Myanmar: The Gaze After the Coup

Jose M. Arraiza

Ten years ago, I set out for a small paradise that today endures a nightmare. I arrived in the town of Dawei, in Myanmar’s Tanintharyi Region, on a sweltering May day in 2015. My mission, as a humanitarian worker with an international humanitarian organisation, was to help the local Karen communities register for legal identity documentation — papers that would allow them, among other rights, to vote in the November elections, where many expected the triumph of the National League for Democracy (NLD), led by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, daughter of the army’s founder and national hero, General Aung San.

Tanintharyi bewitched me. Life there felt like a fragment of paradise. I lived on Mingalar Street, beside a small pagoda and a Buddhist prayer hall where chants rose each night. There was a café baking nan, a school, a noodle shop, and a leather workshop whose workers’ shouts woke me at dawn. Every full moon brought a festival in honor of Buddha. Hindu, Muslim, and cultural Chinese celebrations added to the rhythm of daily life.

Historical memory and conflict

I traveled by 4×4, boat, and on foot through Tanintharyi and into the Karen, Kayah, and Mon states. In Bamar-majority areas, portraits of Aung San Suu Kyi and General Aung San, along with the red crest of the NLD and its peacock, were everywhere. Optimism filled the air. I slept outdoors in villages along the Thai border, where mistrust lingered among the Karen and other minorities. Tens of thousands of Karen refugees still lived in camps across the border. Yet war stories seemed consigned to the past, part of history. I did not know then that the worst was yet to come.

Immigration officers often accompanied me, setting up mobile offices to issue identity documents. They were enforcing the notorious 1982 Citizenship Law, which discriminates against anyone with roots in India or neighboring countries. The Rohingya remain stateless because of this law and the nativism behind it. Indeed, even during the attempted transition which took place before the coup (2011–2021), the Myanmar state was already merciless toward some minorities.

I debated endlessly and in vain with many officials, some of whom made me think of the “banality of evil” as described by Hannah Arendt. Administrative violence was widespread then and continues to be even more so now. Indeed, now it is taking the form of an India-supported Digital ID project which will replicate existing discrimination and create more opportunities for surveilance and repression.

To find respite, I spent long afternoons on Maungmagan beach, photographing fishermen as the community pushed their boats into the surf or dragged them back under monsoon rains.

A premonition

On one journey to Palauk, a former soldier turned local administrator invited us to a Karen village where he was inaugurating a “peace bridge” built under military oversight. As we moved upriver in a small boat, this heavyset man in Rambo-style sunglasses shouted: “Democracy? I laugh at democracy!” I dismissed him as a relic of the past, the old guard. But I was wrong — he was a harbinger. Palauk has since been shelled repeatedly from the sea.

My work with the international humanitarian organisation expanded across Myanmar, assisting with land restitution and fighting displacement caused by land grabs. I made dozens of trips, sometimes flying in small planes to ethnic states — Rakhine, Kachin, Shan, Chin. In Maungdaw, Rakhine, I met Rohingya who angrily displayed their old identity papers, demanding equality. In remote Chin, I photographed elderly women with tattooed faces. I sailed to the Myeik Archipelago, home of the Moken, the “sea gypsies.”

The coup

Then came the tragedies. First, the Rohingya exodus of 2017. Maungdaw was burned to the ground; those I had spoken with — if they survived — are now refugees in Bangladesh. Then the Covid-19 pandemic struck, and I left Myanmar. On February 1, 2021, General Min Aung Hlaing staged a coup, toppling the elected government. Aung San Suu Kyi was jailed once again; thousands were killed, opposition leaders executed after sham trials. In the streets of Dawei, brutalized police officers would mercilessly shoot at teenagers on bicycles simply for violating the curfew. Dormant ethnic conflicts exploded, plunging the country into a humanitarian crisis with 3.6 million displaced people — a living hell for the most vulnerable.

Post-COVID, I worked remotely for a UN agency in Myanmar, my life defined by a strange paradox. My mornings were consumed by calls with Burmese colleagues and NGOs detailing bombings and persecution; my afternoons were spent stepping into the quiet streets of a different world, one preoccupied with trivial complaints. During this time, I also held many discussions with international expats working for donors, the UN, and various global humanitarian and development agencies.

I was disappointed to realize that for many, the primary concern was not the impact of their work, but rather securing funding and the survival of their own small establishments. Their focus remained fixed on institutional preservation, seemingly detached from a desperate population yearning for peace and a federal democracy—a population already reeling from the infamous aid budget cuts of the Trump era and beyond. Worse still, some of these international actors looked down on local civil society organizations, treating them as partners in name only. They viewed them primarily as mere subcontractors, frequently occupying the very spaces those local groups should be leading. By now, many of these foreigners have likely moved on to other crises, having already forgotten about Myanmar. Meanwhile, civil society organizations remain in place—and at risk—still demanding the quality funding they deserve.

In 2023, I finally returned to Yangon—the only area then accessible to foreigners without special clearance. Dawei, once my preferred destination for its natural beauty, had become a battlefield where the military fired indiscriminately, even at children, echoing the tragedies of Gaza or Ukraine. I found myself newly curious about Yangon, a city I had once bypassed. Its downtown, steeped in colonial remnants and a rich tapestry of Hindu, Muslim, and Buddhist heritage, struck me with its raw, unexpected beauty.

I wandered through Dala, the neighborhood across the river, mesmerized by its village-like energy and the endless flow of people on bicycles, rickshaws, and tuk-tuks. Returning to the jetty, I met the gaze of a woman holding a sleeping infant, fresh off the wooden ferry. Her smile was warm, yet her vulnerability haunted me. What future awaited them both?

Later, I traveled to Mae Sot, Thailand, to reunite with old colleagues. They were refugees once again, hiding from Thai police who extorted them with threats of deportation. I visited orphanages run by the Spanish NGO Colabora Birmania and saw communities abandoned by the world. Along the roadsides, families endure disempowered lives in makeshift settlements, lacking even the most basic sanitation and remaining entirely overlooked by aid efforts. It was these realities that led me to co-author the book Before a Democracy Died with Scott Leckie, documenting the devastating scourge of land grabbing.

The Gaze After the Coup

More than ten years after I first arrived in Myanmar, the world has fundamentally changed. Brexit, COVID-19, and the war in Ukraine were only the beginning. Now, the devastation in Gaza and the widening conflict in Iran signal the dawn of a more lawless world—one with even less room for democracy and peace. The racist, nativist philosophy of Myanmar’s 1982 Citizenship Law no longer seems like an obsolete relic; instead, it feels like a grim precursor of what may come to other nations. Yet, despite this darkening landscape, hope remains. Hope is itself a form of resistance.

In the new images I captured in Mae Sot and Yangon’s neighborhoods, I sensed something had shifted since those luminous days of 2015. Had the gaze itself changed after the coup? To explore this, I organized the exhibition “The Gaze After the Coup,” juxtaposing twenty images from before the takeover with twenty captured since February 2021. It was then that I realized what the 2021 coup had altered was not the face of the tea seller, nor the rickshaw driver dozing in the sun. It was my own gaze.

And so I asked myself: to whom does a gaze belong? To the one who looks, or the one observed? To both? Perhaps photography gives birth to a third look — the perspective of the public, and its silent communion. That is yours: a gaze after the coup.

Please do not look away.

The itinerant exhibition “Myanmar: “The Gaze After the Coup” is on display in different cities in Spain. For info & announcements follow instagram: @chemaarraiza. All the pictures can be seen here.