Young people in Myanmar are fighting the military junta’s information suppression and internet shutdown by producing an underground printed newsletter.
Tens of thousands of PDF versions have been printed out and distributed across communities secretly in Yangon and Mandalay, the two biggest cities in the country.
Lynn Thant, not his real name, is the 30-year-old editor of the newsletter which he named Molotov.
“Even if one of us is arrested, there are young people who will carry on producing the Molotov newsletter,” Thant says. “Even if one of us is killed, someone else will come up when someone falls. This Molotov newsletter will continue to exist until the revolution is successful.”
Since the February 1 coup, when the military ousted democratically elected leader Aung San Suu Kyi and took over the country, there have been mass uprisings.
The result has been brutal security crackdowns with more than 700 civilian deaths.
At least 82 people were killed on Friday in Bago, about 100 kilometres northeast of Yangon, in the biggest one-day total for a single city since March 14. The tally was compiled by the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners, which warned that it expected the number of dead in Bago to rise as more cases were verified.
