Myanmar’s Military Has Stolen One More Thing: A Revolution’s Song

Myanmar’s military has a long record of looting. For decades, soldiers have raided villages in ethnic areas, taking food, money and whatever could be carried away. After the 2021 coup, people in major cities witnessed soldiers and police seize motorcycles, mobile phones and other belongings from civilians in broad daylight.

Now the military has looted something it cannot carry away in a truck: a song.

On May 24, military-owned Myawady TV broadcast a music video titled “Sit Thar Thway Ni, Shae Tho Chi” (“Soldiers’ Red Blood, March Forward”). Myanmar listeners did not need a musicologist to recognize it. Its melody, some lyrics, structure and instantly recognizable refrain belonged to “A Yay Kyi Bi” (“The Time is Critical”) — also known as “Thway Thitsar,” or “Blood Oath”—the revolutionary anthem written by Htoo Eain Thin and sung by Mun Awng, two legends of Myanmar’s contemporary music. The song has historically been closely bound to the anti-dictatorship struggle that followed the 1988 uprising.

The Myawady production did not merely borrow the tune. It changed and inserted lyrics, turning a song of resistance into a salute to soldiers. Then its producer, Ko Win Maw, also known as Shwe Than Zin, offered an explanation worthy of the regime’s propaganda machine: Htoo Eain Thin’s song, he claimed, had actually drawn from a military song written in the 1960s by someone called Zarni Sit Thway.

So the generals are no longer satisfied with arresting elected leaders, bombing villages and renaming stolen power as “stability.” Now they want the Myanmar people to believe that one of their best-known songs against military dictatorship was really military property all along.

There is just one problem: the public knows this song’s history.

Mun Awng has spoken about it for years. After the 1988 uprising, he and Htoo Eain Thin were among those who reached the Thailand-Myanmar border. At a resistance camp near the Thaung Yin River, Htoo Eain Thin composed “A Yay Kyi Bi.” Mun Awng later sang it on his album “Battle for Peace,” recorded in Bangkok in the early 1990s. Many other former student fighters have also written about the night Htoo Eain Thin composed the song and later sang it as an anthem of the All Burma Students’ Democratic Front, the student armed resistance force. It later passed into the hands of new generations—including students who sang it during the 1996 protests and young people who revived it again after the 2021 coup.

Mun Awng’s answer to Myawady was as simple as it was devastating: if this is really a military song from the 1960s, let the public hear the original recording.

The request is reasonable. The military has published songbooks and official histories celebrating its marching songs. Yet this supposed original, now suddenly useful for discrediting a resistance anthem, was not identified in any of the well-known military music histories, including the marching-song compilation published for the golden jubilee of Armed Forces Day in 1995.

Before Myawady’s May 24 broadcast, the only supposed “evidence” for this military origin story appeared to be an amateurish YouTube video circulated online around the time of the 2021 coup by an apparent military supporter. Even its handwritten-style thumbnail contained a spelling error. It is hardly the lost archive of a 1960s military classic.

The claim has also been rejected by musicians who understand not only the politics of the song but also its musical construction. For example, Austin Xavier, the veteran former lead guitarist of The Aces, a prominent Myanmar band of the ’60s and afterwards, said in a public Facebook statement that a song supposedly written in the military-music world of the 1960s would not have the guitar-chord structure and stereo-era style heard in “Thway Thitsar.”

There is a further irony. The military itself has a history of singing borrowed tunes.

The early army, formed under Japanese sponsorship during World War II, inherited more than just military training and authoritarian habits from Imperial Japan. Songs later presented as part of Myanmar military tradition included “Let’s Fight Together,” adapted from the Japanese “March of the Beloved Horse,” and “Will Defend Myanmar,” adapted from “Hohei no Honryō” (“Specialty of Infantry”), and there are many more.

An institution whose early marching-song tradition borrowed from its fascist patrons is now trying to accuse Htoo Eain Thin and Mun Awng—two artists revered for original Myanmar music and songs of resistance—of borrowing from the army. Even by the standards of Myanmar military propaganda, it is a performance of remarkable shamelessness.

But this is not only about musical ownership. Nor is it merely another argument between supporters and opponents of the military. Myawady’s remake is an act of historical vandalism.

“A Yay Kyi Bi” was not a love song lifted for a television entertainment program. It was born from the wounds of the 1988 uprising, carried by students, exiles and resistance fighters, and revived by young people facing the same military institution three decades later. The military is trying to take a song written by the resistance and make it sing for the oppressor.

It has done the same with national history. For generations, Myanmar’s generals have taken public struggles, removed the public from the story and stamped a military badge on history.

For instance, March 27 originally commemorated the anti-fascist resistance against Japanese occupation: a struggle joined by political organizations, armed forces, ethnic resistance fighters, students and ordinary citizens. But the military later recast it as Armed Forces Day, reducing the people’s resistance to an annual military parade and presenting the army as its sole owner.

The generals have repeatedly attempted to make the Myanmar people forget who fought for freedom, who built the country’s democratic hopes—and who has repeatedly destroyed them. They have tried to turn resistance into military glory, dictatorship into guardianship, and now an anti-military anthem into a barracks song.

But the Myanmar people are not as forgetful as the generals need them to be.

They know that “A Yay Kyi Bi” did not come from a military parade. They know why it was sung, where it was born and whom it opposed. The military can rewrite lyrics, produce a music video and fill its television channel with footage of marching uniforms. It cannot make the stolen version true.

As the famous poet Dagon Taryar once said of the deterioration of history under the military dictatorship: “Lies written in ink cannot cover history written in blood.”

Neither can a counterfeit marching song broadcast on Myawady TV.