Land Without Evil

In 2021, Myanmar's military ousted the country's democratically-elected government in a coup. Can the country's ethnic armed groups unite to overthrow its tyrannical rule once and for all?

On February 1st of 2021, Myanmar's military, the Tatmadaw, ousted the country's democratically-elected government in a coup. Peaceful protests held across Myanmar against the actions of the Tatmadaw soon devolved into bloodshed as the police and the military attempted to suppress civil defiance with excessively violent crackdown.

For the first time in over a generation, Myanmar's majority ethnic group, the Bamar, have suffered the same brutality at the hands of the Tatmadaw which has been inflicted upon the country's minority ethnic groups within its remote and peripheral states for decades. In retaliation, the young Bamar have formed a People's Defence Force (PDF), which now trains and fights alongside the numerous ethnic armed groups across the country - some long-established and others newly-formed - with the united aim of removing the tyrannical regime.

As well as attempting to quell civil disobedience in the country's major towns and cities, the Tatmadaw has turned its forces upon Myanmar's ethnic regions, where it has waged air and land campaigns upon its own civilians and the ethnic forces mandated to protect them.

The following images have been taken in two of Myanmar's ethnic states - Karen and Chin - which have witnessed some of the Tatmadaw's most violent efforts since the coup.

Air raids upon villages inside Karen state in March and April forced some 40,000 civilians to flee into the jungle for safety. In Chin, while systematic arson takes place within one of its main towns, Thantlang, a build-up of Tatmadaw forces in the state bares a haunting resemblance to manoeuvres which preceded the Rohingya genocide of 2017.

While there is indeed a general ambition among the people of Myanmar to overthrow the Tatmadaw, what remains to be seen is whether this desire can evolve into a truly unified effort, or whether tribal and ethnic fault lines between the numerous groups can be exploited by the Tatmadaw to break it apart and crush it.