Myanmar Spring Chronicle – December 21 Scenes
MoeMaKa, December 22 2022
The psychological state of people living in Myanmar after the military coup
After the military coup, violence began to take place within a few weeks. It started with using tear gas and sound bombs, beating with batons and violent arrests. Within a few days, there were fires with live ammunition and incidents resulting in fatalities in Naypyidaw, Mandalay, and Yangon. The young protesters retaliated with Molotov cocktails, slingshots, and gas guns. The military council continued to use live ammunition to quell the protest, and violent suppression occurred throughout the whole country. This encouraged the people to fight back against the military council by armed means.
All of these incidents happened less than 2 years ago, so there may be no need to describe them in detail. What I mean is that almost all people in Myanmar have seen the above violent attacks, arrests and killings with their own eyes, experienced them from family members, and read about those incidents in the news.
When these kinds of violence, arrests, tortures and killings have been experienced almost every day, people notice that their emotional feelings and mental states are not what they used to be.
The kind of state of mind that is optimistic, willing to try to improve, develops sympathetic joy, and encourages others no longer occurs. With despair, lack of mental strength to build under unfavorable situation and uncertainty, people are feeling that they must face no matter what happens and the future is bleak. Though we have never thought about the risk to our own lives and the lives of our family members for many years in the former situation, everyone now feels that their lives are in danger and that they themselves or their family members are at risk of being caught, robbed, or killed in the current situation. Daily events have shown that both people’s lives and material possessions can be lost at any time. As for the people in the areas facing the military council’s arrests, shootings, and looting of property, they are suffering from mental stress daily, and those who live in the cities are not at risk as much as the people in those areas, but the possibility of being arrested for crime exists in any area.
Having their house burned down, their family members beaten, killed, and their possessions taken and destroyed will leave them with nightmares and traumas that will never go away in their lives.
Seeing these incidents and even hearing about what their relatives and friends are going through, they are traumatized and psychologically affected. Thus, they no longer see a good future, have no hope, have a strong feeling of revenge or retaliation, or fear and choose to escape such events.
Even if the whole family cannot escape, the rest of the family encourages their young and middle-aged family members to live and work away from the conflict.
Among those who leave Myanmar every day to work abroad, there are also many people from armed conflict areas. There are young people who are fighting in armed conflicts and also those who were sent abroad to work after selling cattle, farm and crops.
They are feeling that it is not easy to build a future in Myanmar anymore.
When we read the daily news, we see news about bomb blasts, injuries, deaths, arrests, killings, executions, robberies and murders for robbing, hardships in the livelihood of armed revolutionary comrades and refugees, the arrests and deaths of Rohingya ethnic groups who crossed the country risking their lives to gain refugee status, battles, and arsons of houses and villages. No matter what the news is, it’s no longer strange and these have become normal occurrences. In these reports, even the deaths of tens of people are not something that has never happened. Such incidents are becoming unpleasant daily events to the extent that the number of casualties are compared with that of previous news.
Every time I think about these situations, I lose my hope and enthusiasm to build the future for myself and my family, and live with less hopeful feelings in a bad situation.