By Estelle Sanchez

First published in March 2021

Jacques Maudy was born to a French mother and a father of Spanish origin. As he’s part of the 1968 generation, he explained he has always been interested in understanding the world and how to make it better. He came to Australia in 1995, when he was about forty after he decided to sell his advertising agency in Paris. He started his career as a photographer reporter afterwards, and has based his reporting work on Myanmar, also known as Burma, for the past 10 years. He wrote a book about colonial architecture in Yangon, as well as several articles that were published in The Irrawaddy, Mizzima, and the Myanmar Times. Jacques developed a very strong bond with Myanmar during his time there, as he witnessed widespread solidarity and desire for change among the people, which was unlike any other place.

During one of his travels in 2012 in the Mergui islands, a territory forbidden for foreigners since 1947, he recalled the incomparable help he received from the Burmese people in his team. Jacques was reporting on the Myanmar navy and the collusion with fishermen from Thailand, who were fishing with dynamite, and the army was trying to arrest him. “For two weeks, we played hide and seek with them and they couldn’t get me. I was protected by my team [that] was getting information from islanders.” On his way back from the island to the mainland, Jacques had to take the boat for a seven hours trip. He recalls being on the tarmac with 100 Burmese people looking at him, who could tell he was a Westerner with a camera and wasn’t allowed to be there. The army was coming to patrol the boat and look for them.

“Suddenly, – I was with my partner – they (their team) put us on the ground, they [bend us], they put [something on] top of us and they sit on us”. The army arrived on the boat and started searching but couldn’t find them.

When they left, ten minutes later, the people on the boat were applauding.

“No one dobbed us. They were risking their freedom. No one dobbed us.”

Jacques Maudy

“It wouldn’t happen in Australia. There would be a dickhead saying: ‘Hey, the guy you’re looking for is here’.” Jacques said this was the spirit of resistance in Myanmar and he became fuelled with passion to support the people’s quest for independence from the army.

Known as the Tatmadaw, the Myanmar army staged a coup, a “junta”, at the beginning of February this year, seizing the power from the democratic government party, the National League for Democracy (NLD). In the next days, the Myanmar people started to resist the oppression of the coup. “The CDM is a Civil Disobedience Movement of people who are refusing to work for the junta, which means that they have no income at the moment. And the challenge is to channel the money to these people so [that] they can pursue their resistance on the ground”, he explained.

Jacques Maudy met Nay Myo Steven Han, a Burmese who moved to Australia ten years ago, through an interview they did together to raise Australians’ awareness of the situation in Myanmar.

As the communication officer for QUT Myanmar society, Steven is part of the Myanmar Student Association Australia coalition, created by students to raise money to the protests for freedom in the country. One of their fundraisers on GoFundMe, obtained over $50,000 of donations, which Steven qualifies as getting “momentum”. They were able to distribute some of the funds raised already to several organisations in Myanmar.

“The way that we move the funds, I would like to keep it confidential. I don’t want it to give away how we are doing it, because they could become targets in Myanmar and also in here as well. But we have our people on the ground, who are doing a lot of work there to get the funds out”, Steven explained.

Jacques and Steven are both optimists the situation could turn in the people’s favour. They both agreed the main goal of the army is to gain wealth through this coup, to protect their financial interests. “But when people stop working, when they stop this mechanism, [the Tatmadaw] cannot create money and wealth out of the whole country. So they are losing money. They cannot do more investments. They can only have power,” Steven said.

Gerhard Hoffstaedter, a UQ researcher specialising in South-East Asian politics, explained the behaviour of the army during the coup didn’t seem to be a united front but rather a disorganised movement likely to stay at the limit of what is accepted by the international community. “Often you see one or two people shooting and other people just standing by. It’s not an all-out war where the police and army [would be] strategically deployed,” he said. That’s why the army would not go as hard as it could, Jacques added to the researcher’s comment. “700 dead in 70 days, that’s 10 per day. Compared to what Pinochet did [in 1973] in Chile in one week, when he killed 10,000 people, it’s a joke. So they’re going on the fine line here. They want to do business with the West”, he said.

The CDM has seen a lot of young people leading the movement, and Professor Hoffstaedter explains this phenomenon is a consequence of the past few years in a country where people have been able to taste democracy. Steven described these young people as more passionate with a completely different mindset because they grew up in the age of information.

“It’s not just the school books that they’re reading. They have social media, they can talk to other people or see what’s happening in these free countries like Australia. It’s ingrained in them,” he said.

Steven

Min Hnaing, 34, whom her family and friends call Nana, is from Myanmar, lives in Yangon, and has been involved in the protests for the past few weeks. She said she has never experienced anything similar. “My mom and my brother, they didn’t allow me to go out to do the protests, because they’ve been worried that, maybe some sniper will be there shooting”. But she replied to them: “It’s okay, I have to go. If I don’t go, and people like me are scared then, who is going in my place to get this democracy?” When COVID-19 cases were rising in Myanmar, she wanted to go volunteer in the hospitals. Her mother and brother didn’t allow her to go and at the time she agreed to listen to them. This time, the decision was too important and she joined the protests.

Even if the youth is leading the movement, it doesn’t mean the older generations are not involved. Jacques explains these older generations have rebellion in their blood too, as they have been through a first coup in 1988. Therefore, they know what it’s like to be subjugated by an invading force and now want to avoid it for their children. “This is a transgenerational resistance”, he affirmed.

While people are ready to suffer or even die for this cause, Professor Hoffstaedter says unifying Myanmar remains one of the key aspects that need to be resolved, as a large number of different ethnic groups are living together in the country.

“There is so much conflictual history between the different ethnicities in Myanmar and so many different interests, that there’s still a long way to go to show a unified front against the junta”, he added.

Professor Hoffstaedter

Jacques says he’s confident the current attack of the army against all the ethnic groups, even on the majority Bamar (main ethnicity), is an opportunity for the country to come together. They would now recognise a common enemy and a common goal to achieve, which is a federation. “There is a big bully in the schoolyard and the big bully in the schoolyard has made people who weren’t friends become friends”, he summarised. And in fact, some of the ethnic groups/armies have already said publicly they were in favour of the CDM. “It’s a defining moment. It’s like the end of World War II in Europe. If there is a common victory against the dictatorship, it’s going to create a solidarity”, Jacques said. “If the outcome of the struggle is a federal constitution, there is no way anything’s going to break it. Now the challenge is to get there.”

But to get there, the people of Myanmar need the support of the international community that has for now been reluctant in doing so. Myanmar has been calling for the United Nations to come in with a military force, and Jacques and Steven explain it is not likely to happen as long as countries focus on their financial interests that depend on the army. “Why a country like Australia is not forefront, [having a] leading role in condemning this?”, Steven asked. According to Jacques, Australia would be complicit of the actions of the Tatmadaw, if it decided not to impose targeted sanctions like freezing bank accounts or seizing their real estate in the country. He explains, however, that the advantage could turn in the people’s favour if they can show that the countries aren’t going to get any financial advantages from supporting the army. “Countries are competing for financial power everywhere. So that means that, at one stage, they’re pragmatic. ‘Is the game we are playing, serving us or not serving us? And what the CDM is doing is demonstrating that whoever is betting on [the army], they’ll lose the bet. This is our job here.”

For Jacques, the conflict would not only be about Myanmar itself but rather a universal issue, as its resolution would depend on whether countries put financial interests before human rights and democracy. “And we’re not going to let it happen, because when you see someone in the schoolyard, who’s beating up a guy who’s half his size, if you do nothing, it’s like you beat him up yourself !”

Steven said people could think because he is the one who is Burmese, he would have that passion to defend Myanmar. But “you can hear it from Jacques [too]”, he said. “Why do I feel so strongly about Myanmar when I’m not Burmese?”, Jacques asked. “It’s nothing to do with being Burmese […], it’s about being a human being”,