“We have to find evidence if they really are informants. “This part is complicated,” Thurain says.
Several offices, he reports, have been bombed or burned to prevent the military from gaining access to these records.Īnother key target for Thurain’s group are people believed to be informants providing information on the opposition to the military or police. Whoever controls the ward administration wins.” Most of the information in the ward offices, he points out, is contained in paper records. “We want to make sure the administration is not controlled by the military. “We warn people in the ward offices not to work for the military and police,” he says. The information will include the ages, ethnicity, and religion of each person in the dwelling.Īs Thurain explains, if the military and police have access to this information, they can track and monitor the population and more effectively thwart and hunt down members of the political opposition and the resistance: “It makes it hard for people to hide.” So his group aims to prevent the security forces from taking over these offices. This data reveals who lives where-say, a particular apartment is home to two parents and three children. Under Burmese laws, these offices maintain active rosters of the civilians who live within their jurisdictions, tracking their residences and holding extensive demographic information on each person and household. Their main mission at the moment is to prevent the military and the police from gaining control of the ward administration offices-local governing bodies that have tremendous influence within the neighborhoods they oversee. But he and his colleagues are very careful in vetting who they allow in. (Aung San Suu Kyi is being held by the junta and subjected to a rash of trumped-up charges that could lead to a sentence of life imprisonment.) According to Thurain, there are now about 250 people seeking membership in his group.
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The NUG, which includes the National League for Democracy, the political party led by Aung San Suu Kyi that was ousted from power by the Burmese military, calls the PDF a precursor to a federal army that will attempt to join together various armed ethnic insurgent groups and the main political opposition. He says these bands have become part of a special task force of the People’s Defense Force, which was created in early May as the military wing of the National Unity Government, a coalition of anti-coup leaders and groups that insists it is the legitimate government of Myanmar. Thurain describes his set-up to me: he works in a covert group that has about 50 members, and it collaborates with about eight other cells in the Yangon area. “My skill is more like strategic approach and coordination, and motivating people.” “My personality is not a frontline person,” he said in an interview on the Insight Myanmar podcast last month. Initially, Thurain attended the protests, but he eventually decided that with his organizational skills he would be better suited to work in the shadows. The military junta has responded by killing hundreds of protesters and bystanders-including children-and detaining or arresting thousands. Since the military’s takeover, a nonviolent protest movement has steadily organized protests against the new dictatorship and demanded a restoration of democracy.
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Prior to the coup, Thurain, who is in his late 20s and who was born in a conflict zone near the Thai border, had several businesses, including a translation service and a software development firm. He would rather talk about his overall operation and how he came to help build a clandestine network. Speaking with me through an encrypted application, Thurain-this is a pseudonym he uses-doesn’t want to go into details.
And he’s talking about an assassination his secret cadre executed.
Now he’s part of an underground resistance group opposing the brutal Burmese military that overthrew the nation’s democratically elected government in February. There is anguish in the voice of Thurain, who a few months ago was a young entrepreneur in Yangon, the largest city in Myanmar.
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