At night, when the mountain air was not cold enough to appease the insects, the young people gathered around a glow. The light that attracted them was not a phone screen, that electric lure that attracts people almost everywhere, but a bonfire.
Around the fire, music radiated. Her fingers were strumming a guitar. Overlapping voices in lyrics about love, democracy and, above all, revolution. The moths courted the flame, sparked when they got too close, and then fainted to death.
For months now, these hills in Karenni State, eastern Myanmar, have been cut off from modern communications. The military junta that seized power in a coup d’état three years ago, plunging the country into civil war, has isolated the populations most opposed to its brutal government. In these bastions of resistance, where people from all over the country have gathered, there is almost no internet, cell phone service or even electricity.
The return to a pre-modern era carries terrible consequences for people’s lives. When a baby’s fever rises, there is no way to call a doctor. Rebel fighters, who have overrun dozens of Myanmar military bases in recent offensives, are unable to contact battle commanders from frontline outposts. Students cannot attend online classes, which in some places in Myanmar are the only educational option.
News (who survived an airstrike, whose village was burned to the ground, whose daughter fled the country to work abroad) travels at a walking pace or, if expensive fuel can be found, on motorcycles that zip along jungle trails.
However, the communications blackout has brought an unexpected benefit. Without the distraction of handheld devices, people talk to each other, in person, with eye contact. They joke. They sing. They dance. They play the guitar.
Only a war, it seems, can break the fascinating hold of a tiny screen.
In what people in Karenni call the British Columbia years (before the coup), almost everyone was on Facebook. Then, in the pre-dawn hours of February 1, 2021, the junta disconnected telecommunications. That was the first sign of trouble. By morning, most of the country’s elected leaders had been arrested. Today they remain imprisoned.
Since the coup, internet and mobile phone services have been restored in most of the rest of the country, but Facebook and other social networks are banned. In regions where militias have repelled junta forces, such as parts of Karenni State (also known as Kayah State) in the east, Rakhine State in the west, and Sagaing Region and Chin State in In the northwest, entire municipalities remain in the dark. .
With no online games to play or videos to stream on phones, the shadowed space at night is more often filled with local music.
At the front, when the thud of artillery recedes during the day or hour, resistance soldiers exchange AK rifles for guitars. A rebel army commander hits the cajon, the Afro-Peruvian instrument. In a hospital, emergency supplies are lined up against a wall made of leaves: bandages, rubber gloves, rubbing alcohol and a ukulele.
After serving rebel soldiers a meal of spicy noodles with foraged herbs, Emily Oo picked up a guitar resting on the dirt floor of a security outpost captured last year by opposition forces. A few years ago, she was a high school student in Loikaw, the capital of Karenni state, studying English and TikTok dance moves.
Last year, she and her family fled home when fighting between resistance soldiers and junta forces invaded their neighborhood. Most people in Karenni are now displaced and live with a few bundles of their most valuable possessions, including, surprisingly often, a guitar.
“History is written with our blood,” he sang. “The heroes who lost their lives in the battle for democracy.”
The lyrics, part of a well-known revolutionary anthem, were written by candlelight in 1988, when Myanmar was consumed by another national uprising against a previous military dictatorship. After that protest movement was violently crushed, Myanmar seemed to go even further back in time, while most of Asia urbanized and prospered.
A dozen years ago, the junta that then ruled Myanmar set the price of SIM cards at about four times the country’s average annual income, preventing all but the richest from connecting to the world.
So most people’s source of news (or an amalgam of facts, rumors and rhetorical flourishes) was the local tea shop, as it had been for decades. People sat on plastic stools around plastic tables, leaning to avoid any military intelligence spies who might be listening. The tea, whether milky sweet or vigorously bitter, grew cold. The gossip was hot.
As political reforms brought a quasi-civilian administration in 2016, Internet access became cheaper. Facebook accounts proliferated. So did online misinformation. Falsehoods about sexual violence fanned the flames of genocide against a Muslim minority.
Today, in Karenni, Myanmar’s smallest state and one of its least developed even before the online blackout, innuendo is once again replacing the truth. Conspiracy theories multiply. But in the midst of uncertainty and paranoia, music acts as an ointment.
“Every day I heard the sound of bombs, planes and gunshots,” said Maw Hpray Myar, 23, who fled a junta-controlled town and opened a music school in the Karenni forests. “When we hear the sounds of music, our fears disappear a little.”
When there is the rare possibility of accessing the Internet, the lure of going online can pose its own dangers.
In January, members of the resistance gathered at a secret command post in Loikaw. They weren’t there for battle strategy but to access Wi-Fi, courtesy of Starlink, a satellite Internet service used in conflict zones around the world.
The resistance forces got drunk on Facebook. They loved the photographs of newborn babies and the images of other rebel recruits posing, young and determined, in their camouflage uniforms. Some were so engrossed in their online forays that they didn’t notice the nearby buzzing, a soldier who was there recalled.
He and others escaped from the armed drone sent by junta forces. But three people too connected to the Internet did not do so and were injured in the attack, one of them seriously.
On the night of the coup’s third anniversary, opposition soldiers gathered in the rebel-held town of Demoso to celebrate the marriage of Agustín and Josefina, whose names were proclaimed on a sign at the site. Augustine would soon head to the front and many of the other members of the militia were enjoying a couple of days respite from the battle. Generators lit the store and soldiers occasionally glanced at the sky to make sure no fighter jets were targeting the glittering festivities.
As partygoers sipped shots of whiskey before filling the dance floor, Ko Yan Naing Htoo sat on a plastic stool, smoking. In the years before Christ, he had been an accountant. He then joined a rebel army. A land mine took off his leg.
“I am very sorry that I cannot continue fighting alongside my comrades,” he said.
A commander approached Mr. Yan Naing Htoo and put an arm around his shoulder. They nodded their heads to the music, the lyrics about the loss of home for a people displaced from their own. Then a wave of song carried the commander back to the dance floor.
Left on his plastic stool, Mr. Yan Naing Htoo puffed on his cigarette. His hand went to his pocket and pulled out a phone, a vestigial move from another era. He swiped the device. He was dead. He put it away and watched as the men swayed and sang, very close but just out of reach.