Myanmar: Comrade in Arms

“Comrade,” answers Renata, a member of the People’s Defense Force and a former political prisoner, simply when asked how she would like to be remembered. In this powerful interview, Renata frames her experience in the revolution through the lens of that identity, explaining that what binds her to the struggle is not abstract nationalism or personal ambition, but loyalty to people who have suffered, fought, been imprisoned, and died. She says she continues because of obligation to them, one formed through her own experiences: protests, arrest, prison, jungle survival, airstrikes, and the arrests of nearly every member of her family. Before the coup, Renata was as a law student, and she describes her life as pretty ordinary: hitting the books and doing some office work. She volunteered with NGOs, partly to gain experience beyond school, and partly to understand how such organizations functioned. She was also shaped by a family ethic that emphasized service over self-interest. Her parents, she explains, taught her, “Be the one for the people, but not for yourself! ” When the coup occurred in 2021, she says she did not initially believe it would reshape her life so completely. At first, she was cautious. In her village, where military retaliation was widely feared, she avoided joining early street protests and instead participated online. She refers herself as a “keyboard fighter” during that period, acknowledging both fear and uncertainty about what public protest might ultimately cost. Over time, however, as shootings and crackdowns intensified, she felt compelled to participate directly in physical protest. As the junta’s repression intensified, her attempt to join an ethnic armed organization (EAO) was rejected because she was not a member of that ethnic community. She then began learning to make Molotov cocktails and small bombs using online tutorials, producing them at home for her brother and his friends. She describes this shift not as ideological escalation but as practical response to constraint: when one door closed, she searched for another. In June 2021, she was arrested by the junta and imprisoned along with her mother and her four-year-old sister; her sister was the youngest political prisoner in the country at that time, and soon released to live with a neighbor. Renata was sentenced to three years with hard labor. Prison, she says, was not simply confinement, but a form of psychological injury, and she has experienced persistent trauma since. She contracted COVID-19 during her incarceration and was placed alone in a cold room without proper treatment for roughly twenty days. She survived through immersing herself in breath meditation. “I just know, ‘Breathe in and breathe out,’” she says, describing it less as spiritual practice than survival. The authorities also pressured her to reveal the location of her father, who had been politically active before the coup; she refused. She says it was not heroism on her part, but family devotion: if continued imprisonment was the price she had to pay for safeguarding family members, she accepted it. Finally, after serving four months of her sentence, she agreed to sign a pledge not to participate in further revolutionary activity in order to get an early release. CATCH THE PODCAST https://player.captivate.fm/episode/6b8309bf-05a8-4b80-80f7-936647e62dd0