This is popular front a podcast focused on the niche details of modern warfare and

underreported conflict with me Jake Hanrahan. Today we're speaking to researcher Nathan Russo

about the ongoing conflict in Myanmar or Burma. One year ago today there was a military coup and ever since there

have been very serious clashes which evolved into outright guerrilla warfare. There are dozens and dozens of

resistance factions now, rebels fighting against the junta. Nothing's gonna

speak to us and tell us what's happening in Myanmar. If you like what we're doing, please support

us for extra content at patreon.com slash popular front. So I think we'll get into the various different factions and the battles soon, but just to remind people,

maybe you can just kind of briefly go into, you know, what is it that happened in Myanmar, Burma, this new situation with the military junta,

there's now many, many different militant factions fighting against them.

Maybe just give us an idea of, you know, what's been going on over the last year or so

yeah so when you look at look at me and my history more generally you can see that there's a lot of a lot of

streams of military started making some

sort of in 2012 and then more so in 2015 it started opening up a bit.

The sort of military started making some concessions to the civilian

political parties and they had I think it's

fair to say overwhelming success at any elections that were given. So the

the military had sort of stacked the decks in a way where they'd guaranteed themselves a certain amount of seats, they'd guaranteed themselves enough sort of representation in parliament no matter what happens, that they can veto whatever they want and they can sort of be in charge of whatever they actually

want. But when it comes to the parts of Parliament that were democratically elected, it was basically

90% plus going towards this National League for Democracy, which was Anung-Souchez Party, that had sort of risen through the ranks through all of this student protests and all of these protests against military rule for the last 30, 40 years.

But in November 2020 there was the most recent election where again the NLD won an overwhelming majority of seats.

And so for the months between sort of November and February, the military was crying foul

a lot.

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