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Su Thit has a table in a corner by the window in her home. She no longer sits there at night. “You never know when the bullets will fly,” she says.
She fears the Myanmar military might shoot at random. At 8 pm, when people still bang pots and pans in protest, security forces will sometimes fire at the sounds with slingshots, stones, bullets.
Su Thit, a pseudonym she is using for her safety, lives in Yangon, Myanmar’s largest city. She began protesting in early February, when demonstrators swarmed the streets in defiance of a military coup that toppled the country’s quasi-democratic government and detained its civilian leader, Aung San Suu Kyi.
Rehman Asad/NurPhoto via Getty Images
The Myanmar military overthrew its civilian government in a coup on Monday, ending the facade of democratic rule and creating an even more uncertain future for human rights in the country especially the persecuted Rohingya and other ethnic minorities.
The aftermath of the coup is still unfolding, but human rights advocates and experts told me they are increasingly fearful of what might happen to anyone who challenges the regime.
“The options available to the Burmese people are very, very limited because I don’t think there’s much influence inside the country,” Mabrur Ahmed, founder and director of Restless Beings, a UK-based human rights group, told me. (Burma is the country’s former name; the military junta changed it to Myanmar in 1989, but many, especially those in the pro-democracy movement, still use the older name.) There is not much people can do besides protest, Ahmed said though any protests, he added, would likely be me