Ma Kyal Sin loved taekwondo, spicy food and a good red lipstick. She adopts the English name Angel, and her father bids her farewell as she takes to the streets of Mandalay, in the middle of Myanmar, to protest the crowd peacefully against the recent force attack by the army.
The black T-shirt that Kyal Sin wore during the protest on Wednesday had a simple message: “Everything will be fine.”
In the afternoon, Ms. Kyal Sin, 18, was shot in the head by security forces who, according to the United Nations, killed at least 30 people nationwide on the bloodiest day since the February 1 coup.
“She is a hero for our country,” said Ma Cho Nwe Oo, one of Ms. Kyal Sin’s good friends, said. She also took part in the daily marches that electrified hundreds of cities in Myanmar. “By participating in the revolution, we are showing our generation of young women that we are no less brave than men.”
Despite the risks, women stood at the forefront of Myanmar’s protest movement and sent a powerful reprimand to the generals who expelled a female civilian leader and reinstated a patriarchal order that had oppressed women for half a century. has.
Through the hundreds of thousands, they rallied daily for striking unions of teachers, clothing workers and medical workers – all sectors dominated by women. The youngest is often at the forefront, where the security forces have apparently singled it out. Two young women were shot in the head on Wednesday and another near the heart, three bullets that ended their lives.
Earlier this week, military television networks announced that the security forces had been instructed not to use live ammunition, and that they would only shoot at the lower body in self-defense.
“We could lose some heroes in this revolution,” said Ma Sandar, an assistant general secretary of the Confederation of Trade Unions of Myanmar who took part in the protests. “Our wife’s blood is red.”
The violence Wednesday, which has brought the death toll since the coup to at least 54, reflects the brutality of an army accustomed to killing its most innocent people. At least three children have been shot dead in the past month, and the first death from the army’s repression after the coup was a 20-year-old woman who was shot in the head on February 9.
In the weeks since the protests began, groups of female medical volunteers patrolled the streets, caring for the wounded and dying. Women have added backbone to a civil disobedience movement that paralyzes the operation of the state. And they supported gender stereotypes in a country where tradition believes that garments covering the lower half of the bodies of the two sexes should not be together, otherwise the female spirit will act as a polluter.
With defiant creativity, people used garments of sarongs for women, called htamein, to protect protest areas, knowing that some men were disgusted to walk under them. Others affixed images of senior general Min Aung Hlaing, the army chief who orchestrated the coup, to the hanging htamein, an insult to his cruelty.
“Young women are now leading the protests because we are motherly and we cannot allow the next generation to be destroyed,” said Dr. Yin Yin Hnoung, a 28-year-old medical doctor who escaped bullets in Mandalay. “We do not care about our lives. We care about our future generations. ”
Although the inhumanity of the military extends to about 55 million people in the country, women have the most to lose due to the resumption of the authority of the generals after five years of sharing power with a civilian government led by Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. The Tatmadaw, as the military is known, are deeply conservative and believe in the official statement on the importance of modest dress for proper ladies.
There are no women in the Tatmadaw’s senior ranks, and its soldiers have systematically committed gang rape against women of ethnic minorities, according to United Nations investigations. In the generals’ worldview, women are often viewed as weak and impure. Traditional religious hierarchies in this predominantly Buddhist nation also place women at the feet of men.
The prejudices of the army and the monastery are not necessarily shared by the wider society of Myanmar. Women are educated and an integral part of the economy, especially in the business world, manufacturing and the civil service. Increasingly, women have found their political voice. In the November election last year, about 20 percent of the candidates for the National League for Democracy, Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi, a woman.
The party achieved a great victory and underlined the military and much more male-dominated Union Solidarity and Development Party. The Tatmadaw dismissed the results as fraudulent.
When the military began to take off a bit over the past decade, Myanmar experienced one of the deepest and fastest societal changes in the world. A country once bunkered with violence by the generals, who first seized power in 1962, went on Facebook and discovered memes, emojis and global conversations about gender politics.
“Even though it’s dark days and my heart breaks with all these images of bloodshed, I’m more optimistic because I see women on the street,” says Dr. Miemie Winn Byrd, a Burmese American who served as a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army and is now a professor at the Daniel K. Inouye Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies in Honolulu. ‘In this match I will put money on the women. They are unarmed, but they are the true warriors. ”
This passion has ignited across the country, despite the fact that Tatmadaw has killed hundreds of people in recent decades.
“Women have taken the border position in the fight against dictatorship because we believe it is our business,” said Ma Ei Thinzar Maung, a 27-year-old politician and former political prisoner who, along with another woman of the same age, first led. anti-coup demonstration in Yangon five days after the putsch.
Ei Thinzar Maung and her co-leader, Esther Ze Naw, protest during the day and hide at night. According to a local monitoring group, about 1,500 people have been arrested since the coup.
The couple were politicized at a young age and talked about the rights of ethnic minorities at a time when most people in Myanmar did not want to recognize the military campaign against the Rohingya Muslims. At least one third of Myanmar’s population consists of a constellation of ethnic minorities, some of whom are in armed conflict with the military.
When they led their rally on February 6, the two women pulled on shirts belonging to the Karen ethnic group, whose villages had been overrun by Tatmadaw troops in recent days. Me. Esther Ze Naw is from another minority, the Kachin, and as a 17-year-old she spent time in camps for the tens of thousands of civilians uprooted by Tatmadaw attackers. Military jets roared overhead and rained artillery on women and children, she recalls.
“That was the time I committed myself to abolishing the military junta,” she said. ‘Minorities know how it feels, where discrimination leads. And as a woman, we are still considered a second generation. ‘
“This should be one of the reasons why women activists seem more committed to rights issues,” she added.
While the National League for Democracy is led by Ms Aung San Suu Kyi, its top ranks are dominated by men. And just like the Tatmadaw, the party’s highest echelons tend to be reserved for members of the country’s ethnic Bamar majority.
In the streets of Myanmar, although the security forces are still shooting at unarmed protesters, the composition of the movement was much more diverse. There are Muslim students, Catholic nuns, Buddhist monks, drag queens and a legion of young women.
“Gen Z is a fearless generation,” said Honey Aung, whose younger sister, Kyawt Nandar Aung, was killed by a bullet to the head in the city of Monywa on Wednesday. “My sister joined the protests every day. She hated dictatorship. ”
In a speech published in a state propaganda earlier this week, Army Chief of Staff Min Aung Hlaing sniffed at the impropriety of the protesters with their ‘obscene clothing in conflict with Myanmar culture’. His definition is usually considered to be women who wear long pants.
Moments before she was shot dead, Ms. Kyal Sin, dressed in sneakers and ripped jeans, gathered her fellow peaceful protesters.
As they staggered from the tear gas fired by security forces on Wednesday, Ms. Kyal Sin given water to clean their eyes. “We’re not going to run,” she shouted in a video taken by another protester. “Our people’s blood must not reach the ground.”
“She’s the bravest girl I’ve ever seen in my life,” said Ko Lu Maw, who shared some of the final images of me. Kyal Sin protested in a vigilant, proud attitude amid a crowd of protests.
Under her T-shirt, me. Kyal Sin wore a star-shaped pendant because her name in Burmese means ‘pure star’.
“She would say, ‘If you see a star, remember, it’s me,'” she said. Cho Nwe Oo, her friend, said. “I will always remember her proudly.”