Category Dictatorship
Myanmar’s rebels see unity as key to victory over weakened military rulers
Al Jazeera, 3 February 2024 Karen State, Myanmar – A young fighter looks out from the upper floor in a concrete skeleton of a church that villagers have been building for two years in this small pocket of southeast Myanmar. The construction work has been a slow undertaking, said 21-year-old Zayar, a member of Myanmar’s Muslim […]
Inside Myanmar’s military bases: Wives stand guard as war escalates
Nikkei Asian Review, 24 November 2024 MYANMAR BORDER, Thailand — The sudden escalation of Myanmar’s civil war, with coordinated resistance attacks across the country’s northeast, has shaken the military establishment and reenergized pro-democracy forces. Rare interviews with wives of serving soldiers reveal that the grip of the dictatorship may be as shaky in its bases, […]
Life and death on the front lines of fighting in Myanmar
Al Jazeera, 11 August 2023 Demoso, Eastern Myanmar – The rebel commander studies a chicken bone in a search for clues as to the fate of his coming attack against the Myanmar military. Scraggly bearded Reh Du, 27, frowns. The signs from the bone are mixed. Nevertheless, his underlying confidence in the plan of attack against […]
In the targets of the junta: life and war inside rebel-held Myanmar
The Observer / Guardian, 4 June 2023 On a busy strip in eastern Myanmar, restaurants with bomb shelters serve sizzling plates of beef washed down with Belgian beer and French wine. Teenagers mingle in snooker halls, women relax in beauty salons and revolutionaries get inked in tattoo parlours. From dawn, steaming bowls of noodle soup are […]
Defections from Myanmar military slow as generals tighten grip
Al Jazeera, 7 March 2023 Mizoram, India – Aung Pyae paces outside the hillside clinic on India’s remote border with Myanmar. The crackle of gunfire between his former comrades in the military and pro-democracy fighters a few hundred metres away in his homeland has eased, and all Aung Pyae can hear now are the moans of […]
‘The most painful, inhumane act of terror’: Myanmar’s Christmas Eve massacre retold
The Telegraph, 24 December 2022 One year on from the mass killings, survivors and relatives of the dead recount the horrors Esther spent last Christmas Eve in a state of nerves waiting for her two children as they made their way across conflict-torn Myanmar. The next day, on Christmas, she learnt she would never see […]
Sun, sea and civil war: holidaying in Myanmar
Nikkei Asian Review, 3 August 2022 In the grand lobby of a Yangon hotel, a senior Myanmar tourism official told me she was meeting government officials to “rebrand” the country to focus international attention on pristine beaches instead of conflict and military atrocities. It was March 2018, and Myanmar was governed by an elected civilian […]
‘We are not afraid’: anti-junta groups rail against Myanmar executions
Guardian, 26 July 2022 On Monday night at 8pm, the familiar, defiant sound of clashing pots and pans returned to the streets of Yangon. In the aftermath of last year’s coup, the same din was heard nightly as people demanded the return of democracy – until the military launched brutal crackdowns against any such acts […]
Guns, not monks, at monastery on Myanmar’s Thai border
Nikkei Asian Review, 11 May 2022 In a different world, Wat Fah Wiang Inn would symbolize the power of faith to transcend the borders between two largely Buddhist nations. Trust and tolerance, not guns, would hallmark this monastery straddling the Myanmar and Thailand border in the hazy Shan Hills, which stretch from Yunnan in China […]
‘The darkest days are coming’: Myanmar’s journalists suffer at hands of junta
Guardian, 7 June 2021 Journalism has been outlawed in all but name since the coup, with reporters and editors fleeing the country or leading double lives to survive As a cyclone rolled over the Bay of Bengal on 24 May, American journalist Danny Fenster, 37, contemplated the brooding skies near a terminal window at Yangon […]
Lorcan Lovett 
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