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Insight Myanmar · Today · 1 hr 42 min

The Revolution Must Learn

Episode #639: “I don't want this kind of accident to be happening in our new generation.” Htoo Chit Chit, founder and executive director of the Foundation for Education and Development in Thailand, carries that warning from his own years in resistance into more than twenty-five years of work with Myanmar migrants, refugees, displaced people, and children. The 1988 uprising redirected a life he had expected to spend in volleyball, academics, and government service. After supporting the democracy movement, he was arrested and interrogated, later transferred as punishment to southern Myanmar, and eventually crossed into Thailand without proper documents. Thai authorities detained him, and he later spent more than a year as an undocumented migrant worker. Those experiences taught him that political change alone cannot protect people from wage theft, trafficking, legal insecurity, interrupted schooling, or the daily vulnerability of living without documents. They also left him wary of resistance movements reproducing the abuses it opposes. He recalls leaving a revolutionary organization after fighters killed the wife of a suspected informer who had escaped detention. Today he supports collective leadership but argues that fighters and political leaders need stronger education, critical thinking, accountability, and respect for human rights. That principle runs through FED’s work in Thailand and his concern for Myanmar’s post-coup generation. He opposes blanket pressure on younger children to abandon school for political reasons, worries about young adults who have lost years of education, and is developing vocational options for those who cannot spend years pursuing university degrees. In Thailand, schooling and language can also determine whether a migrant can find safer work, understand legal protections, or approach authorities. Htoo Chit Chit sees the same generation being squeezed by war, displacement, weak institutions, precarious migration, and shrinking humanitarian support. His concern is not only whether Myanmar can defeat military rule, but whether young people can reach that future without losing the education, rights, and habits of restraint that any future democracy will require.

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Episode #639: “I don't want this kind of accident to be happening in our new generation.” Htoo Chit Chit, founder and executive director of the Foundation for Education and Development in Thailand, carries that warning from his own years in resistance into more than twenty-five years of work with Myanmar migrants, refugees, displaced people, and children.

The 1988 uprising redirected a life he had expected to spend in volleyball, academics, and government service. After supporting the democracy movement, he was arrested and interrogated, later transferred as punishment to southern Myanmar, and eventually crossed into Thailand without proper documents. Thai authorities detained him, and he later spent more than a year as an undocumented migrant worker. Those experiences taught him that political change alone cannot protect people from wage theft, trafficking, legal insecurity, interrupted schooling, or the daily vulnerability of living without documents.

They also left him wary of resistance movements reproducing the abuses it opposes. He recalls leaving a revolutionary organization after fighters killed the wife of a suspected informer who had escaped detention. Today he supports collective leadership but argues that fighters and political leaders need stronger education, critical thinking, accountability, and respect for human rights.

That principle runs through FED’s work in Thailand and his concern for Myanmar’s post-coup generation. He opposes blanket pressure on younger children to abandon school for political reasons, worries about young adults who have lost years of education, and is developing vocational options for those who cannot spend years pursuing university degrees. In Thailand, schooling and language can also determine whether a migrant can find safer work, understand legal protections, or approach authorities.

Htoo Chit Chit sees the same generation being squeezed by war, displacement, weak institutions, precarious migration, and shrinking humanitarian support. His concern is not only whether Myanmar can defeat military rule, but whether young people can reach that future without losing the education, rights, and habits of restraint that any future democracy will require.

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