Tag Archive for: Myanmar

Myanmar Security Forces Cut Internet; Rolls in Armoured Vehicles to Major Cities

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After nine days of mass protest demanding a return to civilian rule, armored vehicles have rolled into the Myanmar cities and cut internet access. The armored vehicles appeared in Yangon, Myitkyina, and Sittwe, the capital of Rakhine state on Sunday evening. After that day, near the Sule Pagoda in central Yangon, more than a dozen police trucks with four water cannon vehicles were deployed.

“Internet Shutdown”- a major tool in protest

As a sign of averting the protest, the Myanmar coup last week saw an internet shutdown. Again, a near-total internet shutdown has come into effect from Monday, 1 am. Early Monday morning, the internet blackout lasted eight hours dropping the connectivity to 15% of the ordinary level. Even the crackdown on protests has drawn international criticism. A resident of Yangon, Win Tun told a news agency, “To do bad things, the military has shut down the internet. We didn’t sleep the whole night so we could see what happen”.

Also Read: Myanmar Ends Civilian Rule, New Zealand Suspends Military and Political Ties after the Coup

Junta fired to disperse protesters

To disperse protesters at a power plant, on Sunday, security forces opened fire at them. In the Northern state of Kachin, soldiers were deployed to the power plants, leading to a confrontation with demonstrators. The police were seen aiming long guns into the air amid sounds that resembled gunfire. Local media stated that few of the people were injured by the rubber bullets that were fired into the crowd. But, there was no immediate confirmation of a death toll and no comment from the government.

Civil Disobedience Movement

Since February 8, many staff had stopped coming to work causing delays to international flights.  The junta has threatened action against the civil servants and ordered them back to work. The civil servants and the government employees are also on strike, in addition to the protests that result in the disruption of train services throughout the country. Even the work of many government departments had effectively ground to a halt. Richard Horsey said, “This has the potential to also affect vital functions- the junta can replace engineers and doctors, but not power…

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Suu Kyi faces new charges as Myanmar crackdown intensifies

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Associated Press

YANGON, Myanmar — Police in Myanmar filed a new charge against ousted leader Aung San Suu Kyi, her lawyer said Tuesday, in a move that may allow her to be held indefinitely without trial as part of an intensifying crackdown by authorities who seized power in a coup.

Suu Kyi, who was deposed and detained in the military takeover on Feb. 1, already faced a charge of illegally possessing walkie-talkies — an apparent attempt to provide a legal veneer for her house arrest. Under the new charge, she is accused of breaking a law that has been used to prosecute people who have violated coronavirus restrictions, lawyer Khin Maung Zaw told reporters after meeting with a judge in a court in the capital, Naypyitaw.

It carries a maximum punishment of three years in prison. But, perhaps more worryingly, because of changes to the Penal Code instituted by the junta last week, it could allow her to be detained indefinitely, even without a court’s permission. Suu Kyi’s lawyer told reporters he has not seen her since her arrest — and only arrived after an unexpected videoconference the judge said had been held with her.

The legal maneuver comes two weeks after the military seized power in a coup that shocked many in the international community who had been hopeful that Myanmar was taking steps toward democracy. Since then, the junta has ratcheted up the pressure on protesters resisting the takeover, including violently breaking up some demonstrations and blocking internet access.

On Monday, security forces pointed guns at a group of 1,000 demonstrators and attacked them with slingshots and sticks in the city of Mandalay. Local media reported that police also fired rubber bullets into a crowd and that a few people were injured.

Protests continued Tuesday in Yangon, the country’s largest city, and elsewhere. In Yangon, police blocked off the street in front of the Central Bank, which protesters have targeted amid speculation online that the military is seeking to seize money from it. Buddhist monks demonstrated outside the U.N.’s local office in the city.

Around 3,000 demonstrators — mainly students — returned to the streets of Mandalay, carrying posters of Suu Kyi…

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Myanmar security forces intensify crackdown on protesters

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YANGON, Myanmar (AP) — Security forces in Myanmar pointed guns toward anti-coup protesters and attacked them with sticks Monday, seeking to quell the large-scale demonstrations calling for the military junta that seized power this month to reinstate the elected government.

More than 1,000 protesters rallied in front of the Myanmar Economic Bank in Mandalay, the country’s second-largest city, when at least 10 trucks full of soldiers and police arrived and immediately started firing slingshots toward the protesters, according to a photographer who witnessed the events.

The soldiers and police then attacked the protesters with sticks, and police could be seen aiming long guns into the air amid sounds that resembled gunfire. Local media reported that rubber bullets were fired into the crowd and that a few people were injured. Police also were seen pointing guns toward protesters.

In the capital, Naypyitaw, protesters gathered outside a police station, demanding the release of a group of high school students who were detained while joining anti-coup activities.

One who managed to escape told reporters that the students — thought to range in age from 13 to 16 — were demonstrating peacefully when a line of riot police suddenly arrived and began arresting them. It wasn’t clear exactly how many students were rounded up, but estimates put the figure at between 20 and 40.

Earlier Monday, Myanmar’s military leaders extended their detention of deposed leader Aung San Suu Kyi, whose remand was set to expire and whose freedom is a key demand of the crowds of people protesting the Feb. 1 coup.

Suu Kyi will now be remanded until Feb. 17, when she will likely appear in court by videoconference, according to Khin Maung Zaw, a lawyer asked by Suu Kyi’s party to represent her. The Nobel laureate remains under house arrest on a minor charge of possessing unregistered imported walkie-talkies.

Suu Kyi’s extended detention is likely to further inflame tensions between the military and the protesters who have taken to the streets of cities across the Southeast Asian nation seeking the return of the government they elected.

Protesters gathered across Myanmar on Monday, following a night in which…

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Digital Technology As Accelerant: Growth And Genocide In Myanmar

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Every person in Myanmar above the age of 10 has lived part, if not most, of their life under a military dictatorship characterized by an obsession with achieving autonomy from international influences. Before the economic and political reforms of the past decade, Myanmar was one of the most isolated nations in the world. The digital revolution that has reshaped nearly every aspect of human life over the past half-century was something the average Myanmar person had no personal experience with.

Recent reforms brought an explosion of high hopes and technological access, and Myanmar underwent a digital leapfrog, with internet access jumping from nearly zero percent in 2015 to over 40 percent in 2020. At 27-years-old, I remember living in a Yangon where having a refrigerator was considered high tech, and now, there are 10-year-olds making videos on Tik Tok.

Everyone was excited for Myanmar’s digital revolution to spur the economic and social changes needed to transform the country from a pariah state into the next economic frontier. Tourists, development aid, and economic investment poured into the country. The cost of SIM cards dropped from around 1,000 US dollars in 2013 to a little over 1 dollar today.

This dramatic price drop was paired with a glut of relatively affordable smartphones and phone carriers that provided data packages that made social media platforms like Facebook free, or nearly free, to use. This led to the current situation where about 21 million out of the 22 million people using the internet are on Facebook. Facebook became the main conduit through which people accessed the internet, and now is used for nearly every online activity from selling livestock, watching porn, reading the news, to discussing politics.

Then, following the exodus of over 700,000 Rohingya people from Myanmar’s war-torn Rakhine State, Facebook was accused of enabling a genocide.

The ongoing civil wars in the country and the state violence against the Rohingya, characterized by the UN as ethnic cleansing with genocidal intent, put a spotlight on the potential for harm brought on by digital connectivity. Given its market dominance, Facebook has faced great scrutiny in Myanmar for the role social media has played in normalizing, promoting, and facilitating violence against minority groups.

Facebook was, and continues to be, the favored tool for disseminating hate speech and misinformation against the Rohingya people, Muslims in general, and other marginalized communities. Despite repeated warnings from civil society organizations in the country, Facebook failed to address the new challenges with the urgency and level of resources needed during the Rohingya crisis, and failed to even enforce its own community standards in many cases.

To be sure, there have been improvements in recent years, with the social media giant appointing a Myanmar focused team, expanding their number of Myanmar language content reviewers, adding minority language content reviewers, establishing more regular contact with civil society, and devoting resources and tools focused on limiting disinformation during Myanmar’s upcoming election. The company also removed the accounts of Myanmar military officials and dozens of pages on Facebook and Instagram linked to the military for engaging in “coordinated inauthentic behavior.” The company defines “inauthentic behavior” as “engag[ing] in behaviors designed to enable other violations under our Community Standards,” through tactics such as the use of fake accounts and bots.

Recognizing the seriousness of this issue, everyone from the EU to telecommunications companies to civil society organizations have poured resources into digital literacy programs, anti-hate-speech campaigns, social media monitoring, and advocacy to try and address this issue. Overall, the focus of much of this programming is on what Myanmar and the people of Myanmar lack—rule of law, laws protecting free speech, digital literacy, knowledge of what constitutes hate speech, and resources to fund and execute the programming that is needed.

In the frenzy of the desperate firefighting by organizations on the ground, less attention has been given to larger systemic issues that are contributing to the fire.

There is a need to pay greater attention to those coordinated groups that are working to spread conspiracy theories, false information, and hatred to understand who they are, who is funding them, and how their work can be disrupted—and, if necessary, penalized.

There is a need to reevaluate how social media platforms are designed in a way that incentivizes and rewards bad behavior.

There is also a need to question how much blame we want to assign to social media companies, and whether it is to the overall good to give them the responsibility, and therefore power, to determine what is and isn’t acceptable speech.

Finally, there is a need to ask ourselves about alternatives we can build, when many governments have proven themselves more than willing to surveil and prosecute netizens under the guise of health, security, and penalizing hate speech.

It is dangerous to expect private, profit-driven multinational corporations to be given the power to draw the line between hate speech and free speech. Just as it is dangerous to give that same power to governments, especially in this time of rising ethno-nationalistic sentiments around the globe and the increasing willingness of governments to overtly and covertly gather as much data as possible to use against those they govern. We can see from the ongoing legal proceedings against Myanmar in international courts regarding the Rohingya and other ethnic minorities, and statements from UN investigative bodies on Myanmar that Facebook has failed release to them evidence of serious international crimes, that neither company policies nor national laws are enough to ensure safety, justice, and dignity for vulnerable populations.

The solution to all this, as unsexy as it sounds, is a multifaceted, multi-stakeholder, long-term effort to build strong legal and cultural institutions that disperses the power and the responsibility to create and maintain safe and inclusive online spaces between governments, individuals, the private sector, and civil society.  

Aye Min Thant is the Tech for Peace Manager at Phandeeyar, an innovation lab which promotes safer and more inclusive digital spaces in Myanmar. Formerly, she was a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who covered business, politics, and ethno-religious conflicts in Myanmar for Reuters. You can follow her on Twitter @ma_ayeminthant.

This article was developed as part of a series of papers by the Wikimedia/Yale Law School Initiative on Intermediaries and Information to capture perspectives on the global impacts of online platforms’ content moderation decisions. You can read all of the articles in the series here, or on their Twitter feed @YaleISP_WIII.

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