On February 1, hours before the new parliament was due to be sworn in, troops swooped on Yangon, arrested Aung San Suu Kyi and other political leaders, and installed bespectacled general Min Aung Hlaing as the country’s ruler. For months, Myanmar’s armed forces had been questioning the legitimacy of the November 2020 general election, which had resulted in a landslide for the incumbent governing party, the National League for Democracy, and its leader, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi. This is how Lu, a trade union worker based in Myanmar’s capital Yangon who asked to be identified only by his first name for security reasons, realised that his country’s democracy had been upended by an army coup d’état. “On the news, they officially announced that the military took over the country.” “It’s strange,” the neighbour shouted back. Lu shouted, asking whether he knew what was going on. Lu stepped out onto the balcony of his flat and spied the glimmer of a TV screen through his neighbour’s window. Worse, it now looked like his smartphone couldn’t get online either: Facebook’s app loaded endlessly, WhatsApp texts stayed stuck in pre-delivery limbo. WHEN LU WOKE up early on February 1, 2021, he noticed that his Wi-Fi had stopped working.
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