On Monday, Myanmar’s military seized power in a coup d’etat, deposing former international darling Aung San Suu Kyi. The military putsch dramatically exposed Myanmar’s widely lauded democratic transition — which came to the world’s attention with the freeing of Suu Kyi in 2010 and the first democratic election in decades in 2015 — as fundamentally flawed. The 2008 constitution that governs the country grants the military full control over key ministries and broad authority to declare a state of emergency.
The question of how Myanmar’s people will respond now looms large. Suu Kyi and her party remain popular in the country despite her brutal record — which includes enabling the ethnic cleansing of Rohingya Muslims — because they’re seen as representing an end to military rule and an increased openness to the world.
Meanwhile, the medical staff in major cities have called for a strike, the country’s largest labor federation is urging people not to cooperate with the military government on labor issues, and a Facebook group titled “civil disobedience movement” has drawn a hundred eighty thousand likes.
Shortly before the coup, we spoke with Ma Moe Sandar Myint of Action Labor Right, a key organizer of the recent strike wave, to get a better sense of workers’ struggles in Myanmar. We tried to reach her after the putsch, but communication is currently being disrupted inside Myanmar. What is certain, though, is that the fight against authoritarianism in Myanmar will be intimately tied to the success of its labor movement.