Not backing down: Lin Lin (centre) taking part in a demonstration against the military coup in Yangon. — AFP
Student activist Lin Lin led protests against the nation’s junta, defying the generals for months before being hunted down and caught.Now serving a 15-year sentence, she regrets nothing.
“I wanted to do that more than anything else,” she said during her trial.“And if you ask what I will do if I am released, I will do it again.”
The 25-year-old psychology student grew up during a rare semi-democratic interlude in Myanmar.
When the military staged a coup in February 2021 citing unsubstantiated claims of electoral fraud, she joined millions of others demonstrating in the streets.
Soldiers fired live bullets into the crowds, arrested thousands and carried out nighttime raids on suspected dissidents.The demonstrations gradually fizzled out. But Lin Lin was determined to find a way to keep defiance against the junta at the top of people’s minds.
Inspired by democracy flashmobs in Hong Kong and elsewhere, she began organising protests around Yangon.
She used messaging apps to summon dozens of young protesters, who would converge under colonial-era tenements, outside shopping malls, or at parks and markets.
They would light flares and unfurl banners, a thicket of hands raised in the Hunger Games-inspired three finger salute that has become popular among pro-democracy protesters.
Others criticised the junta through megaphones as passers-by looked on.
Seconds later, the protesters would break apart, scattering down side streets or into waiting vehicles before security forces could arrive.
Each event was filmed and the footage uploaded to social media or sent to journalists abroad.
As she made her way to a protest rendezvous in December 2021, Lin Lin was arrested by plainclothes police.
“I had prepared for the worst ... But when I was suddenly faced by it, my mouth opened and I just said ‘Huh?’” she said from prison.
“I was also thinking to run at first, but the road was very open and they had guns.”
In March 2022, a junta-controlled court jailed her for three years under a law that outlaws any action deemed to undermine the military.The junta has exploited this law – authored during the British colonial era – as a catch-all weapon against dissent, using it to jail protesters, actors, and journalists.
More than 26,000 political prisoners have been arrested by the junta since the start of the coup, according to a local monitoring group.
The monotony of life in prison is broken occasionally by food parcels from home.
Only when she meets family at court hearings is Lin Lin able to hear news of the turmoil that continues to rock Myanmar over three years since the coup.
“I avoid depression by thinking of what I did before I was arrested,” she said.
But last month, a court sentenced Lin Lin to another 10 years for contact with a “terrorist” organisation.
Lin Lin has stopped counting down the days to her release date.
“I don’t want to ask myself how long it is before I can come home.
“I just accept I can come back home after the revolution (against the junta) has won.” — AFP
