SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
Four years ago today, a military junta in Myanmar seized power from the country's democratically elected government. They sent tanks into the streets and detained the country's president, as well as the opposition party leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, among others.
LORCAN LOVETT: After about a week, people started to come out onto the streets to protest - hundreds of thousands of people, if not millions across the country.
DETROW: That's journalist Lorcan Lovett, who covers Southeast Asia.
LOVETT: The military responded with brutal force, shooting many young protesters, suppressing the protests until those protesters, many of them, fled to the - Myanmar's jungles and border areas to seek combat training from established ethnic armed groups. And that has snowballed into what we have today, which is a major uprising that will probably define the future of the country for generations to come.
DETROW: Four years later, the military is still in power, and a civil war between the military and the country's armed resistance carries on. Lovett recently visited Myanmar and got a firsthand glimpse of the ongoing strife. Welcome to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.
LOVETT: Hi, Scott. Thanks for having me on.
DETROW: Is there a simple answer, is there a straightforward answer, to who is winning this conflict four years in?
LOVETT: There's not a straightforward answer. However, there is a trajectory that's emerging. If we look at the last two years, or especially from late 2023 up until now, we can see that the resistance overall is pushing the military back into a kind of rump (ph) area of Myanmar while they claim many victories over bases, and they are strengthening.
But there's a caveat to that. The resistance is not one entity. It's many different groups with many different agendas and many clashing visions for what they want Myanmar to look like in the future. So it's not a simple situation, but overall, we can say that the Myanmar military and Min Aung Hlaing, who's the regime leader, are in - are on the back foot and are in a very bad situation.
DETROW: What stood out to you? What reporting, what conversation, stood out to you from your most recent reporting trip to Myanmar?
LOVETT: Well, my most recent reporting trip was in Chin State, which borders India. It's a mountainous region, devoutly Christian. And what stood out to me, as always on these reporting trips, was the number of young people participating in the armed revolution and how their prospects for an education and families are completely out the window in sacrifice for fighting this revolution. It's always a sad thing to see.
DETROW: You know, the thing about conflicts is it's not just the conflict. It spirals out. There's so many ripples in terms of how it affects life. Can you talk about other ways that this conflict has affected life in Myanmar, particularly when it comes to food scarcity?
LOVETT: In the conflict areas - and there's many of them in Myanmar - the displaced people are really struggling to survive. In Chin State, where I visited, the living costs in those areas have gone up because the Myanmar military is blocking food and medicine from getting into those areas. The U.N. has warned that there's an imminent famine risk in Rakhine State, which is to the south of Chin State. So some observers have said that there's pockets of potential famine around Myanmar, especially with these displaced communities who are isolated.
DETROW: That's journalist Lorcan Lovett, who covers Myanmar and writes about it on his Substack newsletter On Myanmar. Thank you so much for talking to us.
LOVETT: Thank you.
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