Members of the former ruling party have followed different paths since the 2021 coup, with some lying low and others taking up arms, while the continued imprisonment and recent deaths of party leaders raise questions about its future.
By FRONTIER
It has been more than three years since Ko Nay Zin Latt traded his pinni – the khaki-coloured, hand-woven jacket that is a signature of the National League for Democracy – for an outfit of green army fatigues and shiny black combat boots.
The would-be MP won his first seat representing Kantbalu Township in the Sagaing Region parliament in November 2020, part of the NLD’s sweeping, nation-wide electoral victory that year. He earned more than twice as many votes as his rival from the military proxy Union Solidarity and Development Party.
Nay Zin Latt never imagined he’d be a soldier, and at first glance he doesn’t look the part. He has the tanned skin typical of anyar thar – the people of the dry zone, that hot arid plain in the country’s centre – and a round, open face. He is a doting father with an easy smile, a lover of literature and music. Four years ago he was visiting villages with senior lawmakers to check in on local development projects and looking forward to his first regional parliamentary session, scheduled for February 2021.
“I wanted to build the country peacefully, which is why I chose parliamentary politics,” the 39-year-old told Frontier. “But circumstances changed.”
His transformation from MP-elect to guerrilla soldier is far from unique among the ranks of the NLD, whose members have gone a variety of separate ways since the February 2021 military coup. More than a hundred members have reportedly signed pledges not to oppose the regime – often as a condition to avoid arrest or be released from detention – but others like Nay Zin Latt say they refuse to capitulate, and believe that taking up arms is the only defence against years of imprisonment and brutal torture for practicing their beliefs.
The coup began with the arrests of senior NLD members, including party chair State Counsellor Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and President U Win Myint, the party’s vice chair. The junta has since arrested thousands of lower-ranking party members and tortured dozens of them to death in detention. Across the country, township and village-level party offices lie vandalised, while many members’ homes have been confiscated or destroyed.
Having annulled the NLD’s 2020 election win, the regime promises to hold fresh elections next year. However, the party was banned early last year for refusing to comply with a draconian new registration law, and any vote held under the junta-stacked election commission is destined to be a sham. An NLD “central working committee” still releases public statements, but it is unable to set new policy or carry out party activities in the absence of the central executive committee, which remains dormant due to the imprisonment and death of key members.
But, undeterred, members like Nay Zin Latt have found what they believe are more potent ways to oppose the military.
MPs, PATs and PDFs
Nay Zin Latt said anti-junta fighters like himself “didn’t immediately take up arms after the military seized power”. “First, we chose peaceful protest,” he said, referring to huge nonviolent demonstrations across Myanmar that were brutally crushed by the regime. “Only when I realised these methods would never work against the military did I finally choose armed resistance.”
Other NLD MPs and local party leaders went on to take civilian roles in the uprising. Shortly after the coup, a group of mostly NLD lawmakers created the Committee Representing Pyidaungsu Hluttaw and by April it was naming officials to the National Unity Government, Myanmar’s parallel administration. Several relatively prominent NLD members became NUG ministers, including Mahn Win Khaing Than and Daw Zin Mar Aung, who were appointed prime minister and foreign minister respectively.
The CRPH also mandated People’s Administration Teams at village, township, district and regional levels, to replace the regime’s own local governance structures as resistance forces advance. These PATs include civil society activists, community elders and civil servants who quit their jobs after the coup to join the Civil Disobedience Movement, but they are often chaired by NLD MPs.
In May 2021, the NUG sanctioned the formation of armed Peoples Defence Forces throughout the country and began attempting to establish a chain of command among them. Eager to join this effort, Nay Zin Latt left Kantbalu for six months of combat training in the town of Laiza, on the China-Myanmar border in Kachin State.
Laiza is the headquarters of the Kachin Independence Army – one of several veteran ethnic armed groups that took in a new generation of fighters after the coup, offering them shelter and training. When Nay Zin Latt finished his training there, he returned home to fight with the NUG-aligned Kantbalu District PDF.
For him and other MPs turned fighters, this has meant abdicating all party roles and any work with political bodies like the CRPH and its Sagaing Region counterpart. This regional parliament met to elect a speaker and vice-speaker in November last year and has been debating the drafting of an interim constitution for Sagaing.
Nay Zin Latt said that before the coup, “We repeatedly told the military to maintain appropriate political boundaries even as they held 25 percent of parliamentary seats and controlled important ministries [as per the military-drafted 2008 Constitution].”
“So, while I’m serving as a PDF soldier, I have to refrain from participating in any political activities,” he said. “I now participate in the revolution solely as a soldier.”
Fellow elected MP Ko Aung Hein Min also joined a PDF, but in a non-combat role.
In 2020, when he was just 25, he won a seat in the Kachin State parliament for Hpakant Township. This would have made him one of the party’s youngest parliamentarians. After the coup denied him his seat, Aung Hein Min also travelled to Laiza to train under the KIA, and then joined the Hpakant Township PDF.
However, he said, “I don’t currently serve on the front line. I work more in the back, like an office staffer, helping to raise funds and procure weapons for the Hpakant PDF, and help with some tasks for the NUG’s defence ministry.”
At the same time, his electoral mandate allows him to play a local leadership role outside the PDF. “As an elected representative for Hpakant, I also help mediate village-level disputes in my constituency,” he told Frontier.
The military seized and then demolished Aung Hein Min’s home in Hpakant in June 2022, a fate common within his party. As of September this year, the junta had confiscated 449 NLD members’ homes, including those of 199 MPs, and vandalised or destroyed 165 NLD offices across the country, according to the party’s Human Rights Violations Documenting Team.
With recent gains in Kachin made by the KIA and its PDF allies, however, Aung Hein Min believes he may soon be able to practice politics above ground.
“The revolutionary forces could take Hpakant town completely if they wanted to. But war is about strategy, and I understand that it is not yet the right time,” he said. “Revolutionary groups have surrounded the town and cut off the military’s key supply routes. Many bases are held by the KIA and PDFs – there are only two or three military bases left in town.”
South of Kachin, junta troops also razed the home of Ko Zaw Htet, a 44-year-old former regional NLD lawmaker, along with his younger brother’s home in Min Taing Pin village of Sagaing’s Pale Township. But this hasn’t stopped Zaw Htet serving the public. Although wanted by the regime, he continues to chair the Pale PAT.
As elsewhere, this governing body functions mostly in rural areas of the township, where resistance armies have established control. Besides offering public services, PATs are also supposed to provide some civilian oversight of these armies – a challenge that Zaw Htet says is now taking up most of his time and energy. His “main duty”, he explained, is “controlling local PDFs who don’t follow the NUG’s chain of command”.
“Many local armed PDFs misbehave here, which creates significant challenges for me because, as a governing body, we cannot hold arms. We only carry out NUG policy,” he said. “This puts my life in constant danger. I’ve received many death threats from local PDFs.”
Elected MPs like Zaw Htet who chair PATs draw their legitimacy from the 2020 election. But some dispute this mandate, particularly the younger generation of non-party activists who point out that it was they, not the NLD, who led the immediate post-coup uprising, and who continue to make the greatest sacrifices on the front lines of the conflict. Ordinary residents are also unhappy with the leadership of NLD lawmakers in some cases.
In September, about 700 residents of Sagaing’s Mawlaik Township took to the streets to protest when elected NLD MP Daw Cho Cho Win was named chair of the township PAT. The residents complained that Cho Cho Win now lives in India and demanded to be led by somebody who still lived in the community.
“Till now, the NUG has not responded to our demands,” a resident who requested anonymity for their safety told Frontier.
These demands were submitted to the Sagaing Region PAT but its representatives declined Frontier’s request for comment.
However, Zaw Htet said it doesn’t matter whether elected MPs and other leaders are inside or outside the country, so long as they are “still in the revolution”. He compared them favourably with the roughly 100 NLD lawmakers who had signed pledges to stay out of the struggle, even though many of them were signing under severe pressure from the junta.
“I understand the party members who are overseas for their security,” he said. “But I’m intensely disappointed with the MPs who don’t work for the revolution and have signed the junta’s pledges. I’ve put their names on my list of enemies.”
A party changed
The military has suffered historic defeats over the last year and its grasp on power is fragile. Yet, even if it was defeated tomorrow and Nay Zin Latt were to lay down his arms, the post-coup conflict has utterly changed the face of his party and put its relevance in doubt.
About 3,000 NLD members have been arrested since 2021, with more than 1,600 still in detention, according to party Central Working Committee member U Kyaw Htwe, who spoke to Frontier over the phone from exile in the United States.
He said the junta had also killed at least 93 members, by the party’s count, including through torture in detention. “The junta shows no mercy, even to ward and village-level members. They arrest or kill them,” Kyaw Htwe said, adding that there have likely been dozens of unreported deaths, for instance among members who had to forgo medical care while in hiding.
Moreover, the figure of 93 doesn’t include those who died of medical neglect in prison, such as U Nyan Win. The NLD legal adviser and central executive member succumbed to COVID-19 in Yangon’s Insein Prison in July 2021.
The number also doesn’t include Ko Phyo Zayar Thaw. The former hip-hop star, who served in the pre-coup parliament, was among four people who were hanged at Insein Prison on July 25, 2022, breaking a decades-long stay on judicial executions in Myanmar.
Because of this persecution, Kyaw Htwe said thousands of members have fled their homes for resistance-controlled areas. Others have sought sanctuary in neighbouring Thailand or India, but also in Western countries like the United Kingdom and US, where many of them work for the NUG and CRPH.
But while party members are scattered, the Central Working Committee continues to message the Myanmar public and the world.
It said on September 27 that the NLD “rejects the sham election planned by the military council as a means to deceive the domestic and international community. We will neither recognize nor participate in this illegitimate process.”
However, this position came after some wrangling between senior party members. In late 2022, NLD grandees Daw Sandar Min and U Toe Lwin met Aung San Suu Kyi in Nay Pyi Taw Prison, where the party chief remains confined, to allegedly lobby for the NLD’s participation in the election. The two visited the prison again in early 2023 but Aung San Suu Kyi reportedly refused to meet them, and the Central Working Committee expelled them from the party shortly afterwards.
However, powerful neighbours like China and India have backed the junta’s election plan, calling it a potential solution to Myanmar’s crisis. While in government before the coup, the NLD established warm ties with Beijing and secured big-ticket Chinese investment pledges. These ties still seemed warm when China invited the party to an Asian political summit in September 2021, but it since appears to have changed course, inviting four political parties that registered with the junta’s election commission to visit the country in July this year.
U Bo Bo Oo, a Yangon regional lawmaker now serving as the NLD’s point person on China, said his party rejects support from any neighbouring country, including China, for the junta’s planned election.
“Election discussions should only occur after all political and armed forces meet and discuss,” he told Frontier. “Until then, we refuse to consider the junta election.”
In the meantime, the NLD continues to suffer tragic losses. On June 1 this year the party’s patron U Tin Oo – the former army commander-in-chief who co-founded the NLD with Aung San Suu Kyi and others in 1988 – died from health complications at the age of 97. Although previously a political prisoner, Tin Oo was not jailed after the coup. This is in contrast to former Mandalay Region chief minister and party vice chair U Zaw Myint Maung, who died aged 72 on October 7 after his cancer deteriorated due to alleged neglect in Mandalay’s Obo Prison.
Some question what will become of the NLD, with so many of its leaders dead, imprisoned or exiled.
U Win Aung, an NLD Central Working Committee member and former upper house lawmaker for Sagaing, dismisses such concerns. He says the party has cultivated a new generation of leaders, even as its founders are gradually passing away.
“A party standing with the people and following democracy’s path never fades. We pass our beliefs from generation to generation,” he said.
Aung Hein Min agrees. The party has been here before, he says.
“Our leaders emerged during the 1988 uprising. This party has grown from then,” he told Frontier. “We must focus on our revolution and serve the public interest. If we do this, our party need not worry about its future. The public will decide.”
Yet, it’s debatable whether the party has successfully fostered a new generation of leaders and has truly grown from its roots in 1988, when Aung San Suu Kyi entered politics. Before the coup, she dominated the party both internally and in the public imagination; her image was front and centre during the party’s election campaigns.
NLD members interviewed by Frontier all worry deeply about the party leader. She will turn 80 next year and remains largely uncontactable in prison; even her legal team is denied visits. Earlier this year, her son Kim Aris said he had received a letter from her saying she was suffering from bad teeth and osteoporosis, a bone disease.
“She is not living in a suitable place for her health, and does not have good healthcare access or adequate food,” Kyaw Htwe told Frontier. “Her life is at risk every day.”
Like other party members, he combines personal affection for Aung San Suu Kyi with a continued belief in her political importance. “The release of our leader is important not only for herself but also for the resolution of Myanmar’s political problems, so I would like the world to force the junta to release her,” he said.
Similarly, the Central Working Committee’s statement on September 27 said, “We believe that a lasting solution to the current crisis of Myanmar requires the involvement of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi.”
Bo Bo Oo agreed. “She is the only person who has the full mandate of the NLD. We can’t talk about political issues without her,” he said. “Her importance remains strong to this day.”
