Student activist Lin Lin led protests against Myanmar’s junta, defying the generals for months before being hunted down and caught.
Now serving a 15-year sentence, she regrets nothing. “I wanted to do that more than anything else,” she said. “And if you ask what I will do if I am released, I will do it again.”
The 25-year-old psychology student grew up during a rare semi-democratic interlude in Myanmar.
When the military staged a coup in February 2021 citing unsubstantiated claims of electoral fraud, she joined millions of others demonstrating in the streets. Soldiers fired live bullets into the crowds, arrested thousands.
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The demonstrations gradually fizzled out, but Lin Lin was determined to find a way to keep defiance against the junta at the top of people’s minds.
Lin lin began organising protests around Yangon. She used messaging apps to summon dozens of young protesters, who would converge under colonial-era tenements. They would light flares and unfurl banners. Others criticised the junta through megaphones as passers-by looked on.
Seconds later, the protesters would break apart, scattering down side streets or into waiting vehicles before security forces could arrive. Each event was filmed and the footage uploaded to social media.
With the military tightening its grip on life in Yangon, the rush of each protest was followed by fear.
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Lin Lin said goodbye to her family and went underground in the commercial hub of around eight million people, changing safehouses every few days and always dreading a knock at the door.
In March 2022 a junta-controlled court jailed her for three years under a law that outlaws any action deemed to undermine the military. Lin Lin was also later jailed for another two years for possessing a fake ID.
The monotony of life in prison is broken occasionally by food parcels from home. Only when she meets family members at court hearings is Lin Lin able to hear news of the turmoil that continues to rock Myanmar more than three years since the coup.
