Why should we care about what’s happening in Myanmar?

I had a chat with a young friend from Myanmar recently. He was worried about Myanmar’s deteriorating exchange rate and complained about the challenges he faces withdrawing cash from the bank and the ATM since the coup of 1 February.

He had been to the bank every day but there was always such a long queue of people withdrawing money that his request was never processed, while the ATM was always out of cash. His father, currently a migrant worker in Thailand, had not received his salary for several months and couldn’t send money back to his family.

The Central Bank of Myanmar has been limiting cash withdrawals and individuals are unable to withdraw more than two million kyats (roughly NZD$1680) from their bank account. The civil disobedience movement and the paralysis of Myanmar’s banking system means people are facing cash shortages and limited access to remittances and social welfare payments.

Protest against the military coup in February, in Hpa-An, Kayin State, Myanmar. Image: Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Protest_against_military_coup_(9_Feb_2021,_Hpa-An,_Kayin_State,_Myanmar)_(3).jpg)

I am telling you this because of the importance of narrative imagination – of stories – in becoming a fully democratic world citizen.

Influential philosopher Martha Nussbaum has argued that democracy requires the world citizen to exercise civic imagination, to see the lives of others “with involvement and sympathetic understanding, with anger at our society’s refusals of visibility”.

Stories, Nussbaum says, help children develop the empathy and compassion needed for the democratic endeavour.

I hope the stories I bring from voices of young people in Myanmar can achieve that too.

A United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) report released last month suggested that with the ongoing political crisis combined with the pandemic, Myanmar is approaching the point of economic collapse: family incomes are likely to deteriorate and almost half of the Myanmar population (48.2 percent) might live in poverty by 2022.

World Food Programme (WFP) presents a similarly dismal outlook, reporting that up to 3.4 million more people will struggle to afford food in the next three to six months. In other words, on top of the risks of military persecution and violence, supporters of the civil disobedience movement bear significant personal cost and sacrifices when they speak out.

Three-finger salute at a protest in Yangon, Myanmar. Image: Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Three-finger_salute_at_a_protest_in_Yangon,_Myanmar_(8_February_2021).jpg)

To be frank, when I write about what is happening in Myanmar and the stories these young people are telling me in a safe and democratic New Zealand, I am exercising a lot of civic imagination. I had never experienced the direct political violence, the poverty and the desperation that Myanmar citizens suffer from, even though I was from a single-income, working-class Singaporean family.

Legal scholar Ayelet Shachar describes citizenship as a form of birthright lottery, where some people have a headstart in life simply because they were born into a flourishing political community that is relatively safe, secure and free, like here in New Zealand, or in Singapore. Our nationality is intertwined with the lottery of human survival on a global scale. For example, an infant born in Myanmar is nine times more likely to die by the age of one compared to an infant born in New Zealand. This statistic is already an improvement compared to Myanmar 10 years ago.

Covid-19 and the human rights crisis following Myanmar’s military coup are threatening to put the hard-won development gains in the last 10 years at risk. The United Nations reported over 10,000 refugees fleeing Myanmar in the three months after the coup as tensions rose between the Tatmadaw and the ethnic armed organizations.

The World Food Programme market monitoring reported a five percent increase in average rice prices across the country since January, even as poverty-stricken Myanmar citizens lost their jobs and income.

Some staple foods, such as rice, have increased in price at a time many are facing rising food insecurity. Image: Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:20200207_083817_Market_Mawlamyaing_Myanmar_anagoria.jpg)

We can silently accept this global distribution of inequalities as how the world is, but we can also recognize the common humanity we share with those living in other parts of the world. We can transcend the boundaries of nationality, if we recognize the stories of these Myanmar citizens might really have been us, given a change of circumstances.

New Zealand is a society that wants to foster the fair treatment of all. This democratic vision provides strong reasons to foster compassionate imagination that crosses social and national boundaries, an imagination that allows the world citizen to gain empathic understanding of people who are different. But civic imagination, while important, is insufficient to re-create the world.

If circumstances shape people’s possibilities for action and their aspirations and desires, hopes and fears, we need to do what we can to support Myanmar citizens in their effort to change their circumstances. As Paulo Friere, a Brazilian philosopher and educator, points out, the pursuit of full humanity cannot be carried out in isolation or individually. It can only take place in fellowship and solidarity.

I call upon all New Zealanders to demonstrate that fellowship and solidarity by supporting the Myanmar cause through UnionAid: Myanmar Fight Back for Democracy – UnionAID and the World Food Programme: Emergency Relief: World Food Programme | World Vision New Zealand.

- Asia Media Centre