Peace Through Punk Rock

Min Sid’s upper lip curls and his tattooed hands twitch at the wrist. Slight spasms grab at the 22-year-old punk rocker’s cheek as he examines the sharp silhouettes in front of him. Onstage at the Caribbean-themed Pirate Bar in downtown Yangon, he’s a living metaphor for his country, Myanmar—its modern skin and its bone-deep agony.

He wrote songs in 2017 while weaning himself off heroin with street methadone and amphetamines. Tremors still run like falling dominoes up his arms and into his face, a steady hum below Min Sid’s smile as he watches 50 punks, all dyed Mohawks and fishnet T-shirts, fall over one another. Everyone is sloppy-friendly drunk, and everyone in the room loves Min Sid, the Yangon punk scene’s rising star. Everyone is his brother—his “bruzaaah!” Still, he can’t help but wonder if the police will cut the power to the show, as they have in the past, or how many of the taxi drivers hopping out of their cabs to eyeball the crowd are paid police informants.

For these 20-somethings dousing one another in beer, this is a gathering of chosen family. The Yangon punk scene breaks down into three waves stretching back to the mid-1990s, and luminaries from all three are in attendance. Shway (not his real name), the reclusive founding father of Yangon punk, with hair too thin to be teased into a Mohawk, perches on a bar stool with his video camera. He brought the first punk CDs—bootlegged compilations of songs by New York band the Casualties—into the Yangon open-air markets in 1996. Kyaw Thu Win, a.k.a. Kyaw Kyaw, is credited with founding the scene’s more worldly and web-savvy second wave. His band, Rebel Riot, has been covered extensively by European journalists and young documentary filmmakers ever since. Tonight he’s master of ceremonies, popping in and out of the spotlight, hyping the younger musicians and rallying the crowd with chants: “Fuck discrimination! Fuck the war!”

At punk shows from Oakland, California to Ridgewood, New York, cries like these are obligatory, implied or mocked, and the studded jackets are Halloween costumes—relics of a scene supplanted by myriad subgenres. In Myanmar, where decades of discrimination have tumbled into genocide and the civil war has been nursed by successive junta leaders to span the past seven decades, “fuck the war” means fuck the norm. It means fuck the one thing all 135 ethnicities in Myanmar have in common—life dangerously close to blood-speckled grass and villages set ablaze by government soldiers.

Ten or 20 foreign aid workers pepper the floor, swaying above the native crowd like pale palms in thick tennis shoes. (Most nights, Pirate Bar is where this group seeks new faces in the humanitarian dating pool.) Like every other damp, green-lit gin mill and beer station in Yangon, Pirate Bar tends to observe an unspoken ban on political discussions, with a special sensitivity to opinions about the Rohingya exodus from Myanmar’s Rakhine state. So it’s an unlikely place for an ideological cri de coeur, but on this April night, the world churning around the pencil-thin punk musicians of Myanmar’s largest city has made it one. Since Shway’s first efforts, a line has been drawn between Yangon punks and the rest of their conservative homeland. When Min Sid and his band, Outcast, take the stage, they’re entering their country’s culture war, a shouting match between the Buddhist majority, more than 35 million strong, and a small community of derelict punk rockers, starving artists and university students.

Both sides have their heels dug in, jockeying for the philosophical heart of a military state only recently reopened to the West with the free election of Aung San Suu Kyi in 2015. The three-front civil war the government has waged against minority populations for the past 70 years has been decried in only a few places in Myanmar; Pirate Bar is one of them. Cops generally tolerate the punks, but the bar is only a mile from the notoriously corrupt Kyauktada police station, so all bets are off. In January 2018, Kyauktada station cops forced poet and Muslim civil rights activist Than Toe Aung into the back of a van. They beat him there and at the station before his family paid a bribe for his release.

Suddenly power chords pummel the thick air, ascending in pitch and volume; in his mind, Min Sid begins to levitate. Music is like heroin in that way, he says later: It makes him feel like he’s floating. He turns his back to the crowd and focuses on the scrawny musicians onstage with him.

He screams into the mike, “Break bounda-raaaay!”

He’s floating above the boundaries he grew up with—a nationalist education, a traditional Burmese society based on conformity and a marathon of military assaults that formed a circle of death around Yangon.

He aims his addled truth at the ceiling: “Cunt authoritaaaay!”

A few blocks beyond Min Sid’s voice, in the Yaw Min Gyi neighborhood, Buddhist devotees young and old lay down long red carpets on closed-off streets. It’s only a few weeks before the April New Year’s celebration, and plush outdoor meditation rugs line large portions of the city. Rocking back and forth with their eyes closed, somewhere between wakefulness and sleep, monks lead the crowd droning mantras for hours into the hot night.

top: A Yangon punker mounts a charm offensive. Above, from top: Min Sid strikes a biblical pose outside Shwedagon Pagoda; punks take a break from Pirate Bar’s beer-soaked mayhem; Kyaw Kyaw displays a print from the photo shoot that resulted in personal threats and his written promise that he’d leave the Buddha out of future Rebel Riot endeavors.

Burma, the former British colony and Japanese puppet state, rejected its colonial name in 1989 in exchange for Myanmar, a move meant to acknowledge not just the ethnic Burmese majority but all the ethnicities within its borders. That may have been the government’s last move toward inclusivity. Its attacks on the Rohingya, Kachin, Shan and Karen people in 2017 and 2018 make Myanmar’s overarching domestic policy look like a race to violently displace minorities—for mineral resources in the case of the Kachin, for poppy farmland in the case of the Shan and Karen, and for fear of a religious and cultural takeover in the case of the Rohingya Muslims.

The Myanmar government of the 1990s was as opaque and as opposed to freedom of expression as it is today. Large expanses of the countryside were closed to journalists and the public, as they are now. Locals say much of that land was grabbed by the military and privately mined for jade or divided into government contract farms. Those who got too close to exposing the illegal economies in those regions were jailed or disappeared altogether, according to Kyaw Kyaw. “There is danger for people who make noise—still today,” he says.

The journalist Soe Moe Tun, reporting on illegal logging in the Sagaing region, was beaten to death in late 2016. The same year, two reporters’ homes were threatened with bombs in the Rakhine and Kachin states. In another case, Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, two Reuters reporters who uncovered a mass grave and verified the summary execution of 10 Rohingya men by government soldiers and Buddhist villagers in Rakhine state in the fall of 2017, have been sentenced to seven-year prison sentences for violating the Official Secrets Act. A vague and antiquated piece of colonial legislation, the OSA was enacted by the British Governorate in 1923 to classify evidence of corruption as an official state secret, allowing colonials to jail Burmese insurgents.

Myanmar’s openness to Western business can be seen in the expat boat parties in the port of Yangon and the slick bars and English-language classrooms popping up all over the city. Distrust of the Western media and international standards of free speech, which flowed in with the American and European money, is just as plain.

“Fake news from America!” is a frequent café reaction to New York Times stories that treat Myanmar government militarism as acts of war instead of self-defense or antiterrorism measures. Inquisitive foreigners are likely to be told they have no right to speak about Myanmar, but the reality of this young democracy is that natives are also limited in their right to talk about their country. Laws governing protest, telecommunications and defamation, many left over from British colonial rule, are still used by the government to jail critics. Human Rights Watch reports that by the beginning of 2016, 166 people were awaiting trial for breaking the Peaceful Assembly Law, including students who’d protested against the role of the military in government, farmers who’d protested the confiscation of their land for government gem mines and journalists who’d protested the arrest of other journalists. The legislation’s vague language penalizes “statements likely to cause fear and alarm” and those who “disturb the public tranquility.”

To make matters worse, political activism in Myanmar fell into complacency after once lauded humanitarian Aung San Suu Kyi took office as state counselor in 2016.

“Their reasoning was that Aung San Suu Kyi was elected democratically. It’s what the people wanted, so what is there left to protest?” says Zin Linn, a Yangon-based musician and activist on the fringes of the punk scene.

“Buddha didn’t need anybody else. he went his own way, like Johnny Cash.”

Kyaw Kyaw says that Shway passed down his primary tenet of punk in 2004: “Solidarity,” he said, “is number one.”

Those words have echoed between Kyaw Kyaw’s shaved temples for the past 14 years. In that time he has become the charismatic, English-speaking face of the Yangon punk scene. He and Rebel Riot are the focus of the documentary My Buddha Is Punk, released last January on Vimeo on Demand. Another rumored project, a crowd-funded narrative film about a female filmmaker from Europe marginalized because of her fetish for Asian males, began production in the summer of 2017; Kyaw Kyaw plays the pierced love interest.

But visibility alone doesn’t pay the bills, so Kyaw Kyaw converted his apartment, perched in a walk-up in the Hledan district, into a screen-printing shop. (The Rebel Riot shop sign being difficult to see from the street, it’s much easier to follow the sound of Bob Marley, Cannibal Corpse and Pantera upward to the third-floor balcony.) The sale of Rebel Riot shirts pays for rent and food for the transient musicians between gigs. More important, the shop is where everyone meets. When I walk in, a metal guitarist and a Vice journalist visiting from Hamburg are smoking and talking about politics and the punk scene in Germany. Punks from the countryside wander into the shop for drunken jam sessions and family-style meals. Outcast drummer Japan Gyi celebrated his 22nd birthday there over a meal of Myanmar Beer, dried crickets and sautéed chicken heads.

Kyaw Kyaw appears to have taken Shway’s philosophy of solidarity to heart while dodging corrupt police and protesting the conflicts that encircle Yangon. Focusing on the idea that political change in Myanmar must be generational, for the past three years he has been on a mission to expose schoolchildren in rural villages to punk (not to mention pop) music, the arts and the international media before they get hooked on government-controlled television news. Through crowd-funding, Rebel Riot has toured Thailand, Indonesia and much of Eastern Europe, building a roster of promoters and paving the way for Outcast and other third-wave bands.

Solidarity was number one with Shway because he knew the punk community would suffocate without it. They are a generation on the margins of a traditional Buddhist society that often sees artists as people too stupid or weak to pursue careers in business. Their country is by turns maniacally pacifist and militaristic, a new democracy and an old colony. Individual rights are determined by the ethnicity listed on a person’s national identification card. A tightly knit punk community—and vocal opposition to the government war machine—could grow if musicians and fans had one another’s tattooed backs, if they lived as though punk were their listed ethnicity.

Meanwhile, Kyaw Kyaw and his band are at constant risk. Threats rolled in over Facebook after Kyaw Kyaw posed as a punk-rock version of Buddha while other members of Rebel Riot dressed as Jesus and the Hindu goddess Shiva for a photo shoot in Thailand. When the threats intensified and found their way to Kyaw Kyaw’s cell phone, he signed an agreement with a Yangon governing body stating that he would never again punkify the Buddha. But that didn’t stop him from writing a song called “Fuck Religious Rules”:

Fuck religious rules

There are no human rights by religious rules

There is genocide by religious wars

Religious rules fuck off!