. And then they're coming into the jungle and they don't know how to fight. I mean, they shouldn't know how to fight. But they were given training and weapons and kind of military know-how, how to throw a grenade, how to protect yourself, basic first aid. All of

these things were being taught to them. And these city kids have been fighting and dying alongside members of these ethnic militias. And I think this trust that has developed between them has really changed the tenor of the war. So, you know, given that they're gaining territory, given that this alliance, for the first time, seems to be holding, is there a chance that they actually win? That's a very good question. As difficult as what has happened has been for the resistance, I think it's the easy part.

Capturing remote areas is a lot easier than moving into the heartland of the country where the big cities are. And that's going to be a really difficult thing for the resistance to be able to push into and claim. So what lies ahead is the really tough part. Oh, yes. Let's say somehow the resistance is able to push in and put the junta on its back heels in the heartland and kick them out of some big cities. At a certain point, I think members of their alliance are going to realize that they have fundamentally different goals. Some of the ethnic militias want to become independent of a country called Myanmar. Some of them want to control the gains of illicit economy. Myanmar is one of the biggest producers of methamphetamine, of fentanyl, of opium.

some people who really want democracy. And so it's very hard to imagine, even if they succeed militarily, for these groups to be able to agree on what they envision Myanmar to look like. So does that mean the idea of some future united democracy is not actually realistic? future united democracy is not actually realistic. Across these different groups, everybody agrees the idea of federal democracy is a good thing. I don't know when it comes down to actually forming a new government, should the resistance be able to do so, whether the temptation of power will prove to be a more potent force than this gauzy idea of federal democracy. And I think the reality right now, and even should the resistance win, is a Myanmar that is fractured and splintered. So what does that mean for the young people fighting in the jungle?

Are they talking about this? Are they conscious of the risks of their country being fractured and splintered? And are they prepared for such an outcome? You know, it's very easy for political theorists to talk about, is this a fractured state or is this a splintered state or is this, you know, it's very easy for political theorists to talk about, is this a fractured state or is this a splintered state or is this, you know, a functioning democracy? But I think for the people who are actually on the ground, they are fighting for very specific things, which is a resumption of their lives as they were before the coup. And that was a life in which things were slowly getting

better, and they had certain freedoms, and they were able to vote, and they were able to participate in a, yes, flawed democracy, but a democracy nonetheless. And that is what they're fighting for. are fighting for. And revolutions fail, and they fail, and they fail until they succeed. And I think for the young people who are in Myanmar, they are willing to give their lives for what maybe to me seems a slim chance, but for them, it's what keeps them going day after day in the jungles to fight for a better future for young people and for all the people in Myanmar. Hannah, thank you.

Thank you, Catherine. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. On Sunday, Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu lashed out at the United States for the second time in a week. Netanyahu accused the Biden administration of withholding weapons for the war in Gaza. His comments came as Israel's Minister of Defense arrived in Washington for meetings with senior U.S. officials. Tensions over Israel's conduct during its war in Gaza have been rising between Netanyahu and Biden in recent weeks. A day before Netanyahu's latest complaints, Israeli soldiers tied a wounded Palestinian to the top of a military vehicle in the West Bank. The scene was captured on video and quickly went viral, causing outrage. The Israeli military said the act violated military procedure

and that there would be an investigation. military procedure and that there would be an investigation. Today's episode was produced by Shannon Lin, Nina Feldman, Rochelle Bonja, with help from Asta Chaturvedi. It was edited by MJ Davis-Linn, with help from Patricia Willens. Contains original music by Dan Powell and Diane Wong Wong and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brandberg and Ben Lansworth of Wanderley. That's it for The Daily. I'm Katrin Benholt. See you tomorrow.