The first two rounds, which began last month, have seen the Union Solidarity and Development Party, the party of the military junta, grab a substantial lead, putting it on course to form the next, notionally civilian, government. Only 131 of the country’s 330 townships are holding the elections in full, a further 118 townships are holding partial polls in areas the military controls, while polls in 65 townships have been canceled or suspended because of fighting. Opposition parties, including Aung Saan Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy, which won the last election in a landslide, have been forcibly dissolved. Criticism of the election has been criminalized.

ASEAN, the 11-nation regional bloc of which Myanmar is still officially a part, has said it will not recognize election results. The United Nations said the election “seems nearly certain to further ingrain insecurity, fear and polarization throughout the country.” And the European Union described the election as a “sham” before it even began. But Myanmar’s military junta does have powerful support. China has propped up the military regime in exchange for access to resources, and the Myanmar election was only announced after discussions between Xi Jinping and Min Aung Hlaing. Election observers include officials from Belarus, Russia, India and Nicaragua. And in September, Hlaing visited Moscow, signing agreements to cooperate on nuclear energy and space exploration, and to protect each other from international justice. 

This month, Myanmar’s military was forced to defend its conduct in the Hague, as hearings began at the International Court of Justice where it stands accused of of perpetrating a long-running genocide against the Muslim Rohingya minority. Already, by 2018, as hundreds of thousands of Rohingya fled Myanmar, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees had described the situation as “a textbook example of ethnic cleansing.” In 2019, The Gambia approached the ICJ to file a lawsuit against Myanmar, the first filed on behalf of a persecuted people by a third party. The hearings, which have only just started and could take years to conclude, will nonetheless still have implications and set judicial precedents for South Africa’s genocide case against Israel in the ICJ.

Not that it has stopped Myanmar’s military from continuing to use methods, since deposing the democratically elected government in 2021, such as “arbitrary arrests, torture, extrajudicial killings, and indiscriminate attacks on civilians”  that Human Rights Watch said amounted to “war crimes.” Even now, the country is embroiled in bloody conflict. Over 170 armed resistance groups have coalesced to seize 42% of the country. Heavy bombing and artillery fire are commonplace throughout the country. Over 3,5 million people have been displaced into the likes of Thailand and India, 7,700 have been killed by the military, and over 30,300 arrested of which 630 are children.

A local medic from the mountainous Chin State, large swathes of which are rebel-held, told me she had been detained by Myanmar military forces while giving medical assistance to rebels. “My ankles and wrists were chained,” she said, “and wooden blocks were used as restraints.” She was beaten and threatened with sexual assault and said she could smell the dead bodies of other detainees.

This is the backdrop in which Myanmar goes to polls for the final phase of the elections. Despite ASEAN’s rejection of the results, China insists elections are a way out of the civil war and towards stability. In a recent column in the “South China Morning Post”, an analyst argued that “China is the only country with the clout, experience and contacts to talk and make deals with all sides.” Myanmar is a critical supplier of rare earths to China.

Given the transactional foreign policy that has become a cornerstone of Donald Trump’s second term as President of the United States, it’s perhaps not surprising that the White House too has been warming to Myanmar’s military government. As the Trump administration’s actions in Venezuela and acquisitive, imperial interest in both Greenland and Canada show, all relations with foreign countries are seen exclusively in terms of economic and strategic value. Normalizing relations even with Myanmar’s authoritarian regime would be palatable if it delivered access to rare earths and caused unease in Beijing.

The United States, through USAID, played a strong supporting role in Myanmar’s elections in 2015 and 2020 and in 2024 warned about the deteriorating “human rights crisis” in the country. But in July last year, Myanmar’s military leader Hlaing sent Donald Trump a letter complimenting his “strong leadership.” It was a response to a letter from Washington outlining the tariff imposed on exports from Myanmar, a communication that the military junta treated as acknowledgement of its status as the legitimate government. The Trump administration then appeared interested in a dialogue with the Myanmar military junta about access to rare earths. Just weeks later, in what the Trump administration said was a coincidence, it lifted sanctions on individuals and companies connected to the junta.

Also in July, Secretary of State Marco Rubio sent a cable to U.S. diplomats advising them to refrain from criticizing foreign elections as “consistent with the administration’s emphasis on national sovereignty.” And in November, Kristi Noem, the Secretary of Homeland Security, said that Myanmar had “made notable progress in governance and stability” and had “plans for free and fair elections.” It was a remarkable statement of faith in a junta accused of genocide and of overthrowing a democratically elected civilian government, but consistent with the Trump administration’s prioritizing of transactional partnerships over moral principles. From January 26, Myanmar nationals will no longer be eligible for temporary protected status in the U.S., with the Trump administration citing the elections as evidence that Myanmar was safe.

With Russia, China and the U.S. in the Myanmar military’s corner, the implication is clear. The new Great Game is the global tussle for minerals and resources, making Venezuela, Greenland, Canada and Myanmar, among others, the new spheres of superpower hostility.

Related Articles

China’s green energy miracle and a conspiracy of silence

Nithin Coca

Myanmar rappers battle against the coup

Burhan Wazir

Russia lost Venezuela. Putin won everything else

Natalia Antelava

The post The Yangon playbook: Why military rule is being legitimized appeared first on Coda Story.

This decision has become urgent in Myanmar, where the Norwegian telecommunications company Telenor has been trying to untangle itself from the country since the junta seized power in a coup on February 1, 2021. In doing so, Telenor is torn between selling its Myanmar subsidiary quickly or protecting the millions of users whose data could end up in the hands of the military.

Now the company faces a new hurdle, one that could have broader implications for how European companies do business in illiberal countries. 

On February 8, an anonymous Myanmar citizen and a Norwegian law firm filed a complaint with the Norwegian Data Protection Authority alleging that Telenor’s sale violates Europe's General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, which applies to countries in the European Economic Area, which includes Norway. The complaint asks Norway’s state  privacy agency to investigate and intervene to ensure that the sale does not violate the right to privacy of its customers and put them at risk of exposure to military surveillance.

If successful, the GDPR complaint would require Telenor to delete or anonymize the data belonging to its 18 million Myanmar customers before selling its Myanmar subsidiary. In doing so, it is poised to set a precedent for how European companies operate inside authoritarian regimes.

The tussle over Telenor's exit from Myanmar is a microcosm of the struggle facing many executives at Western corporations interested in acting at least with a minimum of responsibility inside countries which challenge that impulse at every turn.  

“What we are hoping to bring across to Telenor is indeed that it's not not a question of wanting them to stay and continue to serve in that environment, but to act responsibly and act legally," said Ketil Sellæg Ramberg, a privacy and data security law specialist at SANDS, the Norwegian law firm that filed the GDPR complaint.

WHAT IS TELENOR AND WHY ARE THEY SELLING? 

The Norwegian government is a majority shareholder in Telenor Group. It’s subsidiary, Telenor Myanmar, is the second largest telecoms firm in the country with a population of over 54 million people. 

Telenor has been trying to exit Myanmar because of military pressure to install intercept spyware that would give authorities a straight line of access to users’ information, which would violate Norwegian and EU sanctions.

Installing the intercept tech is “unacceptable” and “would constitute a breach of our values and standards as a company,” said Telenor Group in a press release in September 2021. 

The likely buyers for control of Telenor Myanmar's data are M1 Group, a Lebanese company with a history of doing business in authoritarian countries like Syria and Sudan, and Shwe Byain Phyu Group, a group of  Myanmar companies with ties to the military involved in gem mining and petrol stations, The sale is expected to be finalized on February 15. 

Human rights groups in Myanmar are strongly opposed to the new buyers. The lives of civil society activists and journalists are “endangered by this secretive sale to a military-linked conglomerate,” said Yadanar Maung, the spokesperson for the human rights group Justice For Myanmar. 

“We are also concerned that Shwe Byain Phyu is a front for the junta, who want control of Telenor as a source of revenue, at a time when they are desperate for funds to finance their campaign of terror,” Maung added.

WHAT’S AT STAKE? 

The junta has extensive control over telecoms companies in Myanmar. By law, the government can request user data without a warrant, intercept communications or take control of telecoms services in “emergency situations.”

This data is valuable to the military, which has been carrying out a brutal crackdown since it staged a coup that has  killed over 1,500 people, according to the human rights group Assistance Association for Political Prisoners. 

Authorities can use phone records and mobile payment receipts to map out pro-democracy networks, identify who is providing financial support to opposition groups and ultimately, target activists and squash dissent.

“They want it to crush the opposition,” said Oliver Spencer at the human rights group Free Expression Myanmar. “They want information about who’s criticizing the military and who’s organizing the military. And the Norwegian company owned by the Norwegian people is about to hand that information over.”

According to reporting by Myanmar Now, Telenor has complied with at least 200 requests for information by the junta-controlled Ministry of Transport and Communications since the coup. Some of these requests were for sensitive data, like the last recorded location of a phone number. 

Despite this, Telenor does stand out as the most sensitive to data privacy concerns in a country where the junta has significant sway over the other two leading telecom options, said Spencer. 

Telenor is “far better than their competitors in regards to the protection of data and therefore their users’ privacy. Without a doubt, they were far better,” Spencer said. 

It’s not a high bar. The Myanmar government runs 50% of MPT, the largest telecoms provider. Another firm, Mytel, is owned half by the Myanmar military and half by the Vietnamese military. Mytel or MPT SIM cards are likely being monitored.

If Telenor leaves the market, people “will all be forced to use companies that are directly or indirectly controlled by the military. Then, of course, the military has access to everything that flows through those telecoms pipes,” Spencer told me.

WHAT’S THIS GDPR COMPLAINT ALL ABOUT?

A GDPR complaint is a consumer’s tool to hold European companies accountable for how their data is used and protected. 

The major concern behind the complaint against Telenor is that, without proper privacy safeguards, the data of millions of users will be subject to surveillance by the junta in Myanmar, exposing activists, journalists and citizens and putting their safety at risk.

The use of GDPR in this context is unconventional. The privacy law is designed to protect EU residents and citizens, and it is rarely applied to international subsidiaries. But Ramberg, the law specialist at the firm that filed the complaint, argues that Telenor Myanmar is bound by GDPR because Telenor Group, based in Norway, has sufficient control over the company. “This actually has real life consequences for real life people,” said Ramberg, “This endangers people’s right to speak freely about issues that might not necessarily be in line with the dictatorship.”

The company disagrees, stating that Telenor Group “does not exert any control on the handling of customer data by Telenor Myanmar, and therefore GDPR does not apply to customer data in Myanmar,” wrote director of communications Cathrine Stang Lund.

Related Articles

Myanmar sets a dangerous precedent with the new draft of its cyber security bill

Caitlin Thompson

Digital insurgents rally against Myanmar’s military junta

Burhan Wazir

Myanmar prepares for military to ratchet up control of the internet

Burhan Wazir

The post Western companies face withering criticism on how they exit authoritarian states appeared first on Coda Story.

Tin had steered clear of Facebook since the armed forces deposed the democratically elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy. He was concerned that he would be attacked on social media: his family in Myanmar has longstanding connections to the country’s powerful military. Tin’s father and grandfather — both retired — were once officers in the air force, a captain and brigadier general, respectively.

In the two-and-a-half months since the coup, over 730 civilians have been killed by security forces and thousands more arrested. Nationwide protests have also paralyzed large sections of the country. While anti-military protesters continue to voice their objections to the takeover online and off, anger and suspicion has driven some of them to target individuals who have entrenched family links to Myanmar’s armed forces.

In the March 4 post, Tin explained to the 650,000 followers of his page, Zeyar Vlogs, that he had been absent from social media because his personal Facebook account had been attacked. He added that his family’s security in Myanmar had been compromised. “Therefore, in order to be able to fight for the cause without affecting anyone’s safety, I decided to stay off social media,” he said.

Tin’s 10-minute clip, narrated in Burmese, received nearly 9,000 comments, many of them confrontational or abusive. “Can anyone believe the words of an ignorant man?” asked one user. “Shut your mouth, you sucker. Never come back,” read another post.

“People are very angry and frustrated at anybody who has ties to the military, because we can all see what the military has been doing,” said Tin, during a recent telephone conversation. 

Tin launched the Zeyar Vlogs account in 2018. Until the coup, he usually posted videos about his life in the U.K., including the five years he studied for a medical degree at Glasgow University, advice on nutrition and trips to towns and cities such as the northern English seaside resort of Blackpool. The March 4 video was the first time he had publicly criticized the coup and the military to his followers. It racked up nearly 6,000 shares.

With over 400,000 soldiers, according to the U.K.-based International Institute for Strategic Studies, Myanmar’s military — also known as the Tatmadaw — is the nation’s largest employer. It ruled the country from 1962 until 2011, when the slow process of democratic reform first began. It has also maintained a tight grip on the nation’s finances through investments in a number of industries, including tobacco, mining, real estate and banking. 

Experts say the attacks on pro-democracy activists who have links to the military indicate rising levels of suspicion within the protest movement. 

“It started off with identifying the sons and daughters of the absolute top leaders, many of whom were studying or living overseas in the United States or Australia,” said Professor Ian Holliday, vice-president and pro-vice-chancellor of the University of Hong Kong and the author of “Burma Redux: Global Justice and the Quest for Political Reform in Myanmar.” 

“As the stresses and the strains of the movement have increased, we have seen that there has been a lot more ad-hoc finger pointing at people. Some of it is probably identifying the next tier down in the military hierarchy.” 

In many cases, the children and relatives of the Tatmadaw’s top brass have made no public statements about the events of February 1. Disagreements about the role of the military in Myanmar certainly cut both ways. Thinzar Shunlei Yi, a pro-democracy activist based in Yangon, Myanmar’s largest city, has family ties to the Tatmadaw. Her grandfather, father and uncles were all in the army. She explained that people with similar connections who disagree with the coup may find it difficult to express their opinions. 

“I think, if their family members are in the military, it is quite challenging for them to come out,” she said. “They worry about their family or that their parents might threaten them.”

“I face a lot of criticism about my opinion of the military or their ideology, from my own friends, from my own family members,” she added. “I have been named as disloyal to the institution. That’s how I have been framed by the military people.”

Yi said that while she tries to avoid confrontation with family members who support the military, the coup and the escalating violence in Myanmar can dominate conversations. 

“They know my positions and I know their positions, so when we have to talk about something, we end up arguing,” she said. “I know their limits and they know my limits, so we don’t cross the line most of the time,” she added.

Social media and shaming

For the past two months, protestors have used Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to target junta members and their relatives living in several countries — including Myanmar, Australia and the United Kingdom — using the hashtag #socialpunishment. Those accused of benefiting from the Tatmadaw have often been referred to as “maggots.”

In March, activists launched the website, Socialpunishment.com, which features details of 120 individuals with military links who have been accused of failing to speak out against the coup. The profiles, which have been widely shared on social media, contain photographs of the individuals in question and rank them on a “traitor” scale from low to elite. 

The aggressive nature of the #socialpunishment campaign has obvious shortcomings. Bryan Tun, a doctor at Redland Hospital in Queensland, Australia, told me that he has been abused on social media, even though he is not listed on the site. Tun has no links to the military, regularly posts Facebook messages in support of the protest movement and is a longtime supporter of Aung San Suu Kyi. He has also attended pro-democracy protests in Australia and donated funds to Myanmar’s civil disobedience movement.

Tun said he was attacked on Facebook feed because he is the son of Myanmar’s commerce minister, Pwint San, who was appointed after the coup. While he disagrees with his father’s decision to accept the role, he says that it took time to convince detractors of his loyalty to the pro-democracy movement. 

“They would post my personal photos — not only me, but also of other children whose parents took up positions given by the military,” he said. 

In the eight weeks since posting his first anti-coup video, Tin, the doctor based in the U.K., has intensified his political activism. Earlier this month, he took part in a pro-democracy protest outside the Myanmar embassy in London. Last Saturday, on a clear and sunny morning, he travelled to the capital again to take part in a three-day hunger strike being held by the Myanmar Students' Union, an organization that represents Myanmar nationals studying in the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland.

Like many opponents of the coup living outside Myanmar, Tin worries that his criticism of the military will result in the punishment of his family members back home. Earlier this month, he learned that his friend, the popular actor May Toe Khine had been arrested for supporting the anti-coup protests. 

“In the UK, I always have to consider, no matter what I speak, ‘Is this going to get my grandparents in trouble, my parents in trouble?’” he said. “Because I am away, I feel like I am really exposing my parents. Instead of them worrying about me, most times I am worried about them.”

The post Myanmar’s protest movement riven by suspicions and accusations of betrayal appeared first on Coda Story.

Dozens of tracks by hip-hop artists living inside Myanmar and abroad have been uploaded to social media platforms and streaming sites, including Facebook, YouTube and Soundcloud. The music marks a new front in an ongoing information war against the military junta.

In the six weeks since the overthrow of the elected government, led by Aung San Suu Kyi of the National League for Democracy party, martial law has been imposed in districts across the country. At least 149 people have been killed by police and security forces, and another 1,800 have been detained. Last Sunday, in the deadliest day of protests so far, 74 people lost their lives in Yangon and Mandalay, the nation’s two largest cities.

Hip-hop tracks criticizing the military began to appear online within days of the coup. One of the most popular — “End Game” by Nay Ye Khant, Adjustor, Yung Hugo, GRACEe, D-Vision, Young Yair and EilliE — has been viewed over 200,000 times on YouTube.

It describes Myanmar’s current authoritarian crackdown — the country’s third period of military rule since gaining independence from Great Britain in 1948 — as a fight for freedom and democracy. 

Over a chanted chorus, rapper Nay Ye Khant solemnly outlines stakes in the weeks and months ahead: “The last battle, the last battle, the final ending/ The people must win, the truth must prevail/ The last battle, the last battle, the final ending/ We shall revolt and end the dictatorship and its roots.”

Speaking by telephone, Khant explained how violence by the police and armed forces, as well as a number of new restrictions on everyday liberties, compelled him and his friends to write “End Game.” 

“The military started making laws, like we can’t go out between 8pm and 4am, and we started losing our rights, like they cut the internet between one and nine in the morning,” he said. “They have raided neighborhoods and homes at night for no reason, shot at houses and arrested people involved in the movements against them.”

Khant, who has over 34,000 followers on Facebook, added, “It is getting worse day by day, so we have to end this as soon as possible.”

From the U.S. civil rights movement to apartheid-era South Africa, music has long played an important role in political struggles. Born of the New York party scene in the late 1970s, hip-hop rapidly became a powerful medium for messages of empowerment and social justice. But, when Public Enemy’s Chuck D commented back in 1989 that the genre was “the Black CNN,” he may not have fully imagined how far it would spread or the number of causes it would give voice to worldwide.

The past two years have seen hip-hop on the front lines at global protests. In the U.S., Black Lives Matter has motivated dozens of MCs — including Run The Jewels, Meek Mill and Ty Dolla $ign — to release songs highlighting police brutality, racism and inequality. Elsewhere, British rappers have responded to the country’s knife crime crisis and artists in Hong Kong have expressed their support for the pro-democracy movement.

“Hip-hop is about rising up against oppression,” said Khant. “That’s how hip-hop walks in the world.”

The quick release of dozens of anti-coup hip-hop songs also speaks to the freedoms only recently enjoyed by local musicians. Myanmar has a long history of censoring music. When the military first seized power in 1962, the authorities regularly banned songs they deemed subversive. This led to the creation of a style of music known as “copy thachin” or “copy song,” in which local artists rewrote and toned down hits by songwriters like Bob Dylan and John Lennon to fit prevailing national sensibilities.

As the process of democratization began in the mid-2000s, restrictions began to loosen, and Myanmar developed thriving hard rock and heavy metal scenes. Now, hip-hop is the dominant youth genre. In 2015, Zayar Thaw, whose group Generation Wave helped pioneer rap music within the country, was elected to parliament as a member of the National League for Democracy.

Dr Jane M. Ferguson, a lecturer in Southeast Asian history and anthropology at Australian National University in Canberra, believes that the outpouring of anti-coup rap performs an important function in Myanmar’s protest movement. “It’s giving it a creative and interesting package that attracts the attention of outsiders, but also it can galvanize support across generations,” she explained.

Ferguson also cited the traditional poetry style of thanjat, which has historically been used to mock and satirize the powerful, as an antecedent to today’s anti-junta hip-hop tunes. “You already have this cultural affinity or propensity or skill to be able to come up with this form of rhythmic, rhyming poetry, which has always been political as well,” she said.

On February 3, two days after the military takeover, the Yangon-based rapper Louz Xa Lone, 24, released a track titled “The Voices.” Over a keyboard melody and a speeded up hook sampled from Laura Lee’s 1971 ballad “Two Lovely Pillows,” he considers a bleak future for Myanmar. “What is life like for all of us?/ Can’t even think about it in this country’s situation/ Wrong sayings are still maintained until the next generation.”

The tune has picked up 7,000 likes and 2,000 shares on Facebook. “After the military coup, almost everyone, including me, lost their future,” Lone said, via email. “It is depressing to live in this darkening life right now.”

The rapper, who has over 84,000 followers on Facebook and has been making music for six years, said he wrote the lyrics to “The Voices” in one evening, ahead of a recording session in a Yangon studio. 

“The one thing I know is that the military is the main obstacle to the development of our country — we don’t want them anymore,” he said.

Hip hop artists based in Myanmar have also been joined by others living outside of the country. Rapper Vanzzzo, 22, a Myanmar national who claimed asylum in the U.S. in 2009, released “Rebel (Save Myanmar)” earlier this month. 

Like a number of songs about the coup, it takes an uncompromising view of life under military rule: “Me and my people, yeah, we’re the rebels/ We ain’t gonna live like cattle/ Mark my words, we ain’t never gonna settle/ Till we get our freedom/ We just want peace, not pistols.”

“The first couple of days, I couldn’t do anything because it was just overwhelming,” Vanzzzo, who lives in Indianapolis, Indiana, said of his reaction to the military takeover. “I couldn’t write. I couldn’t do anything, no inspiration, nothing.”

In addition to music, hip-hop culture has always provided other avenues of expression. One in particular has been highly visible throughout the protests, with graffiti writers drawing anti-coup murals and slogans on buildings and roads around the country. 

Si Thu Aung, from Mandalay, has painted wall pieces in a number of towns and cities over the past six weeks. “I’m a graffiti artist,” he told me, via Facebook messenger. “We don’t have weapons, we have only art, so we will revolt with our art until everyone knows our voice all over the world.”

The post Myanmar rappers battle against the coup appeared first on Coda Story.

The February 1 power grab, which ousted the elected government of leader Aung San Suu Kyi, has placed a number of businesses in the spotlight. International and local companies with links to the security forces have come under growing pressure from activists who say the firms are complicit in war crimes committed by the armed forces. 

Myanmar’s powerful armed forces have long maintained a tight grip on the country’s finances by investing in a number of lucrative sectors, including mining, tobacco, garment manufacturing and banking. A recent Amnesty International investigation found that shareholders in a secretive business conglomerate called Myanma Economic Holdings Limited — which is linked to international businesses such as the Japanese drinks giant Kirin Holdings and INNO Group, a South Korean property developer — have received payments of up to $18 billion over the past 20 years.

Last week, Kirin Holdings announced it will abandon its partnership with a brewery part-owned by army generals. In a statement, the company said it was “deeply concerned” by the recent actions of the military and would be “taking steps as a matter of urgency to put this termination into effect.”

The focus on businesses connected to the armed forces has spurred the release of new mobile apps from activists in Myanmar seeking to weaken the income of the now ruling junta. Last week, the Myanmar-based company Genxyz launched an app titled Way Way Nay (Stay Away). It lists 250 companies, including financial institutions, retail concerns, construction firms, media outlets and health and beauty manufacturers with links to the military. Way Way Nay, which is available on both Google Play and Apple’s App Store, has been downloaded 70,000 times since its launch.

In an interview, the app’s operations manager, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said he was looking at adding another 450 businesses to the list. “We wanted to be able to show ordinary people in Myanmar how the military is linked with all aspects of daily life. We thought an app would be a good way to remind people what to boycott when they are shopping for products or services,” he said.

The military’s efforts to quell Myanmar’s largest pro-democracy protests in more than a decade have led to increasingly repressive crackdowns in the past month. According to human rights groups, more than 50 people have been killed and nearly 1,700 detained since the armed forces took control of the country. 

On Wednesday, at least 38 people were killed, when security forces fired on protesters in multiple cities and towns across the country. Video footage apparently taken by residents in Yangon, Myanmar’s largest city, appeared to show security officials shooting one man at point-blank range. In a separate incident, CCTV footage published by Radio Free Asia showed police assaulting and detaining three ambulance workers. 

The severity of the official response to the protests marks a hardening of the junta’s attitude to daily demonstrations that have paralyzed the economy and large swaths of the country. On Thursday, Michelle Bachelet, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights called on Myanmar's security forces to halt their "vicious crackdown on peaceful protesters" and urged the military to release the hundreds of people believed to have been unlawfully detained since February 1.

Blacklist Myanmar, launched on March 3 on Android, is another guidebook for shoppers who want to avoid firms whose sales benefit Myanmar’s armed forces. Blacklist Myanmar also allows users to submit new suggestions for businesses to boycott via an in-app email function.

The app’s creator, who asked to go by the pseudonym Red Warrior, explained that it was designed to limit the military’s access to different revenue streams. “In the long term, the reason why they have all the power and all the influence is because of these businesses and brands that they have been promoting,” he said.

“If people don’t support these brands or services, then our money won’t go into the military regime. We can slowly cut down their monopolizing influence on the country.”

Myanmar’s digital activists have also created apps to warn ordinary citizens and protesters of the increased presence of police and troops on the streets. Launched on Android on February 11, Genz Map Live takes real-time data from users to highlight areas with a high concentration of security personnel. The app, which has 40,000 users already, also reveals the locations of water cannons, roadblocks and ambulances. All of the data is fact-checked by moderators before it is uploaded.

One of the makers of Genz Map Live told me that the app’s designers took their cue from a similar digital street map used by protesters during pro-democracy demonstrations in Hong Kong in 2019. He added that members of his team consulted an anonymously authored 70-page document named “The HK19 Manual,” which has been widely shared among protesters in Hong Kong and recently translated from English to Burmese.

Digital democracy and milk tea

Over the past month, digital activists in Myanmar have had to overcome a series of military-enforced internet outages and disruptions to mobile networks. On Thursday night, the UK-based organization Netblocks confirmed that national internet connectivity had plummeted for the 19th night in a row, to 13% of pre-coup levels.

Pro-democracy organizers in Southeast Asia say that Myanmar’s internet shutdowns are similar to those deployed by authoritarian governments elsewhere. Sunny Chou, a former Hong Kong protester and founder of the human rights group Umbrella Union, who sought asylum in the UK earlier this year, said that the interruption of internet and data services in Myanmar was a strategy widely employed by the authorities in Hong Kong. 

“During the height of the movement in Hong Kong, there were a few times when our apps were disabled,” he said. “Telegram was also attacked a few times, so that the protesters could not properly communicate and organize their response.”

However, as Myanmar’s pro-democracy demonstrations have gathered pace, the country’s digital insurgency has also sparked interest among online and offline activists in the region. In Thailand, Cambodia and Hong Kong — all places that have been rocked by pro-democracy protests in recent years — an informal but watchful alliance of like-minded campaigners has used the internet to highlight the ongoing violence in Myanmar, while shedding light on their own oppressive regimes.

Sina Wittayawiroj is a Bangkok-based visual designer and activist. He first took an interest in his country’s pro-democracy movement in January 2019, when demonstrators took to the streets after the country’s ruling military junta signaled that long-postponed elections would be delayed for the fifth time in five years.

Activists like Wittayawiroj have gathered on social media, spreading satirical memes and advice highlighting the violence in Myanmar under the hashtag #MilkTeaAlliance, named for a sweet drink popular across the region. Many who follow the hashtag share a common fear about China’s dominance in wider Asia. In Thailand, for example, support for Taiwan and Hong Kong has become a rallying point for ordinary citizens who believe their own government is anti-democratic and too closely aligned with Beijing.

Wittayawiroj, who works for a video production and streaming platform, said he learned about the current crisis in Myanmar from a Burmese co-worker. He has regularly posted illustrations featuring the #MilkTeaAlliance hashtag since Myanmar’s February 1 coup. “I talk to them a lot and try to understand the situation that people are facing. I understand there was an election, but the military took control. I felt I had to draw something to help them.”

Experts say that the #MilkTeaAlliance has been energized by regional protest movements. 

“When we had the very popular pro-democracy movements in Hong Kong in 2014 and 2019, the world was watching,” said Debby Chan, a Hong Kong-based researcher who studies Sino-Myanmar relations. “The activists in Thailand and Myanmar also paid close attention to what happened in Hong Kong back then.”

“When some of the Hong Kongers witness Thai and Myanmar activists in their struggle, we see ourselves,” she added.

Correction: An earlier version of this story included a video recording of Myanmar Map Live. This has been corrected to Genz Map Live.

The post Digital insurgents rally against Myanmar’s military junta appeared first on Coda Story.

For digital startups, the interruptions to the internet and phone networks have led to constant turmoil. According to Shady Ramadan, who founded the online food delivery service Yangon Door2Door in 2013, orders fell by 80% in the days after the February 1 coup. “I’m really worried for my business,” said Ramadan, 44, during a recent telephone conversation. “Right now, I feel like we are turning backwards and I fear there is no one to talk to.”

Ramadan’s company employs 300 bicycle couriers, who deliver over 2,000 orders a day in Myanmar’s largest cities of Yangon, Mandalay and Bagan. Before the internet shutdown, the riders worked in eight hour shifts until midnight and Ramadan was planning to expand to a 24-hour service. A curfew enforced by the military now means that last orders must be processed by 6pm.

While orders to Yangon Door2Door have recovered to around 1,000 a day, the decline in business has cut the couriers’ monthly incomes by 50%. Ramadan said he was considering both cuts to wages and lay-offs. Riders who once earned around $300 a month, including commission and tips, have seen their pay drop to $150.

Unlike companies such as Deliveroo and Uber Eats, whose couriers are broadly classified as self-employed, Yangon Door2Door employs around 450 staff. “Our messengers are full-time employees,” said Ramadan, who was born in Egypt and moved to Myanmar in 2010. “This is different from other food delivery companies around the world.”

The Myanmar coup took most of the international community by surprise. Only three months after the ruling National League for Democracy (NLD) won the country’s general election, the army seized power and declared a year-long state of emergency. Myanmar’s leader Aung San Suu Kyi and senior members of the NLD were placed under house arrest, and power now rests with military chief Min Aung Hlaing.

The armed forces moved quickly to gain control of the country’s institutions. Both internet and mobile data services were suspended and have since experienced sustained interruptions. Last week, Netblocks, a UK-based organization that monitors digital rights around the world, said the online encyclopedia Wikipedia had also been blocked in Myanmar. 

The military alleges that widespread election fraud was to blame for the defeat of the army-aligned Union Solidarity and Development Party. Near daily protests peaked on Monday with millions taking to the streets across the country in mass strikes. The demonstrations are now being referred to as the “Five 2s” uprising, named for the date they began: 22/02/2021.

President Joe Biden has issued an executive order imposing financial sanctions against 10 individuals linked to the coup and steps are being taken to block military access to $1 billion of Myanmar government funds held in the U.S. Earlier this week, U.S. Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken posted a tweet in support of protesters in Myanmar, formerly known as Burma.

“The United States will continue to take firm action against those who perpetrate violence against the people of Burma as they demand the restoration of their democratically elected government,” it read. “We stand with the people of Burma.”

On the day of the coup, cuts to the internet and mobile data meant that customers could no longer access Yangon Door2Door’s app or website. “We are an online business, everything for us is based on the internet,” said Ramadan. “Our guys out in the street are based on the internet. If there’s no internet, we’re down.”

The staff worked up a solution by reverting to how restaurants once delivered food in the years before online connectivity. Workers sent text messages to regular customers and asked them to call to place orders.

Ramadan says the internet shutdowns have affected his company’s growth. He adds he will soon have to halt deliveries in Bagan and lay off workers. He also believes the outages are harming Myanmar’s small but vibrant e-commerce economy, valued at about $6 million in 2019.

“People sell things on Facebook, it’s a huge market here,” said Ramadan. “Whether it is food, or whether they import things from Singapore and sell them. They buy from Amazon and bring stuff to Myanmar. There are thousands and thousands of online businesses. All of them now have been switched off. Even if these businesses are two to three people, they are supporting families and there’s a trickle-down effect.”

Targeting the internet

The military junta’s crackdown on the internet and mobile data services has intensified since February 1. A cyber security bill released on February 11 proposes granting the regime a wide range of new powers, including requiring online service providers in Myanmar to locally store user data for three years. While the law doesn’t specify what kinds of companies might be affected, individuals convicted of failing to manage data in line with the cyber security bill could be jailed for up to three years, fined up to $7,500, or both.

The draft bill also gives the new government access to users’ personal data for security purposes and allows the authorities to force platforms to remove online content that threaten Myanmar’s “sovereignty and territorial integrity.” According to more than 150 local civil society groups, the 36-page document could pave the way for serious privacy and human rights abuses.

The military appears to be making calculated decisions about when ordinary citizens can access the internet. A nighttime curfew has been backed up by new daily internet blackouts. Recent data from Netblocks shows that the internet in Myanmar has been operating at around 13% of ordinary levels between 1am and 9am.

Yet those taking part in the country’s ongoing civil disobedience continue to livestream protests and strikes, with campaigners saying that the military’s control of the internet has been chaotic.

“We saw at the beginning they were chasing after social media platforms, shutting down Facebook, shutting down Twitter,” said Mark Farmaner, director of Burma Campaign UK. “Then they were shutting down the whole internet for two days, then starting it back up again, and then the overnight shutdowns. It seems like they are scrambling and don’t know exactly what to do and how to cope with the situation.”

Even though the military seems unwilling or unprepared to build a permanent wall around Myanmar’s internet, the disruptions have served to underscore the sometimes fragile link between emerging democracies and the freedoms widely believed to be enshrined in the world wide web. Long before this month’s army takeover, Myanmar was an important test bed for the use of new technologies in the decades-long struggle between the country’s military and its opposition groups.

Myanmar was an early example of how activists could harness the internet for positive change, when Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy won a sweeping victory in 1990’s first multiparty election in three decades. The military junta refused to recognize the results or hand over power. Suu Kyi was also placed under house arrest and the army banned her and other senior pro-democracy figures from taking part in elections.

Suu Kyi’s arrest galvanized global internet users who mobilized against the military. Digital mailing lists like BurmaNet, launched in 1993, shed light on the country’s worsening human rights situation by sharing news reports about Myanmar. BurmaNet proved to be so popular that in 1997, the military regime initiated its own rival electronic mailing list, called MyanmarNet.

Local and international activists, students and pro-democracy organizers from around the world also led online and offline efforts to limit the army’s income by campaigning against Western companies with business links in Myanmar. Activists with the popular Free Burma campaign used the internet to share audio and video files of human rights abuses, along with speeches by Suu Kyi.

As international pressure mounted, companies like Disney, PepsiCo Inc and Pizza Hut all terminated their business operations in Myanmar. In 1997, U.S. President Bill Clinton signed federal legislation banning any new investment by American companies in Myanmar.

Over the past decade, Myanmar has also seen the mass adoption of cellular services by ordinary citizens. A surge in network providers and affordable data plans has given residents access to some of the fastest mobile networks in the region. 

“The population of Myanmar has access to more information now than at any time in the past,” said Dr. Lee Jones, a senior lecturer at Queen Mary University of London, who has written extensively about Myanmar’s politics and economy.

Jones said the daily internet blackouts have been used to cover up the nighttime arrests of hundreds of opposition politicians, civil servants and activists by police “snatch teams” in cities like Yangon. Recent video footage has shown residents banging pots and pans to warn their neighbors of approaching security forces.

“The control of the internet is a temporary tactical device,” said Jones. “The temporary outages are linked to providing cover for military operations in particular urban areas, which is why there isn’t a kind of actual shutdown, it keeps coming on and off.”

The post Myanmar military’s internet shutdowns are destroying businesses appeared first on Coda Story.

On Monday, Myanmar’s military detained the country’s leader Aung San Suu Kyi and other members of the National League for Democracy party, announced a one-year state of emergency and took over the government. Its reasons for doing so are based on its claims that November’s general election, which the NLD won by a landslide, was rigged.

Western leaders have been quick to voice their disapproval of the takeover. President Joe Biden suggested reinstating recently suspended sanctions against the country, U.K. prime minister Boris Johnson condemned the “unlawful imprisonment of civilians.” Meanwhile, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres described it as “a serious blow to democratic reforms in Myanmar.”

However, QAnon believers, recently purged by a variety of mainstream social media platforms, are applauding Myanmar’s military on Telegram and their own online broadcasts.

Jordan Sather, a QAnon video blogger, dedicated part of his February 1 episode on Rumble to the Myanmar coup. He showed a sequence of photographs of Suu Kyi with Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and George Soros. 

“Honestly, this is probably some foreshadowing, and I think it’s only a matter of time before we start seeing this exact same thing happen elsewhere,” he said of the coup. "Like I said, it’d be nice if this happened in America already, but there are logical reasons why it hasn’t. You have to remember that fake news media here is much more entrenched and influential than in a small country like Myanmar.” 

Another QAnon believer on Gab, a social media site popular with the conspiracist far-right, posted that “The Burmese military can now expose to the world the same people and equipment who fucked with their elections are the same ones who fucked with the ones here. Myanmar military will literally show that Trump was the real winner. This is why the media is panicking over this coup."

Such comments may seem outlandish, but, according to Amarnath Amarasingam of the School of Religion at Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada, there is plenty of precedent for them.

“This is basically what Q supporters have been doing with every major event that happens. They look for numerological clues, they look for ways that the event is tied to Clinton, or Obama, or someone else they think is part of the deep state, and then they try to figure out whether it is part of the ‘plan’ that they are waiting for,” he said. 

After Joe Biden’s January inauguration, some QAnoners have become disillusioned and distanced themselves from the movement. Others, however, have no intention of giving up and are keen to grasp onto current events — no matter how far flung — that appear to justify their beliefs. 

“For those that remain committed to Q, they will continue to find signs in world events, continue to rationalize why their predictions never come to fruition, and carry on the good fight,” said  Amarasingam. “We know that these kinds of apocalyptic and millenarian movements always find a way to keep going.”

Achi Tsitsishvili contributed to reporting.

The post QAnon followers back the Myanmar coup appeared first on Coda Story.

“I had received a lot of calls in the early morning, but when I woke up, I tried to call them back and I couldn’t,” said Yi, an advocacy coordinator at the Action Committee for Democracy Development, a coalition of community-based rights groups. “I checked and there was no service at all, it had been cut off.”

Yi soon understood that Myanmar’s powerful military had taken control of the country overnight. “I was worried about friends, colleagues, leaders, politicians and activists,” she said. “Anything can happen at that time.”

On February 1, three months after Myanmar’s ruling National League for Democracy (NLD) won the country’s general election, the army seized power in a bloodless coup and declared a year-long state of emergency. Myanmar’s leader Aung San Suu Kyi and prominent members of the NLD were placed under house arrest. Power now rests with military chief Min Aung Hlaing.

The military alleges that widespread fraud took place in the November election, at the cost of the army-aligned Union Solidarity and Development Party, and has taken control of major cities and introduced a curfew.

A crackdown on the internet and mobile networks was central to the coup. Internet access fell by 50% on Monday, according to NetBlocks, a UK-based organization that monitors digital rights around the world. In a tweet, it said that the “pattern of disruption indicates a centrally issued telecoms blackout order.”

NetBlocks also revealed that users were unable to access at least two cellular networks. Myanmar is home to four main providers, the Myanmar-backed MPT, a Qatari company named Ooredoo and Norway’s Telenor. All three are rivals of the military-backed telecommunications company MyTel.

Rights groups have previously raised concerns about the potential security threats posed to MyTel users. In 2018, the European Union considered applying sanctions against it, in response to human rights abuses by the military that left thousands of Rohingya Muslims dead and drove more than 700,000 to flee to neighboring Bangladesh.

On the day of the coup, the activist group Justice for Myanmar posted on Twitter warning of potential surveillance by MyTel: “On Mytel + the other mobile networks, the military can monitor voice calls, SMS, location and some online activity. We appeal to activists, human rights defenders and journalists to take extra care of their safety in this dangerous and uncertain time by taking these steps.”

The group called for human rights workers and journalists to adopt a number of measures to protect themselves from surveillance, including boycotting MyTel, using end-to-end encrypted apps like Signal, and avoiding voice calls and the sending of SMS messages on all networks. 

While it is uncommon for a nation’s armed forces to invest in mobile and internet infrastructure, as is the case in Myanmar, military control of digital spaces can yield huge power over citizens.

“The communication disruptions are an attempt by the Myanmar military to pull a blind over its heinous actions, including arbitrary detention of prominent critics of the military, wrote a spokesperson for Justice for Myanmar in an email. “This has instilled fear among the public and disrupted the daily lives of many who rely on the networks to conduct their work, which for some has been crucial during the time of pandemic.”

The internet has provided authoritarian leaders and democratic governments with a valuable off-switch to control populations during times of crisis. Online blackouts, disruptions to connectivity and social media outages have been a hallmark of elections and protests in 35 countries since 2019, including Iran, Uganda and Ethiopia. Coda Story has previously reported on blackouts in India and the introduction of new laws limiting digital freedoms in Russia.

While cellular network and internet access has mostly returned to Myanmar, digital rights activists are concerned about future consequences for free speech as the military consolidates its control of the country’s institutions. On Wednesday morning, users on two Facebook groups, Myanmar Civil Disobedience Movement Funds and Yangon Youth Network, were calling for doctors, teachers and other professions to halt work in protest against the coup. 

“From a freedom perspective, I believe there will be more control of internet traffic,” said an employee of Internet in Myanmar, a technology news website, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “Since the last few months, the government started to introduce some filtering, I think we should expect that will happen more and more.” 

The post Myanmar prepares for military to ratchet up control of the internet appeared first on Coda Story.

A recently exposed disinformation campaign on Facebook has highlighted the powerful role played by military-backed telecommunications companies in controlling digital spaces in one of the most authoritarian corners of the world.

As part of the social media platform’s much-publicized crackdown on fake news, the company earlier this year began to publish monthly reports about accounts, pages and groups designed to misinform and mislead users. 

A recently released document revealed a coordinated campaign targeting hundreds of thousands of people in Myanmar geared toward improving public opinion toward MyTel, the telecommunications company backed by Myanmar’s military.

The social media company found that a number of accounts, originating in both Myanmar and Vietnam, had posted material critical of three companies: the Myanmar-backed MPT; a Qatari company named Ooredoo; and the Norwegian Telenor. All are rivals of Myanmar’s military-backed telecommunications company MyTel. In total, the network of pages had gathered some 265,000 followers and spent more than $1.1 million on Facebook advertising.

According to the report, the administrators and owners of the accounts, which purported to be independent consumer news pages, operated financially-motivated influence operations that shared content about the alleged business failures of MyTel’s rivals. The posts were written in English and Burmese. 

MyTel is a joint venture between three major groups, including Myanmar’s military and VietTel, which is owned by the Vietnamese Ministry of Defense. In its investigation into disinformation in Myanmar, Facebook also discovered that although the organizations behind the campaign had attempted to conceal their involvement, a trail tied the network of Facebook pages to MyTel, VietTel and a Vietnam-based PR firm named Gapit Communications.

MyTel and Gapit did not respond to requests for comment for this story.

While telecommunications companies owned by governments can be found in countries around the world — Etisalat in the United Arab Emirates and the Data and Communication Company in Iran, for example —  those backed by armed forces are rare. However, where they do exist,  experts say that such companies wield huge power over digital spaces and competitors.

“Telecoms are very lucrative, and in some countries, like Myanmar, Vietnam and Egypt, the military really plays an outsized role in their economy and the country at large,” said Allie Funk, a researcher with Freedom House, an organization that ranks political liberty around the world. 

“Control over ISPs and other types of mobile services means that it is easier to access data that’s really sensitive to minority groups. It’s also then easier for the government to shut down the internet or block websites,” she added. 

Freedom House gave Myanmar an Internet Freedom Score of 36/100 in its 2020 country report. 

The network of fake accounts also highlights the penetration of social media platforms like Facebook in impoverished countries like Myanmar, where the company has more than 18 million users and is, for many people, the most popular way to access and share news.

The importance of telecoms to the military can be seen in a 2015 announcement by the Egyptian ministry of defense, which said it would create a National Company for Communications Infrastructure and own a 51% controlling stake in the new entity, overseeing the laying out and monitoring of fiber-optic cables nationwide. The plan never came to fruition. 

Danny O'Brien, director of strategy at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a U.S. based nonprofit organization that defends civil liberties in the digital world, said Myanmar and Egypt share common forms of military oversight. 

“I think Myanmar and Egypt stand out because of a recent history, where military dictatorships were threatened by internet-mediated revolutions, and then managed to secure some degree of control,” he said, via email. “I think they learned a lesson then about the dangers a free and open internet can pose to military control.”

Myanmar’s restive Rakhine State is now home to the world’s longest-running internet shutdown. In June 2019, amid mounting clashes between the armed forces and insurgents from the predominantly Muslim Rohingya ethnic group, the Myanmar government ordered telecommunications networks operating in much of the state to switch off mobile internet access.

Facebook and Myanmar’s military

The discovery of the fake Facebook pages underscores concerns about how military-backed telecommunications companies seek to preserve their market share and raises questions as to whether Facebook should be doing any business at all with companies linked to Myanmar’s military, also known as the Tatmadaw. 

Mark Farmaner of Burma Campaign UK, a human rights advocacy group that publishes a “Dirty List” of businesses with ties to the Myanmar military, said Facebook’s move to curb coordinated disinformation about telecoms is insufficient.

“Facebook are happy for the Myanmar military to promote products that help pay for genocide, but if they spread disinformation about their rivals, that’s where Facebook draws the line. It’s a strange standard,” wrote Farmaner in email.

In 2018, Facebook removed the accounts of several Myanmar military officials from both Facebook and Instagram,  in order to prevent the spread of “hate and misinformation” related to the Rohingya.

In September 2018, the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on Myanmar, which is tasked with investigating human rights violations in the country, stated that the nation’s military has “so seriously violated international law that any engagement in any form with the Tatmadaw, its current leadership, and its businesses, is indefensible.” 

The UN’s findings followed a 2017 crackdown by the Myanmar military that left thousands of Rohingya dead and drove more than 700,000 to flee to neighboring Bangladesh.

Photo by SAI AUNG MAIN/AFP via Getty Images

The post Military-backed company in Myanmar seeks control of the country’s internet appeared first on Coda Story.

According to the sender, her name was Ma Ye Ye Soe, she was 19, belonged to the Rakhine Buddhist ethnic group, and lived in a village called Myin Hpu in the remote west of northern Rakhine State’s Rathedaung Township. She was caught by a stray bullet, allegedly fired by Myanmar army soldiers as they sought to flush out Arakan Army (AA) insurgents. A four-year-old girl was injured, too. These details were confirmed in the local press a day later, all correct bar the fact that she was reportedly 18, not 19. The Myanmar army has since denied responsibility for the killing, pointing the finger at militants.

Rakhine State was, in 2016 and 2017, the site of ethnic cleansing and several genocidal massacres of stateless Rohingya, leaving at least 6,700 dead and causing over 700,000 to flee to neighboring Bangladesh. This has drawn a worldwide chorus of condemnation and calls for International Criminal Court referral for those responsible, tarnishing both the country’s image and that of its leader, Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi.

The state has also been home to a simmering conflict between Rakhine ethnic insurgents and the Myanmar army or Tatmadaw. The exact number of combatants and civilians killed in the Tatmadaw-Arakan Army conflict is unclear, but the violence has so far displaced over 10,000 people and caused massive disruptions to the central government’s ability to administer conflict-wracked parts of the state.

Pictures of Ye Ye Soe’s dead body began to circulate on social media within hours of the trigger being pulled; the sense of outrage from the Rakhine community was immediate and palpable. In the past, a lack of connectivity infrastructure in Rakhine State meant such swift documentation of human rights abuses and killings of innocent civilians was not possible.

That such images can be leveraged to garner support for an ongoing conflict is not news to the Myanmar army, nor the state information apparatus: until recently, the Ministry of Information and the Directorate of Public Relations and Psychological Warfare had sought to deflect criticism of atrocities against the Rohingya in Rakhine State by blasting social media with images of dead Hindu citizens, who they alleged were massacred by Rohingya insurgents.

For every conflict that plays out on the ground in Myanmar today, there’s a parallel one being waged in cyberspace, by activists, ethnic armed groups, political parties, civilian government actors — and the army itself.

A New Age of Connectivity

When monks first took to the streets in Myanmar’s largest protests in decades in 2007, in a soon-to-be-crushed popular uprising dubbed the “Saffron Revolution”, the world was offered a rare glimpse into a country in the grips of a heavy censorship regime imposed by a brutal military dictatorship. As the number of protestors swelled to tens of thousands, it was the most significant uprising since that of the 1988 pro-democracy movement, which was violently snuffed out and saw thousands of dissidents jailed.

One of the more iconic pieces of footage from 2007, the close-range shooting of Japanese photojournalist Kenji Nagai by a member of the security forces, was captured by citizen journalists from a footbridge. At this time, footage was smuggled out, uploaded and distributed by dissident networks.

At the time, measures for the pre-publication censorship of the media were firmly in place, restrictions on publishing licenses and broadcasting rights were a near-total state monopoly. Independent media had been branded traitors by the state, with one particularly memorable, bellicose broadcast referring to the BBC as “Assassins on Air, Sky-full of Liars”.

Internet access was an expensive, pervasively filtered and heavily surveilled commodity, available only to the elite and those brave, technologically adept and patient enough to use the slow and unreliable connections available at the internet cafes that had begun to crop up in urban centres. Internet outages at times of political unrest were common.

In the late 1990s, small-scale digital activism had begun to take shape. Exiled dissidents, citizen journalists and in-country activists coordinated online, despite the restrictions in place. This was a major shift for a country where the military regime had prohibited ownership of a computer, modem, fax machine or computer network without prior Ministry approval — with penalties ranging from seven to 15 years for violations.

A decade ago in Myanmar, a SIM card could cost as much as $2,000, with one choice of operator. Now they’re $1.50, and consumers can get high-speed 4G from any one of four networks with coverage across much of the country. In this new age of connectivity, the army which once censored the internet and press, hacked dissidents and mounted denial of service attacks on exile media outlets, has turned its hand to disinformation.

“Crushing censorship was rapidly replaced with a cacophony of social media, where agitprop could hide better and be more effectively insidious,” independent analyst David Scott Mathieson told Coda.

While other social media platforms like Viber, WeChat and WhatsApp are used in the country, only Facebook enjoys total supremacy. The platform occupies a unique place in the political landscape of Myanmar with 18 million users. It is used by rebel groups and the state alike to issue communiques. In a low-resource setting where many regional government offices still use typewriters, Facebook allows the government and military to communicate directly — and, it appears, indirectly — with its citizenry.

Telecommunications data indicates Facebook accounted for as much as 80 percent of daily in-country web traffic at its peak, with most browsing of external sites taking place through the platform. When it launched, users enjoyed subsidized access to the platform under the now-discontinued Free Basics program.

Facebook’s enormous influence drew influence campaigns. In late 2018, and again in early 2019, Facebook announced it had dismantled sweeping “Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior” (CIB) campaigns directly traceable to the Myanmar military.  

This first crackdown took out 18 accounts and 52 Pages in Myanmar, including those of senior military figures. Among these were 46 Pages and 12 accounts engaged in covert influence campaigns. These pages were run to appear independent, but occasionally would push the military line, undermining the government of Aung San Suu Kyi and promoting anti-Rohingya sentiment.

All told, the banned accounts (both overt and covert) had a massive reach; they were followed by almost 12 million accounts, or about two-thirds of all Facebook users in Myanmar — a country of some 51 million.

While Facebook has not elaborated on the precise extent of the reach of the covert accounts, it can be deduced to have been significant. Prior to being taken down, the two overt pages for the Commander-in-Chief, Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, had a total of over 4 million followers.

A senior figure at Facebook intimately familiar with the CIB investigation said that while “black propaganda” such as this is not new, its presence on social media presents a unique challenge for those who must deal with it. The company looked for “clustering patterns of behavior that are indicative of deception”.

It’s not just the military that was accused of escalating rhetoric online. Hate speech on social media has been singled out by the United Nations as adding fuel to the fire.

The UN Fact Finding Mission noted that during the Rohingya crisis of 2016 and 2017, “the civilian authorities have spread false narratives; denied the Tatmadaw’s wrongdoing; blocked independent investigations, including of the Fact-Finding Mission; and overseen destruction of evidence”, concluding that through both act and omission, civilian authorities had “contributed to the commission of atrocity crimes”.

“Aung San Suu Kyi's State Counsellor Information committee [Facebook] page was full of hysterical posts about terrorists and implying on a daily basis that the [aid agencies were] assisting [Rohingya rebels],” said Mark Farmaner of Burma Campaign UK.

The Facebook page posted material accusing Rohingya women of claiming “FAKE RAPE”, which remains on the site.

“The phone is our gun.”

From targeted advertising to promote the “Leave” vote in the UK’s Brexit referendum in 2016, to evidence of election-meddling in the U.S., questions have been raised around the globe about the impact of social media on democratic processes. In India, WhatsApp has been linked to a string of lynchings and deaths. In the Philippines, coordinated Facebook and Twitter campaigns promote the agenda of President Rodrigo Duterte and directly attack media who criticize his administration.

Despite explicit warnings about the rampant abuse of social media platforms, technology companies have been slow to act. In Asia, the violence in Rakhine State is perhaps the most shocking episode since the advent of social media in the country.

In Myanmar, Facebook has faced intense criticism over its failure to act earlier on rampant hate speech, with a UN-mandated fact finding mission declaring content on the platform played a “determining role” in stirring up hatred against the Rohingya Muslim minority. The company has indicated a willingness to comply with any legal requests for preserved data, and material posted to the site may well feature as evidence in any international criminal justice proceedings.

What has played out politically, since the 2011 announcement that the military would transition to a quasi-civilian, democratically-elected parliament, has done so concurrently with what is perhaps the fastest digital rollout in human history.

Cell phone towers were erected as people began the countdown to the 2015 elections, the first credibly democratic ballot in decades. But the digital rollout has also prompted a new authoritarian crackdown. “Netizens are being jailed for writing criticism against the government, when some content in their criticism harms or discredits the authorities. Any online user could easily be charged with the Telecommunications Law, Electronic transition law and Law Protection the Privacy and Security of Citizens,” freedom of expression activist Maung Saungkha told Coda.

The allegations of atrocities in Rakhine State have also divided the country, with the post-censorship domestic media who do report on the issue coming under intense pressure — something the jailing of two Reuters journalists in December 2017 lays clear testament to. Reporters Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo’s on-the-ground reporting exposed a massacre of ten Rohingya men in a village called Inn Dinn. For their part, they received a seven-year jail sentence. The pair, who received this year’s Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting, were released last month after 500 days. Last month, seven soldiers who were sentenced to 10 years in prison for the Inn Din village killings, were released early from prison.

In early 2019, an organization called Athan (Voice) reported that 217 people were prosecuted in 103 cases related to freedom of expression during 2018. Nine cases involved journalists.

In Myanmar, as elsewhere, the exact impact this new dynamic  of disinformation, misinformation and propaganda has had on conflict situations is not yet fully understood.

“The use of fake accounts and disinformation on social media is often used to manipulate public opinion by giving the illusion of popularity or opposition to an idea. This manufacturing of consensus can result in a bandwagon effect wherein people support an idea or political power because they fear being marginalized,” said Samuel Woolley, Director at the Digital Intelligence Lab at the Institute for the Future.

“Often times this computational propaganda — the use of automation and social media in attempts to steer political communication — is geared towards massively and forcedly amplifying one perspective while disproportionately dampening another,” he said.

In 2017, the Omidyar Network and the Democracy Fund, both funded by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, released a report which highlighted the ability of social media to potentially undermine democratic institutions, citing “distinct threats for public dialogue by flooding the public square with multiple, competing realities and exacerbating the lack of agreement about what constitutes truth, facts, and evidence.”

In a state where press access has been all but stamped out, social media provides a glimpse of what’s happening on the ground — for both the Rohingya and Rakhine communities. For those civilians trapped in conflict zones, technology has offered them a chance to broadcast their cry for help.

As one opposition source put it, “The phone is our gun.”

In Rakhine State, the violence continues. A new report from Amnesty International has accused Myanmar's military of killing and injuring civilians in indiscriminate attacks in new operations. “Less than two years since the world outrage over the mass atrocities committed against the Rohingya population, the Myanmar military is again committing horrific abuses against ethnic groups in Rakhine state,” said Nicholas Bequelin, regional director for Amnesty in east and southeast Asia.

On April 21, a new snippet of footage was circulated of a heaving distended belly, with a wound about an inch wide to the lower-left of the naval. Later, a video of men in the night, lit by phone torch, digging a grave. One of the men peered into a black bin bag, and delicately removed a dead baby. The mother, a 32-year-old Rohingya woman from Sin Thay Pyin village in Buthidaung Township, had been shot in the stomach but survived.

The post The war for truth in Myanmar’s cyberspace appeared first on Coda Story.

Chanting “Allahu akbar!” and “Buddhists are terrorists,” they denounced what they called Myanmar’s genocidal treatment of its Rohingya Muslim minority - even offering themselves as volunteers to wage “jihad” on behalf of the tens of thousands now affected by the crisis. It was also an explicit challenge to the Kremlin, which has tried to block any outside intervention.

The protesters had no permit either. Yet, as several opposition activists - used to rough treatment for far lesser infringements - noted bitterly, no one was detained. The police were even quite friendly.

PUTIN’S FOOT SOLDIERS

But what made the protest most unusual was its driving force - a man seen as one of Vladimir Putin’s most loyal supporters, Chechnya’s autocratic, bombastic leader Ramzan Kadyrov. He has previously called himself and other Chechens “foot soldiers in Putin’s army” — but now he is openly defying Russia’s foreign policy. And so far at least, he is meeting almost no resistance from a befuddled Moscow: unthinkable by normal Russian political standards. And the next day, Kadyrov turned up the pressure - addressing a massive rally in Grozny, Chechnya’s capital. “If Russia is supporting these shaytans [devils] who are committing crimes, then I’m against Russia’s position,” said Ramzan Kadyrov in an Instagram post.

He had already trailed his views on his Instagram account (his preferred mode of global communication). In one post that was later deleted - but still available on YouTube - he openly challenged his Kremlin patrons, saying “If Russia is supporting these shaytans [devils] who are committing crimes, then I’m against Russia’s position.” In another angry diatribe, he condemned what he called the silence of “dozens of countries and human rights organizations.... in the face of untold atrocities.”

Kadyrov specifically mentioned the UN in that statement, which many interpreted as an unsubtle swipe at Russia’s diplomatic efforts to stall any international condemnation of Myanmar.

Russia has allied with China to block even the most timid statements from the UN Security Council - concerned partly about protecting lucrative trade, but also motivated by its ingrained aversion to any foreign interventions in domestic matters. Last month, Russia’s Foreign Ministry unequivocally supported Myanmar’s government, using the negative term boyeviki, or thugs, to describe Rohingya insurgents. It is a word previously used for Kadyrov’s late father and his fellow Chechen rebels, when they were fighting against Russia.

MARRIAGE OF CONVENIENCE FRAYING

It is difficult to overestimate the significance of the challenge Kadyrov is posing to the Russian leader. President Putin has allowed him unusual freedom to run Chechnya as he wants, allowing Kadyrov to turn it into a de facto independent Islamic state. But most of the time the two leaders’ agendas have coincided, with Kadyrov even acting as the Kremlin’s unofficial envoy to Islamic states such as Saudi Arabia. But now this marriage of convenience is suddenly in question. Russian TV networks barely mentioned the enormous demonstration in Grozny, and the state news agency RIA Novosti posted and then quickly removed an op-ed harshly criticizing Kadyrov.

Russia’s entire propaganda apparatus was caught completely unawares by Kadyrov’s decision to inject himself into the Myanmar crisis. State TV networks barely mentioned the enormous demonstration in Grozny, and the state news agency RIA Novosti posted and then quickly removed an op-ed harshly criticizing Kadyrov. So for now, it is clear that he still retains his political clout.

Even Putin himself attempted to tone down the extent of Kadyrov’s insubordination. Speaking at a news conference at the recent BRICS summit in China, Putin told journalists that “every person is entitled to their opinion, no matter what their status is, even if they are regional leaders.”

But Putin’s words rang hollow. Despite his ultra-loyalist past, observers see this as a sign of Kadyrov marking himself out as different - a lot more than just one of Russia’s 85 regional leaders. Instead, he appears to be casting himself as the main leader not just of Russian Muslims, but as a key player in the Islamic community worldwide - and one who can rapidly mobilize thousands of loyal supporters.

The half-hearted response to Kadyrov’s demarche shows just how much Moscow is uncomfortable with that prospect.

The post Putin’s surprise Myanmar challenge from Chechnya appeared first on Coda Story.