Jangai Jap reflects on ethnic minorities’ participation in Myanmar’s pro-democracy revolution.
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The day after the coup on February 1, 2021, civil servants across Myanmar launched a national Civil Disobedience Movement, consisting of multi-sector labor strikes targeting the Myanmar state’s apparatuses. By February 4, the first visible anti-coup protest in the country appeared in Mandalay, the second largest city in the country. The first visible protest in Yangon occurred on February 5. By February 11, protests and rallies started appearing in ethnic minority areas and the country’s peripheries in full force. On February 22, millions of Myanmar people joined a nationwide general strike against the coup regime in what is considered to be the largest single-day pro-democracy demonstration in the country’s history.
While the protest movements are widespread in many ethnic minority areas, ethnic minority communities disagree over how to respond to the coup. One side prefers to be quiescent and neutral bystanders; the other, particularly younger generations, insists on active resistance.
In this essay, I describe and reflect on ethnic minorities’ reactions to the coup, focusing on an emerging class cleavage in Kachin State, where I conducted research between 2017 and 2019. I have also communicated with several Kachin local residents and protesters in an informal capacity in the past weeks. It is important to note that my observations of an emerging class cleavage in Kachin communities is part of a broader trend across Myanmar. While the coup precipitated from a power struggle between the military and the National League for Democracy (NLD), ultimately, I argue that the on-going pro-democracy revolution in Myanmar is a (class) struggle, between ordinary Myanmar people and complacent elites, a struggle which cuts across entrenched ethnic, religious and political divides in the country.
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