Sarong-like cloths strung out on lines might seem innocuous, but long-held superstitions around women’s clothes appear to have stopped security forces in their tracks as they move to quell an uprising against a coup by the junta in Myanmar.
The country has been in an uproar since the military ousted the civilian government and seized power on Feb. 1, triggering mass protests that the junta has sought to quash with increasingly lethal force.
They have used tear gas, stun grenades, rubber bullets and sometimes live rounds against protesters, who are responding with imaginative tactics of their own.
Photo: AFP
The latest involves hanging women’s undergarments and long skirts — or longyis — on a clothesline across the street.
According to old Burmese traditions, women’s lower parts and the garments that cover them can sap men’s power, known as hpone.
“If they go under a women’s longyi, that means their hpone is destroyed,” pro-democracy advocate Thinzar Shunlei Yi said.
Some soldiers are unwilling to touch a women’s longyi for fear that it could hurt their chances on the front lines.
“When the community hangs the longyi above the rope, [police and soldiers] can’t go in the streets, they can’t cross it and they have to take it down,” Thinzar Shunlei Yi said.
Women are wielding the superstition as a defensive strategy.
Swooping clotheslines of longyis and knickers have suddenly decorated Yangon, from the buzzing San Chaung township to the city’s rural outskirts, where pictures shared on Facebook showed a soldier standing atop a truck to remove one.
Some of the longyis also have images of Burmese Army Senior General Min Aung Hlaing’s face pasted on them, in a further superstitious ploy.
The junta leader features prominently on posters plastered onto the ground across Yangon — protesters believe that it could slow security forces reluctant to step on his portrait.
Yangon has completely transformed since the coup.
Massive makeshift barricades are commonplace, with communities stacking bricks, old tires, tables and barbed wire to prevent authorities from entering their districts.
Some neighborhoods descend into chaos daily as now-seasoned demonstrators take to the streets in defiance of truckloads of police and soldiers. Plastic bags full of water — to help diminish the sting of tear gas in the air — are distributed in hotspots of unrest.
Designated people also carry buckets of water full of soaked blankets, ready to wrap them around gas canisters, while others hold mirrors as shields to confuse their attackers.
As they flee security forces bearing down on them, they release plumes from fire extinguishers to gain precious time — scattering to prearranged escape routes.
Even with all their ingenuity — thanks to some tactics borrowed from Hong Kong and Thailand’s pro-democracy movements — the field remains unequal, Thinzar Shunlei Yi said.
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
PROTESTS: A crowd near Congress waved placards that read: ‘How can we have freedom without education?’ and: ‘No peace for the government’ Argentine President Javier Milei has made good on threats to veto proposed increases to university funding, with the measure made official early yesterday after a day of major student-led protests. Thousands of people joined the demonstration on Wednesday in defense of the country’s public university system — the second large-scale protest in six months on the issue. The law, which would have guaranteed funding for universities, was criticized by Milei, a self-professed “anarcho-capitalist” who came to power vowing to take a figurative chainsaw to public spending to tame chronically high inflation and eliminate the deficit. A huge crowd packed a square outside Congress
RSS