The nights of pots and pans are back, on Myanmar's fearful streets

Activists are urging a traditional show of solidarity amid wary anger over the military's coup

In Myanmar, if you want to drive evil from your home, you bang pots and pans. Yangon's streets were filled with the din of clashing metal in 2007, when monks called for an end to military rule, and before that, in 1988 when the former president Sein Lwin, or the butcher of Rangoon", ordered troops to shoot pro-democracy protesters. Activists have called for pots and pans again.

Evil has returned, they say; Gen Min Aung Hlaing has led a military coup against the democratically elected government and its leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, whose immense popularity within the country helped her National League for Democracy (NLD) win a landslide victory in 2020. The military's electoral proxy secured fewer than 7% of available seats, leading it, and the military, to claim widespread electoral fraud" without evidence.