BANGKOK -- Since Myanmar's military seized power on Feb. 1, the country has been in turmoil and economic decline. Hundreds of thousands of people have demonstrated, while government and private sector workers have joined a civil disobedience movement seeking to strangle the military's economic and infrastructural base.
The military regime, which calls itself the State Administration Council, is acting swiftly to erase a decade of reforms and drag society back toward a brutal dictatorship like that under which the country languished from 1962 to 2011. Hot spots of resistance have been placed under martial law, regular curfews and internet blackouts have been imposed, and mobile data networks and broadband Wi-Fi have been intermittently blocked.