A coup is a way to kill democracy. That’s the way all democracies have died in Myanmar—first in 1962, again in 1988 and most recently in 2021. Naturally, people hate them, but their response to each coup has been different. While one coup might be met with just small demonstrations, or no response at all, another might provoke a revolt. Why?
There are multiple reasons. In the case of Myanmar, the most notable fact is how much stronger the resistance to the latest coup, staged by Min Aung Hlaing in 2021, has been compared to the opposition to previous coups. Why?
While the motivations and goals were the same for all the coups, their specific circumstances varied, and this explains why they provoked different forms of resistance. The resistance attacks and anti-regime military offensives we’ve seen against junta military bases and outposts over the past year have achieved significant victories, with the junta losing control of many towns and cities. It’s an unprecedented scenario that no one could have imagined when young fighters first took up arms after the 2021 coup. Nothing like this happened after previous coups.
Anti-regime forces’ most recent major achievement was seizing Lashio, the capital of northern Shan State, in which they captured one of the junta’s biggest military headquarters, based inside a “fortress” inside the city. Now almost all of Upper Myanmar, once called Upper Burma, is seemingly about to fall under the control of the resistance forces sooner or later due to the success of Operation 1027, a coordinated military offensive launched by ethnic armed organizations and People’s Defense Force resistance groups last year. In fact, the junta is losing control of territory, including towns and cities, in the north, east, west and south to resistance forces. Why?
To understand the unprecedented success of the current resistance movement, it’s worth looking at the differences between the three coups in this nation so long troubled by the military, and between the popular resistance movements against them. That’s what this “Evolution of the Myanmar Revolution” series aims to do. Let’s start with Myanmar’s first coup in 1962.
Why the “Mother Coup” faced less resistance
General Ne Win was the first coup maker, or the father of all the coups in Myanmar. The coup he staged on March 2, 1962 was the mother of all future coups, as his successor generals just followed his template for seizing power, a trend that persists to this day.
But the “Mother Coup” barely faced any resistance. One factor, perhaps, was that it was the first. The elected government was overthrown by his troops. President Sao Shwe Thaik, Prime Minister U Nu, cabinet members and dozens more officials were arrested. But no political forces opposed it; no protests on the streets; so, no bloodshed. Even left-wing political parties supported the coup, as the military regime promised that its revolutionary council would implement socialism. Blinded by ideology, those parties’ leaders failed to see that a military dictatorship was disguising itself as “socialism”. They ignored the fact that a coup obviously violates basic democratic principles. Only the student unions spoke out against the coup.
On July 7, several months after the coup, students staged a protest against new restrictions in their hostels on the campus of Rangoon University. Regime troops cracked down on the protest, killing about 100 students. Next morning, the regime dynamited a historic student union building, where, years earlier, student leaders and future independence leaders like Aung San and Myanmar’s first premier, U Nu, had fostered the independence struggle against the British. That was the first declaration of war by the military dictatorship against students, a war that would continue for generations to come.
U Hla Shwe, a prominent student leader who took part in an anti-coup protest in 1962, told me in an interview a decade ago that the regime didn’t dynamite the student union building because of the student protests over hostel restrictions; the main reason for blowing up the building, he said, was that the students were the only ones speaking out against the military coup. It was the first taste of living under a military dictatorship not only for students but for the general public.
The land on which it stood is still empty; an open wound in the heart of Myanmar’s student community. The war started by dictator Ne Win never ended.
Following the incident, the Ne Win regime continued to crack down on dissent. Ne Win sent hundreds of political prisoners to a penal colony on Great Coco Island to serve life sentences. From then on, a stream of dissidents fled the country to avoid the regime’s political harassment. Many of them found refuge in Thailand, which became their home in exile. They could be considered one of the earliest anti-regime groups in exile.
Despite the harsh persecution of dissidents, there was no shortage of protests and demonstrations against the regime—the “U Thant ayay-akhin”, or “U Thant affair” or “U Thant funeral affair” after former UN Secretary General U Thant died of cancer in 1974; the labor strikes staged by workers in the mid-1970s; and in 1976, the arrest of more than 100 students for holding a peaceful ceremony to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the birth of Thakin Kodaw Hmaing, who was revered as a great literary figure and a man of peace.
But none of those demonstrations against the Ne Win regime reached the level of a nationwide uprising; they were quite limited in scale and confined in geographical scope—and that is the major difference between the coup in 1962 and the ones that followed in 1988 and 2021. That being said, the nature of all takeovers in Myanmar and the intentions of the coup-makers are, unsurprisingly, the same.
All coups have the same motivation
The Cambridge Dictionary defines the word “coup” (short for “coup d’état”) as: “a sudden illegal, often violent, taking of government power, especially by part of an army.”
All of Myanmar’s coups meet this definition. They were staged by the same institution, the military—known as the Tatmadaw—albeit under different generations of generals.
The generals’ motivations, however, were the same: to resist democracy or new liberal forces, in order to continue to wield absolute power over the country politically and economically. They all sought to control the entire country, to possess the country’s resources and to dictate to the whole population what they can and cannot do.
All of the coup makers in Myanmar have had the same goal:
- The first coup in 1962 destroyed one of Asia’s first parliamentary democracies (along with one of its most vibrant economies—Myanmar, then Burma, was known as Asia’s rice bowl).
- The second in 1988 killed the embryonic democracy that emerged from the ’88 pro-democracy uprising. (It can be viewed as an embryonic democracy because the uprising led to the 1990 election, in which the National League for Democracy won a landslide victory and was supposed to form an elected government to lead the country, but the military rejected the poll results.)
- The latest, in 2021, destroyed a newly reborn democracy for the third time in the country’s history (ending the freest era the country has known since the first military dictatorship was established in 1962).
All three coups killed democracies. The people of Myanmar opposed them but in different degrees. But their resistance to the “mother coup” was negligible. In Burmese, as in English, there are words to express varying degrees of protest. Following the “Mother Coup”, the response didn’t go beyond အရေးအခင်း or ဆန္ဒပြပွဲ, which is close to “riot” or “demonstration”.
But the latter two coups were met with demonstrations big enough to be defined as an “uprising” (အရေးတော်ပုံ) or even “revolution” (တော်လှန်ရေး)—the “1988 uprising” and the “2021 Spring Revolution” (the latter taking some time to become a full-blown revolution).
Understanding how resistance movements against the two most recent coups have evolved from uprising to revolution helps us understand why the current resistance against the 2021 coup became the strongest in history—the only revolution against a military dictatorship in Myanmar.
Why did protest evolve into revolution this time, after the ’88 nationwide pro-democracy movement ended as an uprising? In the next two installments in this series, I will not only address this question, but also point out important lessons the Myanmar people learned from the ’88 Uprising that have helped them to move forward.
Read the second part of this series: Evolution of the Myanmar Revolution (Part 2): Why the ’88 Uprising Didn’t Evolve Into Revolution
Read the final part of this series: Evolution of the Myanmar Revolution (Part 3): The Factors That Sparked the Current Revolution
