my fight against the myanmar junta
Thinzar Shunlei Yi and Guillaume Pajot
(Robert Laffont, 60 pages, 2021)
***full translation available upon request***
They cannot stop us or silence us because we have nothing more to lose. It’s not like we don’t know what could happen to us: I can get beaten up, I can get arrested, I can get killed. But Burma will never be the same again.
—from My Fight Against the Myanmar Junta
At dawn on February 1, 2021, Myanmar’s military seized power. The State Counselor Aung San Suu Kyi, President Win Myint, and other leaders of the National League for Democracy (NLD) were arrested in a series of raids. Activists, artists, and leaders of ethnic minority political parties were rounded up. The coup took place just hours before the country’s new parliament was to convene following November elections—a brutal step backward for a nation that was slowly emerging from five decades of dictatorship.
That morning, Thinzar Shunlei Yi, age twenty-nine, woke up feeling that everything was about to change. The daughter of an army captain, she grew up in barracks, and was well acquainted with the privileges granted to military families. She also knew that it was necessary to leave them behind in the pursuit of freedom. With the support of her community of over thirty thousand Facebook and Twitter followers, the young activist had already fought for ten years defending the freedom of the press and the rights of ethnic minorities, such as the Rohingyas and the Karens. A few days after the putsch, she led defiant crowds through the streets of Rangoon. There was talk of overthrowing the military, of a “Spring revolution,” but the security forces fired live ammunition. A wave of violence—extrajudicial executions, torture, and kidnapping—swept over the country. The young activist was among those wanted; she was nowhere safe. Forced to flee, she took a perilous journey through the jungle to reach the border areas, controlled by guerrillas.
Today, Thinzar Shunlei Yi lives in Thailand, free enough to share her story with the renowned journalist Guillaume Pajot—but there are still many who wish to silence her. My Fight Against the Myanmar Junta retraces her remarkable story—an unprecedented first-person account of a fierce battle fought by one woman and her people, ready to sacrifice everything to bring down the dictatorship—including their lives. Yet this is not an account of victimhood rather, it is one of fortitude, of determination and strife, and ultimately, of hope for a better Myanmar.
Thinzar Shunlei Yi was awarded the U.S. State Department’s Emerging Young Leaders Award in 2016 and the Women of the Future of Southeast Asia award in 2019.
Guillaume Pajot is a French journalist and expert on Myanmar. He is a regular contributor to Libération, XXI, L’Obs, and GEO, among others. His in-depth reports have been short-listed for the Albert-Londres prize and the Bayeux Calvados-Normandie prize for war correspondents.