Insight Myanmar
“Thailand, Singapore, these countries are very close to us, these are our neighboring countries, but they don’t know Myanmar! So we need to we have to try to express our voice and our feeling about our condition to the world.”
These are the words of a Burmese youth who goes by the Twitter moniker of “Little Activist”.
He was recently interviewed for a podcast by Insight Myanmar.
As someone who had once hardly paid any attention to political matters in his country, he was propelled into action after the 2021 military coup. He dropped out of university, where he was in the process of earning an engineering degree, because he refused to accept any degree offered by what he now saw as an illegal and unjust authority.
“For people like me, we will never rejoin a university controlled by Myanmar’s military terrorists!” he exclaims. Instead, he has come to play a leading role in disseminating information about the latest developments in Myanmar, amassing nearly 15,000 Twitter followers. He routinely translates news into English so that outsiders can better understand his country’s horrifying conflict. This is no easy task given that he has been operating entirely in Myanmar, and so is faced with frequent internet outages and safety concerns that put him squarely in the regime’s crosshairs.
More recently, like so many other Burmese, he has grown alarmed and concerned about the junta’s new conscription laws. “With the cover of the law, they [demand] a mandatory military service to everyone in Myanmar!” He attributes this latest development to the heavy losses they have incurred following Operation 1027, and Little Activist wants the world to know that their resistance will never falter. “It is very hard to express our feeling that we will never fall! We never give up, and we’ll try every possible way to extract our freedom.”
But the threat to safety has never been worse. The regime is demanding updated ID cards for all citizens that now carry GPS tracking, while new passport applications are being denied. These recent conscription laws are adding yet another level of injustice to the horrifying situation, with soldiers
engaging in extortion, threatening families with abduction and demanding increasingly steep bribes for their children’s freedom from what could amount to serving as human shields or minesweepers in active conflict zones. Little Activist says that Burmese youth are now essentially “hostages” of the regime.
As a result, there have been lines stretching in front of various embassies in Yangon made up of thousands of people who have been queuing for hours, if not days, hoping for some chance to escape the draft by leaving the country. Things are no better on the Thai side of the border; police and authorities there exploit and harass Burmese seeking safety. “The top military tiers, they talk to each other. They don’t look on the citizens and the people of their country. They don’t care about us.”
