As Thitsar* walked through her neighbourhood one December morning, she was struck by its emptiness. The bamboo shacks that line the streets of Hlaing Tharyar, an industrial township on the outskirts of Myanmar’s largest city, Yangon, lay in tatters, overgrown with weeds. The vendors who once weaved through traffic had vanished, as had many of the informal settlements where they lived and the roadside tea shops where they gathered.
Streets that had once resounded with chants for democracy were now eerily silent.
The scene was nearly unrecognisable from just 10 months earlier, when Hlaing Tharyar was a hotbed of resistance following the 1 February military coup which overthrew the elected government led by Aung San Suu Kyi.
Over the past decade, Myanmar’s manufacturing and garment industry saw huge growth, much of it centred in Hlaing Tharyar. Hundreds of thousands of women and men from farming backgrounds flocked to the township to work in its factories, many of which supplied clothes to international brands.
When the coup happened, these factory workers came out in full force to resist. Garment workers led Yangon’s first protests on 6 February, and continued demonstrating even as many were fired from their jobs.
By late February, soldiers were regularly shooting protesters. On 14 March, hundreds of soldiers and police surrounded protesters and fired at them with assault rifles, killing at least 66 people, which Human Rights Watch described as a massacre.
The crackdowns, along with a spiralling economic downturn, caused a mass exodus of Hlaing Tharyar’s factory workers back to their rural villages. Fighting in the countryside is now raging between armed civilian anti-coup groups and the military, which is responding with arson, airstrikes, shelling and other indiscriminate attacks.
One year on, those who remain in Hlaing Tharyar are struggling just to survive. The coup and accompanying violence and instability have left the garment sector in tatters. Poverty and food insecurity have climbed. The UN Development Programme has offered grim forecasts, including that urban poverty would triple by this year compared with 2019 levels and that overall poverty rates would return to levels not seen since 2005.
Thitsar remembers Hlaing Tharyar’s week of terror last March, when she hid with her aunt. “We barricaded ourselves inside until everything was over,” she says.
Now she is out of a job. After months of falling orders, her factory closed in September. Meanwhile, food prices have risen by about 30%, she says. She is now clinging to the hope that her factory will reopen.
Even those still in work face a range of hardships.
On 3 September, two prominent unions accused employers of “taking advantage of the coup” to sack workers, target union leaders and drive down wages.
Than Htun*, another garment worker in Hlaing Tharyar, actively protested in February, but returned to work after several co-workers were fired for going on strike. He says workers were routinely coerced into taking extra shifts, overtime pay has been cut and workers have been made to sleep in an unfinished building next to the factory in case of sudden labour inspections.
Military officers and local officials have since forcibly evicted more than 8,000 families and destroyed their homes, according to research by University College London.
People in Hlaing Tharyar are also living under a cloud of fear caused by a rise in explosions and killings, carried out by both military-sponsored vigilante militias and anti-coup urban guerrilla groups which have increased across the country since June.
In December alone, the township suffered at least 16 explosions in five incidents targeting police stations and military bases, according to a tally of local media reports and announcements from guerrilla groups carried out by the Guardian.
Military informants are also ubiquitous, as are random checkpoints where soldiers and police inspect people’s belongings and the contents of their phones.
For Thitsar, these changes have made her fearful of even going outside for everyday errands. “There are arbitrary shootings and explosions. If there’s a conflict, anyone can get caught in the middle,” she says.
For Than Htun, the neighbourhood is unrecognisable. Market stalls now shut by 8pm, while all-day electricity cuts have become common as public boycotts of electricity bills squeeze the junta’s revenues. Sometimes, the streets are completely dark when he finishes his shift at 7pm.
As the military increases surveillance around the country, he feels as if he is always being watched. “Even when I’m in my own room, I feel the need to wear earphones when listening to the news. It’s like I’m in a strange land.”
* Names have been changed to protect their identity
Nway is a freelance reporter based in Yangon. She is writing under a pseudonym for security reasons
Additional editing by Emily Fishbein
