Before Most People Were Awake
In the early hours of February 1, 2021, military forces moved across Myanmar. Soldiers arrived at the homes of elected leaders — including State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi and President Win Myint — and arrested them. State television went silent. Mobile phone services were cut. ATMs stopped working. Troops took up positions in major cities.
By the time most people woke up, it was over. Myanmar's military, known as the Tatmadaw, had seized full control of the government, invoking an emergency clause in the military-drafted constitution. Senior General Min Aung Hlaing declared a one-year state of emergency — a deadline that has since been extended again and again.
Parliament had been scheduled to convene that very morning for the first time since the November 2020 elections. That session never happened.
"We woke up and the internet was gone. Then we heard from neighbors. By 8 in the morning, everyone knew. It was like 1962 all over again — but we had seen what democracy looked like, and losing it felt different this time."— Burmese civilian, as reported by international journalists
The Military's Claim — and What the Evidence Shows
The military's stated reason for the coup was election fraud. In November 2020, Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy had won a landslide victory — even larger than their 2015 win. The military-backed party won almost nothing. Military leaders claimed the results were fraudulent and demanded an investigation.
Myanmar's independent Election Commission reviewed the claims and found no credible evidence of widespread fraud. International election observers agreed. The 2020 election was widely considered free and fair.
Many analysts believe the real reason was simpler: the military could see that its political influence was fading. Under the 2008 constitution it had written for itself, the military held reserved seats in parliament and controlled key ministries. But as civilian government gained strength and public trust, that guaranteed power felt increasingly threatened. The coup was, in many ways, an act of self-preservation by an institution unwilling to accept a democratic future it could not control.
There was also a personal dimension. Senior General Min Aung Hlaing was due to retire later in 2021. A coup made him, instead, the head of state.
Who Is Min Aung Hlaing?
Senior General Min Aung Hlaing has led the Myanmar military since 2011. He has been sanctioned by the United States, the European Union, the United Kingdom, and Canada for human rights abuses, including his role in military campaigns against ethnic minorities prior to 2021.
After seizing power on February 1, he declared himself head of the ruling junta, which calls itself the State Administration Council (SAC). He remains in that position today, though the military's control of the country has significantly eroded due to armed resistance.
A Nation That Refused to Accept It
The response from Myanmar's people was immediate and remarkable. Within days, millions had joined what became known as the Civil Disobedience Movement — one of the largest and most sustained acts of nonviolent resistance in modern history.
Doctors, nurses, and hospital workers walked off the job. Teachers stopped teaching. Government employees refused to come to work. Factory workers went on strike. Railway workers halted trains. It was ordinary people, collectively, saying: we will not cooperate with this.
Street protests filled cities across the country. People hung red ribbons from their balconies — the color of the NLD. Each night, families across Myanmar stood at their windows and banged pots and pans, a traditional way of driving out evil, now repurposed as nightly defiance. The sound rolled through city after city in the dark.
Young people organized with extraordinary creativity. Artists, musicians, and poets channeled grief and rage into powerful public expression. A generation that had grown up with social media used it to document everything — until the military began cutting internet access to stop them.
The Three-Finger Salute
Protesters across Myanmar adopted the three-finger salute — a gesture borrowed from pro-democracy movements in neighboring Thailand — as a symbol of resistance. It became one of the most recognized images of the 2021 uprising: young people, many of them students, standing in the streets with three fingers raised, facing soldiers with guns.
The courage it took to stand in those streets — knowing what the military had done in 1988 — is not a small thing.
When Peaceful Protest Met Live Ammunition
The military's response to the protests was brutal. Security forces used water cannons, rubber bullets, and then live ammunition against unarmed crowds. By March 2021, hundreds of civilians had been killed. Thousands were arrested — activists, journalists, medical workers, elected officials, and ordinary people who had simply shown up to protest.
As the military's grip tightened, many young people who had been peaceful protesters concluded that nonviolent resistance alone was not enough. They joined or formed armed resistance groups, sometimes alongside established ethnic armed organizations that had been fighting the military for decades. What began as a protest movement became a civil war.
The military responded to armed resistance with tactics that have been widely documented and condemned by international human rights organizations: airstrikes on villages, burning of homes, attacks on schools and hospitals, and the deliberate targeting of civilian communities believed to be sympathetic to the resistance.
A People Who Refused to Surrender
What happened next in Myanmar is one of the most remarkable acts of collective courage in the modern world — and one of the least reported.
When peaceful protest was met with bullets, Myanmar's people did not go home and go quiet. They organized. Thousands of young people — many of them university students, office workers, and teachers with no military background whatsoever — left their cities and traveled to remote jungle areas to receive training from ethnic armed organizations that had been fighting the military for decades. They formed new resistance groups, called People's Defence Forces, and began pushing back. Against one of Southeast Asia's most heavily armed militaries, ordinary people chose to fight.
The price has been devastating. The military responded to resistance with tactics that international human rights organizations have documented as war crimes: airstrikes on villages, the burning of homes and crops, the deliberate targeting of schools and hospitals, the destruction of entire communities. Thousands of civilians have been killed. Whole towns have been reduced to ash. Children have grown up in displacement camps, their schools bombed, their futures interrupted by a conflict they did not choose.
And yet the resistance has not collapsed. In fact, by 2024 and into 2025, armed resistance forces had taken control of significant territory from the military — something that would have seemed impossible in the early days of the coup. The Tatmadaw, which once controlled the entire country, now finds itself losing ground it has held for decades. This is not a small thing. It is the result of years of sacrifice by people who refused to accept that freedom was out of reach.
This resistance has come at an almost unimaginable cost. Families have lost everything — homes, savings, livestock, the communities where they had lived for generations. Infrastructure built over decades — roads, bridges, clinics, schools — has been destroyed. There is not a community in Myanmar that has not been touched by loss. The people carrying this burden are not soldiers by nature. They are parents, teachers, farmers, and young people who simply loved their country enough to refuse to let it be taken without a fight.
That kind of courage deserves to be named. And it deserves to be remembered.
"They left behind everything they had built — their homes, their businesses, their ordinary lives — and went into the jungle because they believed that freedom was worth that price. The world should know their names. It does not."— Strategic Global Missions
Why the World Has Not Stopped It
Many people who learn about what is happening in Myanmar ask the same question: why doesn't the international community intervene? It is a fair question, and the honest answer is complicated.
Myanmar's neighbors — China and India most prominently — have significant economic and political interests in the country and have not supported strong international action against the military. ASEAN, the regional body that includes Myanmar, operates on a principle of non-interference in members' internal affairs and has struggled to respond effectively. The United Nations Security Council has been blocked from decisive action by the veto power of China and Russia, who have opposed sanctions.
Western nations have imposed targeted sanctions on military leaders and entities, cut off military aid, and publicly condemned the coup. But sanctions alone have not stopped the violence, and the people of Myanmar have felt, at times, deeply alone.
This is part of why organizations like Strategic Global Missions believe that supporting indigenous Christian leaders — people who are already there, already trusted, already doing the work — matters so much. The international community may be slow. But the church is present.
"They are kind and beautiful people who have been oppressed and systematically overlooked for decades. The world has not paid enough attention. We believe that is changing — and we want to help."— Kristen Jones, President, Strategic Global Missions
An Ongoing Crisis — and an Unbroken People
As of 2026, Myanmar remains in an active civil war. The military has lost significant territory to resistance forces and no longer controls large parts of the country. But the cost of this conflict continues to fall most heavily on ordinary civilians — families displaced from their homes, children unable to go to school, communities cut off from food, medicine, and safety.
And yet — the people of Myanmar have not given up. The same spirit that filled the streets in February 2021, that banged pots and pans through the dark, that raised three fingers in the face of armed soldiers — that spirit is still there. It has gone underground, into the hills, into exile, into quiet acts of faithfulness that the world does not see. But it is there.
For the Christian communities of Myanmar, February 1, 2021 was not the end of anything. It was a new trial in a long story of endurance. And the God who has sustained his people through decades of military rule, ethnic conflict, and isolation is the same God who is with them now.
SGM's Response Since February 2021
Strategic Global Missions has remained in active partnership with indigenous Christian leaders in Myanmar since the coup. When access became difficult and physical movement became dangerous, those relationships — built over decades — became more important than ever.
We do not share operational details about our partners or their work for their protection. What we can say is this: they are still there. They are still serving. And they need the continued prayers and support of people who understand what they are facing.