Peering through the window of his Mandalay apartment in early March, Hein Aung Htet watched billows of white tear gas float across the skyline. He heard the bang of several gunshots, only later to learn that two protesters had been shot—one in the neck, one in the head—a few minutes’ drive from his home.
The 23-year-old had been applying to graduate schools overseas when Senior General Min Aung Hlaing launched his 1 February coup, aborting Myanmar’s five-year experiment with electoral democracy. The army toppled the civilian government a day before a newly elected parliament was set to take office. State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi, President Win Myint and hundreds of their allies have been arrested.
Hein Aung Htet immediately put his applications on hold so he could join his friends in the streets. But the days steadily grew bloodier; the death toll stands at over 450, with more than 100 killed on a single day. Hein Aung Htet began to reconsider his role in the anti-coup movement.
“My parents are overly worried about me,” he tells New Naratif. “I try to protest three or four days a week, but because my parents are so overprotective, I’ve tried to find other ways of activism, and one of the ways I found was fundraising.”
We’re sending them money so they can go on strike.
He latched onto one of the slogans chanted by supporters of the Civil Disobedience Movement (CDM)—an apparently leaderless campaign aiming to sabotage the military junta from the inside: “Don’t go to work. Quit your job.”
Today, Hein Aung Htet runs one of the numerous ad hoc online fundraisers that have materialised in the wake of the coup to support the CDM, whose primary tactic is to encourage civil servants to walk off their jobs until a stalled economy and an inability to govern force the generals to step down. Taxes are not being collected, imports and exports are not being processed and banks have largely stopped operating.
“They are the ones capable of making the military government fall, so it’s really essential that they don’t go to work, especially bank workers, healthcare workers and electricity workers, because these things are essential to society,” Hein Aung Htet says. “For these things not to work…would mean that the military government has no control over the country.”
“Ethnic Perspective”
The labour strikes have set off a war of attrition, in which any hope for democracy in Myanmar depends on the junta, known as the State Administrative Council (SAC), succumbing to economic deprivation before the CDM crumbles under the force of abductions, torture and gunfire. Mutual aid is therefore the lifeforce of the pro-democracy movement.
“We’re trying to donate as much as possible to each person,” Hein Aung Htet says. “We’re sending them money so they can go on strike. So what they will do is not take money from work…and we will substitute their salary.”
Fundraising efforts have been informal and decentralised, with organisers telling New Naratif they are collecting money mainly through their personal social networks.
“I used to work at a school that taught only ethnic minorities, so my work colleagues and my students were all ethnic minorities,” Hein Aung Htet says. “I called them up and asked them, can you find out if anyone in your neighbourhood…is taking donations to fund the government workers, and they find out for me.”
“Mainly, I’m sending the money to ethnic regions because I find that in Mandalay and Yangon there are quite enough donors to sustain themselves. So we’re sending it to Mon State, Shan, Kachin, Kayah,” he says.
Thierie, who works for a faith-based organisation in Myanmar’s remote Naga Self-Administered Zone (SAZ), decided with a few friends to start raising money independently for striking workers out of a similar concern for the CDM’s viability outside the country’s main urban centres.
“We see that this movement will go on until we see the downfall of this coup. We don’t know how long it’s going to be, how many more months it has to go, and these employees have started to feel insecure, especially financially,” she says. “For the last year, people have been suffering because of this COVID-19. People are not making income, and the coup happened at the same time. If we don’t start [raising funds] like this, everyone—not only government employees—everyone is going to suffer.”
The Committee Representing Pyidaungsu Hluttaw (CRPH)—a group made up of deposed parliamentarians who are identifying themselves as the legitimate government of Myanmar—has endorsed the Civil Disobedience Movement and announced that “civil servants participating in the non-violent people’s demonstration CDM will be awarded CDM-related civil servant badges”, while “non-CDM staff will be effectively punished for encouraging terrorist groups that are not involved in non-violent insurgency”.
But for borderland communities like Thierie’s, neither the promise of reward nor the threat of punishment make living without a salary easier.
“For the Naga community, we are not getting any support from CRPH right now. We just received news that we can send them a list of CDM [workers], so we are trying to send them through Viber messages, but that is the only thing we have gotten from CRPH—no support so far. We are doing it by ourselves,” she says in early March.
CRPH did not respond to multiple requests for comment about the degree of its support for striking workers in minority communities.
If we have a victory, this coup will bring different nationalities [together], and minorities will get a better voice in the future.
CRPH’s alleged lack of support for ethnic minorities echoes the marginalisation many non-Bamar communities described over the last five years when Aung San Suu Kyi and her Bamar-dominated National League for Democracy (NLD) ran the country.
“In northern Shan, I have not seen them helping those in CDM financially, says Thandar*, another independent fundraiser, referring to CRPH.
“I see them helping those in big cities like Yangon and Mandalay, not really in rural areas or ethnic people’s areas. I think in ethnic areas, people see CRPH as something that represents the NLD.”
“The NLD’s core supporters were very defensive [when] we constructively criticised them. That also made us not trust them easily, even now,” Thandar says.
But now that major cities are experiencing the fear of violence and surveillance that minority communities have felt for decades, Thandar hopes the larger pro-democracy movement will take minority grievances seriously.
“Even in big cities like Yangon, there are CCTV cameras, a lot of eyes watching them, and [the military] are still committing these crimes—it would be worse in ethnic areas—so people in Yangon and Mandalay started to have a kind of ethnic perspective, and I hope that will not change,” she says.
In the Naga SAZ, Thierie says local, ethnic minority-led political organisations and civil society groups have not voiced strong support for the CDM, which she attributes to a history of marginalisation. It has fallen to ordinary citizens like her and her friends to step in and seize the opportunity for reconciliation by supporting local civil servants, many of whom are posted there from different parts of the country.
“At the beginning of the coup, many ethnic minorities kept silent. I saw not much activity. …We Naga ourselves are not very strong in making our voice heard,” Thierie says. “That’s why we’re joining in this revolutionary movement. …If we have a victory, this coup will bring different nationalities [together], and minorities will get a better voice in the future.”
“They Will Not Allow This”
The sudden need for donations from abroad comes at a time when there could hardly be more obstacles to getting cash into Myanmar. Walkouts at both public and private banks have forced most branches to close. Some ATMs remain operational, but banks are struggling to replenish them, and the Myanmar Central Bank has limited withdrawals to 500,000 kyat (US$350) per day for personal accounts and the equivalent of US$14,000 per week for corporate accounts.
“The Tatmadaw has attempted to shut down any source of funds entering the country lately,” says a spokesperson for Mutual Aid Myanmar, citing the military’s recent seizure of more than US$4 million from private accounts belonging to the Open Society Foundation. Mutual Aid Myanmar is a collection of activists and academics that raises money to support striking civil servants.
Meanwhile, the junta is still collecting up to US$90 million every month from oil and gas exports, and Western sanctions on military leaders do not preclude doing business with military-owned enterprises.
Channeling funding as I’m doing with a Facebook fundraiser with no accountability is, of course, absurd. But there is no other way to get this done.
“I don’t think it’s easy for people abroad to donate,” says Hein Aung Htet, who has primarily been soliciting donations through his Instagram account. “I’m collecting money through PayPal and then transferring to CB Bank, and then we’re transferring it to KBZ [Bank]. Banks are closed at the moment, so it’s a bit of a complicated process, but it’s doable. It takes around a week for the money to reach Burmese banks.”
Once the funds reach his Myanmar account, Hein Aung Htet asks CDM organisers around the country to send him lists of local civil servants who need money for the month. He then transfers 100,000 kyat (US$70) per worker to the organisers, who distribute the cash to the workers they represent.
Thierie says she raised around US$9,000 in February, much of it from church-based groups in the United States, and distributed it in 100,000-kyat instalments to 119 health workers and General Administration Department staff in the towns of Hkamti, Leshi, Lahe and Namyung. She faces similar constraints—the need for access to both foreign and local bank accounts, the uncertain functionality of fintech apps and the limited availability of cash.
Moreover, the need to collect as much money as possible stands at odds with the need to remain invisible to the military authorities. The state-run Global New Light of Myanmar reported on 2 March that junta leaders had discussed the “illegal inflow of foreign money” and instructed government ministries to “take action against physicians, specialists and staff who are taking part in the CDM”. Protesters have since reported seeing police stop cars on the street to check passengers’ social media activity for anti-coup content.
Thierie says security forces searched print shops around the Naga SAZ in early March looking for evidence of local support for the CDM.
“They will not allow this. If they know, they will stop it. They will try to freeze how we’re getting funds,” she says. “We are not publishing what we are doing on social media. We are not announcing outside. We are trying to keep it very private.”
Hein Aung Htet says has collected around US$24,500 since he began fundraising in late February, and distributed around US$19,000; the rest he plans to distribute when he can be sure the transactions are safe from military surveillance. He also tries to keep lists of civil servants who have received his funds to assure donors that their money is going directly to striking workers, but many workers request anonymity.
“Sometimes they won’t tell me for safety reasons,” he says.
The lack of accountability or transparency inherent in running a clandestine fundraiser makes the multitude that have arisen to support the CDM unsuitable for partnerships with major charities and non-governmental organisations. Nonetheless, the current makeshift system appears to be the safest way, if not the only way, to deliver cash directly to striking workers.
“Decentralisation is best,” says Steven Davis, an American who has worked in Myanmar and is raising money through Facebook for ethnic minority communities. “Small cash transfers through multiple banks in various countries are much harder to detect and shut down. On the receiving end, decentralisation is definitely safer. My contacts in different towns and regions don’t know each others’ identities.”
As such, it falls to prospective donors to conduct their own due diligence before deciding how to support the CDM.
“Channeling funding as I’m doing with a Facebook fundraiser with no accountability is, of course, absurd. But there is no other way to get this done,” Davis says. “Folks will have to be happy with things that look a little messy, and there will undoubtedly be some screw-ups.”
“Calculating the Crash”
Most of the civil servants receiving donations through CDM fundraisers have been forced to subsist on less than their normal salaries. With poverty rising and the threat of permanent unemployment looming, a significant minority of civil servants have either gone back to work or never gone on strike in the first place.
“Most of the government officials have no extra income, no extra savings, so once they stop getting paid, they will struggle to support their families,” Thierie says. When one of Hein Aung Htet’s neighbours went back to work for the Mandalay city government, he tried and failed to convince her to rejoin the CDM.
“She’s not from a well-off family, and the neighbourhood has been ignoring her since she went back to work,” he says. “She doesn’t seem invested in the politics of Myanmar.”
Some CDM supporters have adopted a tactic known as “social punishment”, doxxing and shaming people perceived to be supporting the coup, including civil servants.
“There’s a lot of internet shaming going on at the moment, with people going back to work, which I don’t really agree with,” Hein Aung Htet says.
On the other hand, he has also heard critics of the CDM say that although they do not support the coup, the movement is “not calculating the crash and the financial damage that this will leave on civil servants”.
Hein Aung Htet admits that the initial momentum of donations has subsided, and there are mounting fears that informers will hand over CDM and protest organisers to police.
“Overall, I feel really scared. I feel really anxious. Some days I wake up, and I feel really hopeless,” he says. “There was an uprising in 1988 and in 2007, and those did not result in great structural change, so that’s why sometimes I feel a bit negative about the protests, like we’re not going to win. But I do believe in my people.”
Thierie says that although there is rising pressure to return to work, civil servants’ commitment to civil disobedience is also getting stronger.
“If they are getting some support, they are ready to participate until the end of the victory,” she says. “So I think money is important.”
*Name has been changed due to the person’s fear of reprisals
Editor’s Note: The name of a faith-based organisation has been removed due to a source’s fear of reprisals.
Header illustration by Ellena Ekarahendy
Call to Action: The longer Myanmar’s civil servants can survive without working and taking their salaries, the more likely the Civil Disobedience Movement will succeed. To support the movement, consider donating below: