Like many people in Myanmar, the boys weren't usually.
Political before the protests, but what they saw in the streets change them. This wasn't about a minor disagreement between two parties. It was about fighting for the right to live their life without a boot on their necks. The twenty twenty one election had delivered victory to Angsan Suchi's National League for Democracy and delivered a resounding vote of no confidence in the political arm of the toppler door, the nation's military. It's worth noting here that, yes, we
are compressing some complex things. The elections weren't perfect, and people in areas that were largely non bermin tend not to support the NLD. The NLD had failed to prevent a genocide, but in the country that was well accustomed to harsh military rule, there remained a better option than a military which saw ruling as its right and it
sold just a separate from the citizens. So when the military lost a record number of seats, everyone knew what would happen next, The same thing that happened in nineteen eighty eight, the same thing that always happened when the people came a little too close to taking power from their military.
So that happened on February first, twenty one, and first few days we didn't know what to do. We I mean, we knew the military was going to make it coop because one the NLD won the election. That's why, that's how it started, right and then, and the military is saying that they you know, they cheated, they like, I don't know how to say, they like fucked up the votes and you know they make themselves win. It wasn't true. I mean, the military was not going to win at all.
Like it was because, like I said, there were changes. You know, people saw those changes, and people were saying, yes, if she had one more you know, like four more years, five more years, she could make a real difference.
Those first few days of protest, everyone says felt hopeful, just like our protagonists and Zor who he met in the previous episode, thousands of young people ran into the street and found solidarity in a simple politics. The fuck that guy.
There were so many people, man, it's insane. So in Yawadi there was I think two hundred thousand people that day.
The march's got bigger every day and it seemed like nothing could stop them. Briefly, Western news organizations published stories, and everyone hoped that the UN or the US or the EU would show up and the Top Modo would be dealt with once and for all.
Yeah, I was trying to film, but then one of the guys pointed a gun at me, and I.
Was like, but none of that happened. The story stopped. The West never sent a single bullet or soldier, and the Top Meda deployed thousands. Even after a year. All the boys remember the first time they saw the force of the state turned against them. Even before he got out out of the border town of Malwadi, Andy saw the Top Madow begin to fight back against the movement that had grown up to oppose them. It's a story
we heard from everyone we spoke to. Once they began organizing, the cops started trying to infiltrate their groups.
I think police and military started realizing that we are that group too, So then they started trying to like track down. So there was one night where two of the guys almost got rested and then they run away and then we're like, okay, they are kind of following us. Yeah, yeah, and so after a week, same thing happened. I was
living because I wasn't from Yawadi. They didn't know. I was just a new face, so they didn't really know where I live or you know, and I always like take like two three taxi just to get to where I was staying. Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, but you like switching. No, that was the same place, but it was out of town.
Three of his friends got arrested. They're still in jail. Actually in jail is the best case scenario because the top ma doal make a habit of executing captured activists. The stakes were life and death at every moment, and covering the movement on a daily basis took its toll on Andy and his brothers too.
So my younger brother. They were in the capital CD and that the first time the military killed someone, they were there. They were in the same protest, so they saw the whole thing, and you know, they were traumatized. And so I thought the second time I went back in, I thought, well, you know, like it's better to bring them all together with me, like in the same place and we do it together than all of us spread out everywhere, you know. And like I say, my family's
military kind of on the military side. So they didn't like that my brothers were going out to protest. So then I was like, Okay, I'm going to bring you guys, and yeah, so we did all we did the young On protests together, six of us.
They came face to face with the potential cost of their struggle and they were in.
When that happened. The couple memoir. And it's military city, so it's very heavily controlled by the military. And the first time they went out to protest, the military shoot people. And he was, yeah, there was like these trucks with the water pennants. So he got hit by one and like he he wasn't viewing well, so they took him to the ambulance. But then once he got in there, there was a guy without his eyes because they shot like bullets into him. He was fucking traumatized for that. Yeah.
I remember when Andy says Napier Daw is a military city, he isn't just saying it's a city like Colleen, Texas or San Diego. Napio Daw is a city created out of nothing starting in two thousand and two to be a capital for Meanmar. If you've seen it at all, it's probably in a TV show that mocks the totalitarian excess of building seven lane motorways in a city that was until recently only populated by the people building it.
Top Gear played carfoot ball on the empty freeways, and the TV showed dark Tourists also featured the city today. It is a real city with a real population, but everything about it was designed to reinforce authority. And yet the boys and thousands of others took to the streets here streets built to reinforce the power of the people. They were fighting to demand that the military listened to them. Andy shows us a picture of the man with his
eyes shot out. It looks how you think it would, and it is worth noting that shooting people's eyes out is a time honored international policing tactic. In twenty twenty, US cop shot more than one hundred and fifteen people in the face with less legal munitions. Thirty suffered permanent damage to their eyes. But in Myanmar everything escalated several levels higher than that. Shooting out eyes wasn't radical violence for the Tautmadaw. They treated it more like stretching before
a run. In one protest, the boys saw some drunk people tossing water bottles at the police. The police responded with live gun fire on the polishkan fall.
Peoples are turned to the backside.
And they retreat. Yeah, very situation. Peoples are running.
They also some guys during rocks back to the police.
Yeah, that's when the police started shooting.
And he translated the next part for us.
He so he was in the protest and then they started shooting and he ran away. And but he was not in his neighborhood, in his area of the city. He was somewhere else. So when they started running, he didn't have anywhere to go. And then someone like accept him at the house. They say coming, come in, and he hid. But yeah, so yeah, he hit in the for like two hours until they shooting stopped.
It wasn't until they got home that they realized the police had killed someone. In the early days of what became the Revolution, people formed tight bonds and made radical commitments in the form of legal activity. While the top model was still scrambling to counter the counter coup, everyone felt the clamp down bite at a different time. It took longer than average for the cops to find a mirror and her card of revolutionaries, but eventually that day came.
It came as she and her friends were gathered in a tea shop preparing for an action.
At that time on that day, they are trying to protects in the Sanjan profniance. Yea, so before the protests that they cattering the people at the tea shop. Yeah, they sat in the table with her teams about including her five people, but she had to go and give the banner yeah to the other groups. So she's leaving just about like this match. And then then the soldiers came into the tea shop and then arrested her teammates. She's lucky to escape, yeah, yeah, really narrow you know. Yeah.
Yeah, So did she leave immediately?
Yeah, So that's how she came here because her teammates know where she lives, her house and everything, so she has no choice to stay in a youngle But then she stay organizing her teams to the protests and the younger from here? From here?
What did her parents think when she had to leave?
Right?
So her parents told her, uh, the survival, it is the first so she can't do whatever she wants and then but she have to be on her own, okay, well yeah, and then they don't they agree, you know, like if if she wants to leave, just leave. If she s they want to do the you know, protesting or whatever she wants, and they're not saying no to her.
But they're not supporting it. They're just sort of thing. She's on her own.
Yeah, she's on her own. That that's how last night I told you guys that she lost her inheritance, like you know, she had to give up on everything.
Well, ever, in San Francisco, t K could see what was happening through his scouts on the ground and soldiers posts on Facebook. He started to amass a huge amount of intel. He also knew where the underground groups and what obedience movement centers were in the cities, and when he saw the cops of the military coming for them, he was able to give them a heads up.
So whenever we we have like uh, you know, uh information about from the you know, some CDM soldiers, some city and police, and then they give him the informations a hat so we got the informations, so like, okay, those guys are going to the you know, let's say, okay, this place and then within one hour there so from that place, whoever live in the underground teams move out yeah,
get yeah, so so so that kind of things. Uh with with that, we save a lot of people too, And then we got arrested people too, But we also saved people.
Everyone we spoke to you told us the same story. They went into the street thinking that if they made enough noise, the world would listen, and that the US or the EU or the UN would defend democracy and evoke their responsibility to protect innocent people being gunned down in the street, to quote from the online publication of the Diplomat endorsed by all Member States of the United
Nations in two thousand and five. R two P Advance is a potentially revolutionary idea that state sovereignty entails a responsibility for a government to protect its population from massa trusty crimes and human rights violations. When a nation fails to exercise this responsibility, R two P grants the international community the legal warrant to intervene. The doctrine authorizes the use for a range of coercive tools, which military intervention
as a last resort. People in Myanmar thought that if they were peaceful, civil and respectable, the government of the world would do the right thing. The government of the world, however, didn't give a fuck.
But yeah, so the protests are very very peaceful. You know. It's when you go into the protest, it's very peaceful, very organized, very it's they try to make it look so clean, so nice, because I guess you know, no, it was at the beginning they were trying to get attention from the international community, and they were hoping that someone will come in and say, you know, take down
the military and put our government back. Yeah, a lot of people die, just like there was a saying like to you, and you know, people were saying how many like, how many dead people do you need for you to take action? Right? And there are people saying I will if you need one more, I'll be that person. I'll just fucking die. I'll just get killed by the military so that you will come in and fix it and change this situation in the country.
Right.
Amiror felt the same. She even organized a protest five hundred people displaying a map of the whole country on the river in Yangon. She called it a suicide mission, but she thought it would send a visible signal to the world and it was worth risking her life to make the statement.
I realized.
At the time. She she she didn't know anything about the politics, so she believed in our two p because uh, people are protesting peacefully, but the government take the ash in so other countries not gonna wait and un see and then they're gonna take the actions about that. That's what she believed in. And then she she decided to go protesting peacefully theater and.
Okay, did she think that other countries, United States, whatever, we're gonna come in and intervene.
Yeah, yeah, that that that's what she thought, Like you know, when the wall see the government take the ashans and the government are killing people, and if they if the war knows, and then we can get a hab from the from the other countries.
Where they did find support within other countries in Asia fighting against dictatorship, they formed so called milk Tea. Aligns drew on the example of Hong Kong to learn how to stay in the streets where the government doesn't want you there.
But then one happens in our country, it's like, oh fuck, where does it happen before? And then we went back straight with Hong Kong and there was it's not just us, like there was so much infographics and like you know, how to be in the protest, how to do certain things. It depending on the situation. So we had a lot of information. We were yeah, we were looking through and I think that these are the same thing that like people in Hong Kong used, I think.
But Hong Kong didn't have snipers shooting kids in the head or cops furrowing rifles blindly into crowds.
But then later on, like by the time we got to young and people were sitting down, they were little protests. What the military does is they were coming and they would just start shooting everyone. There was no there's no negotiation, there was no hey, guys, can you move? And then you know, any any of that stuff. They would coming and they they would treat this as a battlefield. And it didn't take a while. It didn't well, it did
take a while. I think it took about like a month and a half for us to finally say, fuck the peaceful protests, Fuck the international community, they're not coming. If they were to come, they would have come a long time ago, you know. And we started fighting back. But when we say we fight back, it's like molotolf cocktails, slingshots.
Doctor Wonder knew exactly when and how place he would spend his days triarging people who would survive from those who might not make it. Soon, the worst nightmares of his medical team are coming true. The police began seizing his colleagues the alleged crime of saving lives.
I remember before the Meli police amilyfi man and totally totally impluded our hospital one day. I think at the midda of their may Okay, they totally interluded our horse there because they have far, they have hearts. Our city and doctors are doing operations at that hospital because we have no no, no another place like that traumassetter. We we could give uh good treatment for that traumatic patient because we have to.
Take a risk.
So we're gonna take a rest soon. One of our concenters was arrested at that emergency unit. Wow, okay, because he took he took also his rais. But if he wasn't here, his junior can can't handle that situation.
You know.
You know, so many tense handress injury injury patients on that day mostly are can short patient. You know, Samma open a doomen open limes. Okay, so we have so many prices.
On that Now things only got worse m yeah.
Yeah. There was a pregnant woman who got shot and obviously with the kids better and she died because she accepted like twenty protesters in her house and when they came, they shot her death. And she wasn't like five weeks or it's it's you can see that she was pregnant. The military, you straight up real bullets, like they don't give a shit, They don't give a shit that the way the military controlled people is fear right, So then they want people to see that if you go against me,
you'll die horribly, and they shoot hat. We saw so many faces with holes, you know, so many people with holes in their face. It was fucked up, and it was scary because every time you go out, you're saying, that could be me, that could be my brothers, that could be you know.
Very quickly the revolution organized itself, not with hierarchies, officers, or vanguard parties. The people who'd existed in those roles had already been arrested or fled, so instead the revolution started with people giving whatever they could to the struggle and taking whatever they needed to get by the revolutionaries we interviewed all initially thought that the struggle would be
sure that the world would come to their aid. But even when it became clear that this was not the case, they continued to fight under the logic it's better to die than live with a boote on your neck.
They took all the leaders from the opposition side, so there was no one to tell us what to do. There was no instructions, right, so there was like two days of Okay, what the fuck do we do? You know? And then people started protesting, but small, like very small, and then I think after like five days then there was like two hundred thousand people everywhere. Like no that
I remember the first day we arrived. I mean, we haven't seen each other but since COVID started, so it was like, ah, well there, you know, back again and together. And then yeah, it was fun for like one night and then we're all hanging out and trying to plan what we're going to do the next day. So basically we kind of planned that, like each of us have a role, and our plan was to go out and
kind of be like a media crew. Right, so we're filming, we're writing news, we're posting on the internet so that everywhere else people can see it. So yeah, two of us are like the camera people, and then this too. They look out for the roads and streets, like because
these places. We've never been right Dane in these areas, So whenever we go to a protest, we'll sit down or we'll walk around and take photos while these twos goes around and look for the fastest escapes, you know, if the military come in, what will be the best way to go, you know, you know, escape. And then him and another one they kind of look after us.
They look at the news to see what's happening around us, so that if there's a posts on Facebook saying oh or some military truck heading towards you, we kind of be prepared, you know. But yeah, I was. Yeah, So we had a lot of energy at that time. It was like a contant. We were going out and you can see like always following me, Like that's me and him, and he's always following me everywhere I go, so that if something happening and he's grabbed me.
While the boys and Andy were reporting, Amira found her calling on the front lines. It's almost impossible to stress how incredible she is. Before we recorded, she casually dropped into conversation that she also trained in knife fighting. Sometimes we met her at a shooting range near my sot and blasted a few paper targets together with a twelve gage shotgun we'd been using for a bit of target practice.
When it jammed, and it always jammed, she cleared the chamber and got it back into action with a practiced efficiency that any formally trained soldier would have recognized. In the revolution, it didn't take long for her to find her way to the front lines, and she's got the scars to prove it, including some from hucking a tear gas grenade bare handed back at the cops. Others adopted roles too. Some picked up shields and took on the
police toe to toe. Other supported protesters with medical aid and food and water.
So you can see the shield two, three, four or five, yeah, to make it. And then you can see that they have these wet like plastic bags to like wash people's faces when they're two gas or like two killed the smokes with wet towels too, and then there's someone always water in it like you see here. Yeah, And this is all from the neighborhood like they provided to us.
They built barricades and even developed a system of communications for when things were getting violent. This allowed folks who were not comfortable to get away, or at least that was the goal.
So the white flag means like we have this place, like this is our but then the black flag means will fuck you up back, like if you've done so much that we're going to fuck you up. You know, I have a video of it when it changed from white to black.
Their tactics improved over time. When one group got kettled, another group would pop up nearby and draw soldiers away.
Oh yeah, so and then there was one time when one one part of the city was under attacked by the military. A lot of protesters were trapped in there, and so we decided to go out. So every other parts of the city came out at nighttime to protest, so that they soldiers have.
To kind of Yeah, a mirror too, came face to face with state violence.
Yeah, she wants to take the ashen bag because they are all protesting peacefully and at the time she wants to have a super power.
M M, yeah, maybe she does. Uh, what what did she what did she decide to do? What did they do at that time?
And then she feels like she's going to the act and then she will keep moving and then she will participate in every role that she can, and then she would do as much as she can. That's that's what she decided to.
We saw that.
Picture of her in front of the car and it was Bernie, we're half in there. Were they throwing molotov cocktails?
Yeah?
Okay, so like smoke bombs and then something like that, and then she's trying to throw them back the picture. Yeah yeah, yeah, so she picked it up and then she told them back.
You hurt your hand, Yeah, you have a scar?
Fuck?
Oh wow yeah yeah.
Then she got hit by the smoke bone like a twice. And then at that time she lost everything. She lost her pats, she lost her phones, and someone have her to hold and took her back.
Okay, that's how she escaped.
Wow, they helped you to know who helped you? Was it a friend or just a stranger?
Her friensis with her and I when the tear guls hit down and then the other strangers had them and she got hit by the tear guls and then she almost faded and a black out.
Our doctor who goes by Wonder faced a difficult choice returning to the hospital meant risking arrest. The military could come in at any time to arrest injured protesters and the doctors helping them, but not going back the letting his comrades die, state violence increased. He decided he needed to help.
They killed so many graceful protesters on that day. I think roundabout nearly round one hundred or more might be more than that we see, yes on that day, you know, or because we have already we have already started say the discoveredient movement on that on that time, because we didn't go the hospital there that was ruined by that genres Okay, okay, so we dere outside the hospital, you know.
We we managed temporary camp like that because for emergency injury patients at that time I was involved one of the campsite. Yeah, because but actually we can't deal yea some of the injury pe that may need for emergency operation like that bullet go through, Yeah, go to break the bones and open moon. So but we have to take the ricks because we have to operate that patient. We go to hospital trauma emergency department. We did our operation.
I remember at that night, one of the pasions was shot down by police and they chased, they followed that patient. We kept that pasion in our hospital in our war We emergency, we did emergency operation on that at that night, on that night, and we emergently moved him out on that night because we can't keep him on that hospital because uh, soon he just left our hospital. The police just came and such for him. But this is one
of our streams. It was, uh, they just quite there again, where is that guy?
TK got on telegram? Lots of people couldn't be on the ground fighting, but they still wanted to be part of the struggle. He developed good connections with people on the ground, but first that was just him desperately try and stay informed. But soon he realized he was well placed to be doing the informing. With internet access cutoff VPNs flowing down, only someone outside the country with blazing fast Bay Area WiFi could collate all the info coming in.
I turn it into useful, actionable advice for protesters on the ground.
At that time, we know nothing about it. No one's no one's teaching us what to do.
Yeah, so we have to do it, do it, you know, like we we we met.
We like I said, we have a seventy people. So we have a meeting every day, every night, so we try to you know, brainstorming what we're gonna do. Yeah, and then so we made we make in the plants and now we make in like, Okay, we're gonna get the informations from you know, every single details that we can get, and that that's we're gonna share to the people. That's what we're gonna share to the unaground team, send other people.
Within a few weeks, it had become clear that a diverse range of people, tactics, and tools are going to be needed in the fight for.
Freedom in Meanma.
Next time we'll talk about how that fight took shape and tell you what it's like today.
Hi everyone, it's James here.
I just wanted to note that lots of the words in the script are Burmese or Karen or Thai, and we've made every effort to make sure that we pronounce them correctly. But we sure we've obviously made some mistakes along the way. That's not out of a lack of respect or out of a lack of rerecording on my part, but we did want to note that where we've made a mistake, we're very sorry for doing so.
It Could Happen Here as a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool zonemedia dot com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It could Happen Here, updated monthly at cool zonemedia dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening.