Myanmar: The Bloodiest Election

Insight Myanmar

“I arrived in Australia in 1996 in February with my parents… we always felt that for their children to have a better future is not to live under the dictatorship,” begins Mon Zin, a Myanmar-born pro-democracy activist based in Sydney. In this discussion with the Insight Myanmar Podcast, she focuses on Myanmar’s planned 2025 election. Her perspective is informed both by personal experience and her present role coordinating international advocacy in support of the democracy movement in resistance to the military coup.

Mon Zin and her family emigrated when she was a teenager, after generations of suffering under military rule. Her father had participated in the 1988 uprising, and her grandfather’s businesses were confiscated during post-coup nationalization under Ne Win, leaving the family with direct experience of how military power reached into private life, property, and security. For her, dictatorship was not an abstract political condition; it was a force that had shaped her family’s prospects, disrupted livelihoods, and pushed them toward exile. So migration, she explains, was not merely economic but existential. 

Mon Zin then turns to the 2021 coup. Before that, she says she had been observing the country’s politics from afar, but the coup moved her to become directly engaged in anti-junta activism, describing her main role now as a founding member of the Global Myanmar Spring Revolution. GMSR is a network that coordinates diaspora communities across Australia, the United Kingdom, Europe, the United States, and Canada for the purpose of amplifying the Burmese people’s clear rejection of the junta for an international audience. It directs its advocacy at governments, particularly around sanctions, diplomatic recognition, and the illegitimacy of the junta’s election. She characterizes the organization’s activities as a deliberate effort to keep the revolution’s core message from being diluted into vague calls for “stability” or “dialogue,” and which ignores the power imbalance created by a military that seized the state through violence. 

Mon Zin stresses that the Burmese people made their demands quite clear after 2021: they do not want a return to a constrained, military-dominated constitutional order, and they do not want to return to a system in which military power remained permanently embedded in the state. She says that in the decade before the coup, many people had lived through a parallel arrangement in which a civilian government appeared to govern while the military retained veto power and decisive authority. While that period produced openings and a sense of forward motion, she portrays it as a compromise that people accepted for the sake of peace, development, and the possibility of democratic growth. After the coup, that tolerance collapsed, and the demand became total liberation from military rule rather than a negotiated balance with it. 

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