Advertisement
3 years after Myanmar’s coup, is the clock finally running out on embattled junta as it ‘slowly falls apart’?
- Junta chief Min Aung Hlaing’s control over the country is now in doubt amid unprecedented military losses, mass surrenders and wobbling alliances
- But the military is likely to ‘fight ever more brutally, the closer it comes to defeat’, analysts say, even as ‘pace of liberation quickens’
Reading Time:10 minutes
Why you can trust SCMP
3
Three years after the coup, the walls are closing in on Myanmar’s junta and its leader Min Aung Hlaing.
Advertisement
Humiliated and overrun across an arc of territory running east to west, his once unassailable military is slowly shrinking back into a central Myanmar heartland, harried by battle-hardened ethnic armed groups and bands of young pro-democracy rebels.
A “spring revolution” is the buzzword almost being willed into existence over Myanmar’s vituperative anti-junta social media.
“I think it may take longer, and it will be hard,” says Aung Zay Ya, a mechanical engineer whose path, like many of his generation, has been diverted into conflict by the coup.
“But I can see the dictatorship is slowly falling apart,” he told This Week in Asia from Karenni state.
Aung Zay Ya is 27 and leading volunteer doctors and rescuers for humanitarian group Free Burma Rangers, when he should be following his career path instead.
Advertisement
Advertisement