“I would rather die than live again in a dictatorship”

After the military coup in Myanmar in the beginning of February 2021, I contacted some of the people I knew from my work in the country in 2016 and 2020. The musician Darko was one of them. He was seven years old when the military junta under General Ne Win brutally crushed the first major student protest, which grew into a national uprising, in 1988. “I was taken back to my childhood trauma," he told me when I called him just days after the coup had happened. "My son is seven years old now. The idea that he could go through the same thing I went through during my childhood saddens me immensely." I wrote a piece for NZZ about the struggle of Darko and other activists in Myanmar who are fighting a reckless junta. Based on this article, I was interviewed on the NZZ podcast "Akzente" about the protests in Myanmar. In the podcast you can also hear excerpts from an interview I had conducted with Darko in Yangon in early 2020.