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Several days before he would be executed by the Myanmar junta, the well-known democracy activist Ko Jimmy reportedly told his family, “It is not necessary to [have] a funeral in order to have a revolution.” Whether Ko Jimmy truly made this statement is unknown, but if he uttered these words, it was most certainly because he was cognizant of the fact that the military, which reseized power in a violent coup in 2021, would likely not allow his loved ones to access his body and properly lay it to rest. Indeed, when his family arrived at Insein Prison to confirm his death, the wardens would not allow them to see Jimmy’s corpse or take his remains home.
The executed body of Ko Phyo Zeya Thaw, another activist and former parliamentarian who was hung along with Ko Jimmy, met a similar fate. His mother, in an interview with BBC, stated,
I asked for [my son’s] “dead body” so that I can have confirmation of his death and they said that they cannot give it to me for regulations. And then, I asked for his bones and other remains, so that I can bury them in a tomb and they replied that it is not possible. Then I asked exactly what day and time he died. I told them we are Buddhists and that we have to perform the yetla [the Buddhist mourning ceremony performed seven days after the death] and the food offering on the third day. To this they replied that it was either Saturday or Sunday, [and that I] can estimate and do it.
The destruction of traditional funerary practices for martyred dissidents has been part of the Myanmar military’s vicious campaign against their political opponents. From 2013 to 2020, I conducted an ethnography with the community of democracy activists and former political prisoners in Yangon. Ko Jimmy and Ko Phyo Zeyar Thaw were part of this social movement community. They and other activists from groups such as the 88 Generation, the National League for Democracy (NLD), and the All Burma Federation of Student Unions (ABFSU) recounted to me how the military and its allies not only illegally detained, tortured, and persecuted their group members, but also how they forbade them to engage in meaningful rites that commemorated important dates of suffering and honored their heroes and martyrs. These attempts on the part of the Burmese military and its allies to annihilate the traditional practices of political communities across Burma need to be highlighted, alongside the more palpable destruction of lives and property. There needs to be an active campaign to counteract this ritualcide.
Ritualcide, which was first coined by Peg Levine in 2010, references the systematic destruction of traditional practices, including those that are connected to birth, illness, courtship, marriage, and death. Ritualcide often occurs in tandem with genocide and politicide. Erasure of entire peoples, whether in whole or in part, necessarily involves an eradication of their ways of life. In Cambodia, under the Khmer Rouge, suppression and alteration of spiritual practices was an overlooked crime that brought pervasive mental anguish to the people of Cambodia, depriving them of practices that had brought coherence and meaning to people’s lives for centuries, particularly in the face of death. Without traditional ceremonies, such as the Phchum Ben, the annual festival of the dead, those who lost loved ones during the reign of the Khmer Rouge were unable to establish relationships with the deceased—something considered crucial in their cosmological order.
Mortuary practices are essential to how communities cope not only with social loss but with existential dread. According to Robert Jay Lifton, funerals are “imaginative forms of transcending death.” Lifton argued that “symbolic immortality” looms particularly large for communities that have undergone or are undergoing tremendous stress or catastrophic change. Death ceremonies are evocative and powerful ways of symbolizing cultural continuity within these communities, even as they face the prospect of group extinction. Perhaps this is why funeral rites—including the right to hold those rites—have played a key role in the history of the democracy movement. Salai Tin Maung Oo, the last former student leader to be executed before Ko Jimmy, was hung in 1976 because he had participated in protests organized to give a hero his proper burial. In 1974, when U Thant, the former Secretary-General of the United Nations, passed away, the military government of Ne Win refused to give him a state funeral. Student activists took into their own hands the organizing of a funeral, including an elaborate procession. They brought the body and coffin to Yangon University. The military government eventually stormed the campus several days later, arresting thousands for disobeying their decrees.
Within the democracy movement, a hero’s burial is bestowed on those who have engaged in bodily sacrifice on behalf of the movement, typically by going through the rite of passage of the prisons. By the time someone is deemed to have made enough sacrifices to deserve a martyr’s burial, they are connected to many brothers, sisters, aunts, and uncles in the movement. These fictive kin plan the funeral alongside consanguineal kin. Often the political family oversees the rites entirely.
When political martyrs are laid to rest, there are special practices that must be observed. Written announcements promulgating the death are circulated through social media or printed with great care. Photographs, paintings, and other artistic works are put on display to honor and memorialize the deceased. T-shirts and other memorabilia are often printed to commemorate the person’s life. Comrades who were particularly close to the deceased engage in charismatic, earnest oratory.
The body of the deceased is dressed in ritual garments and placed inside a casket, the crown of which is often made of a clear material, such as mesh, glass, or plexiglass, allowing mourners to see the face of their fallen comrade. For the 88 Generation,