Image: Ninjastrikers [CC BY-SA 4.0], via Wikimedia Commons
Senior academic recounts battle for survival and lays down his hopes for the future
For most academics, a chance to take a senior role in government is a rare career highlight. For Zaw Wai Soe, it triggered a sequence of events that may cost him his life.
Two days after the country’s military overthrew the elected government on 1 February this year, Zaw Wai Soe—a respected surgeon and one of Myanmar’s most senior academics—found himself protesting against some of his former patients who have become top generals in Myanmar’s army, as he took to the streets with the civil disobedience movement.
On 6 February, he went even further, and made a decision he knew would make it impossible for him to live normally again under the military government. Zaw Wai Soe, head of a prestigious medical university and chair of Myanmar’s rectors’ conference of 164 universities, turned down an offer from the military to become the country’s deputy health minister.
Later, as the situation in the country worsened, shooting started at his place of work. “I lost one student, three doctors and one nurse,” he says, speaking to Research Professional News over zoom from a safe location. “Snipers shoot at the head and the chest.”
In the chaos that has enveloped the country since, hundreds of people have been killed, thousands have been detained and others have simply disappeared. The situation has not improved in the months since the takeover: Myanmar is now facing the triple tragedies of the military coup, an economic crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic.
Raids on health facilities
The UN’s resident coordinator in Myanmar, Andrew Kirkwood, told the Financial Times newspaper on 10 October that there is a serious shortfall in aid funding, as the UN has raised less than half of its $385 million appeal for donations to tackle the humanitarian emergency.
“I think that this is a crisis on top of a crisis with a third crisis on top,” Kirkwood told the Financial Times. “I have been in the country for 17 years, and I have never seen the situation as bad as it is today.”
Despite the troubles, protests against the regime are ongoing. Since the very beginning, university staff and students have been at the centre of many of the demonstrations. As a result, Zaw Wai Soe has seen raids by the military on hospitals, clinics and his university.
Broad shouldered in a starched white shirt and dark blazer, Zaw Wai Soe speaks bluntly, outlining the facts.
After the initial protests were met with violence, he says, “most doctors and medical students went back to the hospital and started to treat the wounded, those with gunshot wounds. The military then raided the clinics. We tried to give them care with charity clinics—they raided those, too.”
A World Health Organization surveillance system has identified more than 200 possible attacks on healthcare workers and their patients since the coup began, from intimidation and threats to physical violence.
The global health charity Médecins Sans Frontières says its partners have witnessed raids on organisations that give first aid to injured protesters, with medical supplies being destroyed. “Doctors and nurses have been served with warrants and arrests, health workers have been injured while providing care to protestors, ambulances have been destroyed, and health facilities have been raided,” it said earlier this year.
In hiding
Zaw Wai Soe fears for his students and staff. “Because of the crackdown and arrests now we cannot walk in the city—that’s why most of them are displaced and in hiding, because the military are everywhere and it’s very difficult to work,” he says.
But although he, too, is now in hiding, in other respects he is not trying to keep a low profile.
On 5 March, almost a month after he rejected the job with the military junta, Zaw Wai Soe became the health and education minister in Myanmar’s self-proclaimed National Unity Government, which formed in opposition to the military takeover.
“Since then, I’ve had to hide—they’re trying to find not only me, but my family,” he says.
Shortly after he fled his home in Myanmar’s largest city, Yangon, with his wife and children, their house was set on fire. On 15 March, the military charged Zaw Wai Soe with treason, an offence punishable by death.
But he remains firm in his decision to oppose the regime, and he draws hope from the messages he receives from his students and colleagues, many of whom have also fled Yangon. “Every day I have news from them,” he says.
He hopes that one day those students and colleagues will return to their homes to re-establish healthcare in the country. There is a desperate need to deal with Covid-19 and restart education that has been disrupted between the pandemic and the coup.
But first, Zaw Wai Soe says there needs to be stability in Myanmar. “We cannot go back to the dark ages,” he says. “I feel very sorry for my people and students.”
He adds that the need for stability gives him a clear vision of “where I have to go, how I have to work. That’s why I decided I will fight until the end—that gives me strength to work”.
Slow progress
Part of that work involves calling on others to help. A day after his appointment as NUG health and education minister, The Lancet medical journal published a position co-authored by Zaw Wai Soe urging international researchers and doctors to join a “global movement of protest against injustice and demand for the return of peace and democracy to Myanmar”.
That article also notes that only by getting peace can the country restart its research and once again contribute to the global fight against Covid and other diseases. For the country’s universities, including Zaw Wai Soe’s, making such contributions seems a distant prospect.
Since 2015, he has been heavily involved in higher education reforms that have attempted to restructure education away from a heavily centralised, top-down system, and bring greater autonomy to universities.
In a 2019 TEDx talk on university governance, he smiles broadly and jokes with his audience. “Do we have university autonomy?” he asks them, cutting in with a laugh. “You do not need to answer.”
Even that slow progress—with the pre-coup education ministry—has been torn apart.
On the run
Yet Zaw Wai Soe is determined to make a difference. These days, he barely sleeps four hours a night. His work starts before dawn with a cabinet meeting of the NUG. Next come briefings with the ministry of health, and then of education.
More meetings follow—online and “on the ground”—with health bodies, education organisations and leaders of various ethnic groups, all of whom must be involved to make the so-called “unity government” successful.
As minister for the opposition, he concedes he lacks much of what it takes to run a ministry. Most obviously, he has no access to government financing. He also lacks the formal recognition of most foreign governments, although he says many are helping unofficially by supplying humanitarian aid.
But he does have hope.
Across the country, hundreds of underground “charity hospitals” have been created with doctors setting up shop in monasteries, churches, private residences and even in tents. Despite military raids on these unsanctioned facilities and the personal risk to participants, such charity hospitals continue to crop up, he says. Zaw Wai Soe is involved in setting up one such facility, housing 25 beds.
Over Zoom, his appearance does not betray signs of his early start, nor the immense pressure of the task at hand.
Between meetings, he contacts foreign governments and non-profit groups, and tries to impress upon them how dire the situation is.
“We cannot afford a long time to solve this problem,” he says, “otherwise Myanmar people are suffering.”
Before turning off his camera, he raises his hand in the three-finger salute that has come to represent Myanmar’s defiance against the regime, and says “We must win.”