In Burma, the women's revolution
Audio 02:28
Women hold ropes with hanged longyi to prevent police from seeing properly during a demonstration against the military coup in Tharketa township in Yangon, Myanmar, March 3, 2021. © Theint Mon Soe / SOPA Images / LightRocket via Getty Images
By: Carol Isoux
6 mins
In Burma, the violence of repression does not seem to stop.
With more than 200 dead according to local media, the Burmese are still in the streets.
In this very patriarchal country, women are now on the front line and are trying to invent new ways to challenge the power of the military ... Carol Isoux went to meet groups of Burmese feminists who are organizing the resistance on the other side of the country. the border in northern Thailand.
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From our correspondent in Burma,
They call it the longyi revolution, named after the traditional skirt worn by men and women in Burma.
All over the country women have started to stretch their skirts or their underwear up high, on clotheslines or electric wires.
An unorthodox weapon but very effective against the military, as explained by Hseng Noung, a member of a network of women from the Shan ethnic minority, based in northern Thailand, where civil resistance to the army is being organized.
“
Most Burmese men think they are superior to women,
” Hseng Noung tells us, “
and that if they touch a female underwear or any clothing worn below the waist by a woman, they will lose. that invisible masculine power.
The Burmese are testing different ways of demonstrating to avoid the bloodshed and it works well, many soldiers do not dare to go under these clotheslines.
"
But women are not content to spread their underwear, since the beginning of the movement of very young women are illustrated by their courage on dangerous grounds.
Mya Twettwet Khaing, the first victim of the movement to be shot in the head in the town of Naypidaw, was 19 years old.
Her comrade Kyal Sin, 20, who died in Mandalay, has become the movement's other female martyr.
For the researcher and activist Karen May Oo Mutraw, many Burmese women, and especially the younger ones, are now fighting against the army also as a symbol of patriarchy.
“
The Burmese army has always been an exclusively male club,”
explains the researcher.
The government too, politics, all that ... It's men's business in Burma, even if a few women participated since the independence movement.
Aung San Suu Kyi is a woman, yes, but she has never defined herself as a feminist, has never been interested in gender issues or taken any action.
Today, Burmese feminists know that if they do not tackle the two problems head on, army oppression and patriarchy, even when they have won a battle, they will have to fight again.
"
Rape as a weapon of war by the Burmese army, especially in ethnic areas, has been widely documented.
Burmese women are standing up all over the country, in the event of a lasting return of the military to power, they are the ones who have the most to lose.
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Burma
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