The bus turned into University Avenue Road in Yangon and I held my backpack tight to my chest while maintaining my balance.
My hand found my phone, the most valuable item in my backpack. One of the great losses for the country since the 2021 coup is the moral deterioration.
News stories about daytime robberies in buses, banks and shops haunt me.
We managed in difficult times during Covid, reaching out to each other with helping hands. However, crime has increased since the coup and we have to protect ourselves in a legal vacuum.
I wonder if this is because the military regime wants to let crime increase so people seek help from its institutions.
From the bus, I saw Thailand’s Office of the Defence and Army Attache. I feel ambiguous about the Thai position towards Myanmar. The outgoing Thai prime minister, Prayut Chan-o-cha, is an ex-general with close ties to regime leaders Min Aung Hlaing and Soe Win who also seized power from a civilian government.
But should we be grateful for Thailand’s help for refugees escaping military atrocities?
Last September we praised the Thai authorities for arresting the junta crony Tun Min Latt, who is closely associated with Min Aung Hlaing’s offspring.
Tun Min Latt faces charges of money laundering, drug trafficking and transnational organized crime.
But then Thai defense minister, General Chalermphon Srisawasdi, slapped our faces by appearing in Myanmar’s regime-run newspapers, bowing his head with palms pressed together towards the junta chief during a meeting in Rakhine State earlier this year.
An international friend told me that Myanmar lacks good neighbors. It is hard to disagree.
India is the world’s largest democracy but we have rarely received moral or any other support from New Delhi in our fight against the regime.
We don’t need to elaborate on another big neighbor which is run by a single communist party.
“We cannot choose our neighbors so we have to get on well with the neighbors we have,” Daw Aung San Suu used to say.
As the bus slowed down, I gazed towards her house at No.54.
“Take action decisively in favor of the people and the country,” reads General Aung San’s quote on a banner above the gate to Daw Aung San Suu Kyi’s home.
The gate is normally closed but that day it was ajar. I peeped inside wondering who was inside. Outside a man watered plants. If Daw Aung San Suu Kyi was freed, would this road be packed with thousands of people again?
“Free our leader,” is scrawled on an electric meter box near her house. A three-finger salute, a symbol of resistance and solidarity for democracy movements, is painted in red elsewhere. The symbol is still in the hearts of people but we are back into the routine of survival.
Across the road, young people queue for visas at the South Korean Embassy.
It was sad to see hundreds of young people queuing in heavy rain last year.
It is disheartening to see young people losing hope in education as they refuse to study in regime-run schools. Some try to leave the country. This generational loss is a great cost of military rule.
South Korea is among a few Asian countries standing by the people of Myanmar.
After the 2021 coup, thousands protested at the US Embassy on the road, seeking its intervention.
We don’t know how many of those protesters have since died in the revolution, are fighting for a better future or are held in detention. Min Aung Hlaing and his accomplices deserve the blame for these broken lives.
As the bus drove past the American Center, I remembered a shooting by a junta-linked gunman after the 2021 coup and I wondered why the US tolerated the insult at the time.
A security convoy passes. Such convoys sometimes mean Min Aung Hlaing or other junta chiefs are visiting Yangon.
Even for me in my late 40s, I wanted to throw a bomb into the convoy.
Seeing soldiers pointing rifles at cars and pedestrians from defensive positions as if they are in battle makes us angrier. Their inhumane acts and atrocities breed hatred in our hearts.
We celebrate news of soldiers being killed.
I hardly see any viable resolution to this crisis. Any effort to table dialogue or reconciliation is in vain. It will take time for us to heal these wounds and for the country to recover.
The military and the people are now in an incompatible position, in a bus which must decide which route it will follow.
