***YOUR DONATIONS ARE TAX DEDUCTIBLE; PROCESSED BY US 501C3 NONPROFIT***
Civil Disobedience Movement (CDM) groups are fast running out of money to put food on the table for CDM families. Without your help, people will starve to death or be forced to return to work, where they will surely be imprisoned by an oppressive military junta conducting an illegal coup.
Civil Disobedience Movement (CDM) groups are fast running out of money to fund civil servants and private sector workers who are on a general strike to shut down government in order to prevent the illegal military coup from succeeding. Most, and perhaps all, CDM groups will run out of funding within 1 month of this writing. This means the CDM is at risk of falling apart, which would deliver a major victory to the junta and damage the chances that the Committee Representing the Pyidaungsu Hluttaw (CRPH) will have enough time to end the illegal coup and reestablish legitimate, democratically elected civilian government for the people of Myanmar.
While CRPH has raised nearly $10 million USD as of this writing, $0 of that funding is going to CDM families.
CDM groups emerged from the ground up, grassroots organizations formed by youth leaders come from the local communities and neighborhoods they serve. They operate on shoestring budgets, working for free and often investing their own money in donations to CDM families.
How have they received funding thus far? From friends and family and local Myanmar people willing to give 1 or 2 rounds of donations when asked. But now people aren't giving donations anymore, and CDM groups do not have access to the vast global funding CRPH does through its crowdfunding efforts. This is not a criticism of CRPH, as CRPH needs funding itself to run, but it's only to note that CDM is not getting funding from the CRPH gofundme, and so CDM groups simply are running out of cash.
The military will gain a significant edge against CRPH, CDM, and pro-democracy resistance if CDM runs out of money.
CDM workers are incredibly brave -- over 700 people have been killed since February 1st, often in horrifying ways. But lack of money could be the final deathblow to CDM. Many civil servants and private workers are already leaving CDM (to join CDM, an individual has to pledge to go on a general strike, helping to disable the military "government") out of sheer need to feed their families. To earn a living wage. When workers return to their jobs, they inadvertently legitimize the illegal military coup by functioning as normal. The junta is already pushing for a return to "business as usual" by offering free cash to SMEs and entrepreneurs. This will only gain momentum as people return to help an illegal government function. Further, many CDM workers who return will simply be imprisoned, tortured, or worse, as the military has threatened.
There are many risks as to how this could go. Young people, feeling increasingly desperate, could turn to violence, which may make Myanmar devolve into some form of long-running Syrian conflict, as the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has recently warned. Syria just had their rueful 10-year anniversary of the Syrian civil war, which has claimed over 500,000 lives and over 5 million refugees.
Syria has less than 50% of Myanmar's population. Imagine those numbers for Syria but for Myanmar, only 2-3x times worse. Horrifying.
The other scenario is one where the junta strolls to victory, military dictatorship is restored, and the light of democracy, which shone so brightly in Myanmar for 10 years and gave so many people hope, is snuffed out in a few months. 55 million souls, their hopes and dreams crushed into dust.
By making a donation today, and by continuing to make periodic donations, you can help us transform CDM into a series of initially necessary small groups, to a cohesive CDM collective that is organized, well-financed, avowedly nonviolent, and ready to conduct a multiyear campaign of civil disobedience to bring down the junta.
We know why donors, both individual and institutional, may hesitate in providing funding to CDM. After all, there is a lot of risk involved:
- Will funds go towards CDM families and workers, or be subject to fraud, misappropriation, fall into military hands, or go to groups engaged in violence?
- How will funds be used? To buy food? To be put towards concrete activities and goals that maximize the chances for success of CDM and overthrow of the junta?
- If I give to one small group, how is that sustainable?
We understand your concerns. To respond, we will be using the funds you donate here to coordinate a collective CDM that will feature task prioritization, reporting lines, documentation that is secure and non-identifying but ensures effective expenditure of donations to CDM families, and avowedly nonviolent.
CDM groups that wish to join the collective CDM and have access to the funds you donate here will have to swear an oath to the following 10 principles:
Note that the first principle, the touchstone, is nonviolence. There will be many groups engaging in violence against the junta: ethnic armed organizations (EAOs), that have been locked in war with the junta for over 70 years; perhaps a federal army; and other guerilla elements. CDM groups that are part of The CDM Collective will not be engaging in violence, and will have to continuously adhere to the above oath in order to have access to funds donated here and otherwise.
Two, reporting lines. Of course we cannot be too specific here because we cannot reveal our actual plans, as CDM workers have and are currently being pursued by police and soldiers, detained, tortured, and killed, but we can give you a teaser:
We assure you, we have more diagrams. We have project task management and prioritization based on the Agile methodology, sprints + backlog. As a heuristic, we use the Eisenhower Matrix:
We'll do more than feeding families (which of course is most important).
Of course, the central goal of these funds are to ensure that CDM workers and families can survive for what is likely to be a multiyear campaign. We've heard the same things you have -- that it will be short, a few months. We don't think so, and tend to think that Harvard professor Erica Chenoweth's exhaustive research is likely to be more instructive, as well as providing a more useful playbook. We have activists, policy analysts, data scientists, hackers. Part of the expanded playbook will involve:
1. Collaborating with CRPH and other partners to advocate and formalize procedures and filings to initiate an Emergency Special Session (ESS), which can end around the UN Security Council vetoes and bring initiative including but not limited to introducing a UN peacekeeping force into Myanmar. We think the current efforts to advocate for R2P to come from a good place, but are ultimately misguided. R2P is an amorphous doctrine. ESS is concrete and real.
2. Advocating and formalizing formal recognition of the CRPH as the legitimate government of Myanmar by bilaterals such as the US and EU countries.
3. Doing what we can beyond just surviving, including but certainly not limited to conducting data science on public databases, social punishment for businesses and individuals that work with the military or show indecision, and you know, being civilly disobedience (imagine there's more to this that we can't say here, but that it's clever).
4. Help CRPH spin up a functioning parallel government, except this government is legitimate. We believe CRPH needs to do more than issue letters -- they need to do real government things. We'll help them execute.
Families are starving. CDM workers will soon have no choice but to go back to work, prison, or worse. CDM groups are running out of money. The aim of this fundraising campaign is to use the money to sustain CDM families with full bellies, maintain the general strike, and whip CDM into shape: operations, logistics, long-term strategy, financing, and concrete tasks and goals.
We will regularly update you in this space with a high-level budget as to what your donations are used for (properly redacted). We look to this crowdfunding as "startup" capital to professionalize The Collective CDM, so we get larger institutional donors involved.
With your help, we can show the junta how 21st century Civil Disobedience Movements are won.
