"You messed with the wrong generation" is one of the popular slogans chanted by many of the young people who have been demonstrating in Myanmar for weeks. "My ex is bad, but military is worse" or "I don’t want dictatorship, I just want boyfriend" are just a few more of the phrases on signs held up by the young generation. After all, their protest also takes aim at a conservative social order represented by the generals and many Buddhist monks.

An increasing number of city dwellers from poor neighbourhoods and members of ethnic minorities are taking part in the student rallies. Civil servants and office workers have also joined Generation Z and their "civil disobedience movement", many of them even walking out of their jobs to do so. The climax to date was the general strike on 22 February, joined by hundreds of thousands of people despite threats of violence from the military.

Generation Z describes those young people born around the turn of the century who have been influenced their nation’s cautious opening in recent years. Officially, the armed forces only relinquished political power to the civilian population in 2015 after oppressing the country for decades.

Aung San Suu Kyi, a divisive figure: once an icon of Myanmar's democracy movement, Suu Kyi fell from international grace in 2017, when critics called for her Nobel Peace prize to be revoked, citing her silence over the persecution of Rohingya people in Myanmar. Suu Kyi failed to speak up during the 2012 Rakhine State riots, nor did she intervene during the 2015 Rohingya refugee crisis. Now, despite having won Myanmar's most recent round of elections, she has been ousted by the military and is being held under house arrest

Since then, under the leadership of the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, the National League for Democracy (NLD) has attempted to gradually reduce the influence of the military.

The party managed to slightly ease censorship of the media and freedom of speech and there were free elections, but to this day the generals still control large sections of the economy and judiciary. And the constitution still in force is that of 2008, which guarantees the military a quarter of seats in both chambers of parliament and three key ministerial portfolios regardless of election results: defence, home affairs and border controls.

However, elections in November last year ended in a debacle for the pro-military USDP party: the NLP won 80 percent of seats in the parliamentary poll. Ahead of the planned opening of parliament in February, the military launched its coup and detained Aung San Suu Kyi. 

The situation facing the Rohingya

The NLD government did nothing to improve the situation of the 1.5 million Muslim Rohingyas in the west of the country. Myanmar regards the Rohingyas as "Bengali refugees"; in many circles even uttering the word Rohingya is deemed offensive.

The flight of Rohingya: Muslims from Myanmar to Bangladesh

Seeking refuge: a series of co-ordinated attacks by Rohingya insurgents on Myanmar security forces in the north of Myanmar's Rakhine State triggered a crackdown by Myanmar forces that has sent a stream of Rohingya villagers fleeing to Bangladesh. About 400 people have been killed in the clashes in Buddist-majority Myanmar

Mass evacuation: a Rohingya man passes a child though a barbed wire border fence on the border with Bangladesh. Myanmar accused the Rohingya insurgents of torching seven villages, one outpost, and two parts of Maungdaw town

Buddhist refugees on their way south: the crackdown by Myanmar forces also sparked a mass evacuation of thousands of Buddhist residents of the area. Tension has long been high between the Rohingya Muslims and Rakhine Buddhists, leading to bloody rioting in 2012. Rakhine Buddhists, feeling unsafe after the upsurge in fighting, are moving south to the state's capital, Sittwe, where Buddhists are a majority and have greater security

No entry: Bangladeshi border guards block people from crossing. Thousands of Rohingyas have sought to flee the fighting to Bangladesh, with nearly 30,000 crossing over. Bangladesh, which is already host to more than 400,000 Rohingya said it will not accept any more refugees, despite an appeal by U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres for Dhaka to allow Rohingya to seek safety

Humanitarian crisis: an aid worker with an international agency in Bangladesh reports: "what we're seeing is that many Rohingya people are sick. This is because they got stuck in the border before they could enter. It's mostly women and children." The Rohingya are denied citizenship in Myanmar and classified as illegal immigrants, despite claiming roots there that go back centuries

Not welcome in Bangladesh: a group of Rohingya refugees takes shelter at the Kutuupalang makeshift refugee camp in Cox's Bazar in Bangladesh. Bangladesh's unwillingness to host more refugees became apparent in the government's plan to relocate Rohingyas to a remote island that is mostly flooded during the monsoon season

Stranded in no man's land: Rohingya children make their way through water as they try to come to the Bangladesh side from no man's land. Tens of thousands of Rohingya refugees are believed to be stuck at the border to Bangladesh. By Nadine Berghausen

When the military used brutal means to drive 740,000 Rohingyas into Bangladesh in 2017, led by the current head of the junta Min Aung Hlaing, the Nobel peace laureate remained silent. In an interview with the BBC, she justified the 2013 pogrom-like attacks by Buddhist nationalists on the Muslim minority and denied genocide against the Rohingya.