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Canberra Today 14°/18° | Friday, March 29, 2024 | Digital Edition | Crossword & Sudoku

ANU students support Myanmar protestors from abroad

The ANU Myanmar Students Association in February 2019 before many of its members left for Myanmar.

AFTER helping raise more than $20,000 for pro-democracy protestors back home, the ANU Myanmar Students’ Association say there’s still more to be done after last month’s military coup in Myanmar.

The university’s Myanmar community is likely one of Canberra’s smallest with only six Myanmar-born students currently enrolled on campus, and yet, the association says, within days they had banded together and released a clear statement denouncing the coup.

Association member Aung, who would not release his full name out of fears for what might happen if he returns home, was preparing for his final semester at ANU when he heard of the coup and says organisations and associations should also be turning their attention to the mental welfare of other Myanmar students.

“Right in front of my family there was shooting,” he says.

While they are safe for now, their movement is restricted, according to Aung, who says his movement is restricted, too.

Because the military remain in power, Aung says: “I don’t know if I will go back or even if I can go back.” 

While he remains in Australia, Aung and other ANU Myanmar Students’ Association members have been involved with a new organisation called the Myanmar Students’ Association Australia (MSAA), which sprung up as a collective of different student organisations across the country.

Less than a week after its founding and a little more than two weeks after the coup, MSAA was already sending money to protestors involved in nation-wide strikes and protests sweeping across Myanmar through a crowdfunding campaign – including the money raised by the group at ANU. 

Those protestors are rallying against what they see as an illegitimate rise to power by the military.

General elections held in November 2020 saw Aung San Suu Kyi, the country’s first democratic ruler, and her NLD party win by a landslide.

However, ANU PhD student and non-resident fellow at the Pacific Institute, Hunter Marston says: “The military and its proxy party, which did not fair well, soon afterwards claimed election fraud and voter list errors.” 

On February 1, the military arrested leaders of the NLD, including Aung San Suu Kyi and the prime minister, Win Myint, as well as leading activists, he says. 

Hunter Marston.

Many of the arrested, including Aung San Suu Kyi, first came to prominence during student-led protests that enveloped the country in 1988, posing the first real challenge to the increasing autocratic and reclusive regime, Mr Marston says. 

Now, with many of them behind bars, Myanmar’s youth are once again rising up, he says. 

“Unlike 1988, the younger people now, and Myanmar citizens generally, are connected via the internet,” he says.

“People realise they’re connected to the international community and they’re engaged, and they are organised in a new way.”

For Aung, this connectivity has helped him keep in contact with family and friends, as well as organise relief efforts, such as delivering VPNs to circumvent military censors.

Aung has kept in close contact with ANU students who recently returned to Myanmar, and says they’ve become a news source for him. 

Most of them are from Myanmar’s major cities: Yangon, Mandalay and the capital, Naypyidaw. These places, Aung says, have been worst hit by protests and the subsequent crackdown by the military.

As a result, Aung says many of the students in Myanmar have been unable to work or study since returning and have joined the CDM movement. 

For now, Aung will have to remain on the sidelines.

But says the ANU Myanmar students and alumni have become a close-knit group in the face of the coup. 

“The current situation has brought us closer together,” he says.

Donations to the MSAA’s campaign can be made here.

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