When massive demonstrations swept Myanmar in opposition to last month’s military coup, 17-year-old Sithu Shein rushed to the front line. The high school student, who used to spend his free time playing video games, organized friends and neighbors and urged workers at a nearby clothing factory to join what he called a struggle for democracy.
One week ago, security forces opened fire on a protest in the neighborhood where he lived in Yangon, the country’s largest city, and he was shot. A bullet hit him in the chest and another in the hip. He died hours later in a chaotic hospital emergency room.
Myanmar’s youth, who came of age during a period of relative openness and democratic transition in a country that spent decades as an authoritarian state isolated from the outside world, are at the forefront of the movement to restore government elected. Their struggle, after large-scale protests in Hong Kong, Thailand, Belarus and Russia, comes at a time when both autocratic rule and resistance have increased, often pitting crowds of young people on the streets against regimes willing to arrest, intimidate and even kill to cling to power.
The current generation of Myanmar glimpsed what it is like to live in a free society. State censorship was lifted in 2012 and millions of young people connected to the world via the Internet for the first time. They saw the promise of foreign investment and many aspire to jobs in fields such as technology and travel. The transition was incomplete, but after half a century of military rule, it opened the door to major changes.
“Although the governments of the last decade were far from democratic, a new generation has emerged that has known a good degree of political freedom, a safer generation that fully hoped that their lives would be a quantum leap forward. of those of his parents, “said author and historian Thant Myint-U, whose books include” The Hidden History of Burma, “Myanmar’s ancient name.