Myanmar: “They Only Know How To Kill”

For Myanmar it is a multiple crisis: six months ago the military seized power and has been suppressing the resistance with brutal violence ever since. At the same time, it shows itself to be incapable of fighting Corona.

Six months after the coup, the brutality of the military becomes even more evident. More people are living in worse conditions. And the military is to blame for everything, says the Buddhist monk U Man Dala Lin Garya over the phone.

He is hiding in a village because the army has occupied his monastery and there was no safe place for him in the city of Mandalay. “Covid is raging badly,” he reports, “there is not enough oxygen – all because the junta fails. They crush peaceful protests and kill people, nearly a thousand have died, including children, clergy and innocent citizens. Political prisoners suffer, everyone Second of their lives is hell. ”

And if the junta can’t get hold of the resisters, they’ll put their children in jail – boys and girls of one or five years of age. This is the monk’s bitter look at his homeland Myanmar, six months after Commander-in-Chief Min Aung Hlaing overthrew the elected government.

The country is suffering: not only from severe floods that devastated some parts of the country. After the wave of protests, some of which the junta brutally suppressed, the coronavirus is plaguing Myanmar: Johns Hopkins University has counted 289,000 infected people so far, 8500 have died, but the number of unreported cases is probably much higher. In Yangon, the largest city in the country, the army is upgrading the crematoria so that 3,000 corpses could be cremated daily, observers report. Few people have been vaccinated in Myanmar so far. Critics say the army is hoarding vaccine for its own relatives.

Broad resistance movement

A large part of the population has joined the civil disobedience movement, from civil servants and teachers to medical staff. And they are often arrested or killed. “They are incapable. I don’t know what else to say about them: they only know how to kill,” says a young man who has joined the armed resistance.

He used to teach that after the coup he went to Yangon, the largest city in the country, and protested, he says. But the security forces killed people around him and he realized that this conflict could not be resolved through demonstrations alone. “So I left Yangon.” In his home village he could do more effectively: “It’s safer and I can do more for the revolution. That’s why I’m back here in my mountains, I’m printing a revolutionary newspaper here and I belong to the defense forces of my ethnic group, the Chin.”

These defense forces are part of the so-called PDF, the People’s Defense Force. People’s defense looks different across the country. Some only have self-made weapons. Some, like the armed ethnic minorities of the Karen and Kachin, have been fighting for their independence for decades and therefore have better weapons and better training.

The goal: international recognition

They all fight for themselves, for their country, for their freedom and, in a loose connection, also for the government of national unity. This underground government, or NUG for short, consists of many politicians around the freedom icon Aung San Suu Kyi, but also of many representatives of the ethnic groups. The NUG is fighting for international recognition – its status is to be discussed at the General Assembly of the United Nations in September.

“There is a lack of political will,” said Kasit Piromya, former Thai foreign minister, at the press conference of a human rights organization within the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. “We have to call on the US to help the EU fight Covid 19 first and bring humanitarian aid to Myanmar.”

Western governments hesitate so as not to be drawn into a proxy war, China and Russia also support the army out of trade interests. Piromya accuses his own organization, ASEAN, of total failure. “We all have to act, and we have to warn our ASEAN member states: if they do nothing, they will make themselves accomplices and we will bring them to the criminal court in The Hague.”

Worthless promises by a coup leader

At the only ASEAN special summit so far in June, the head of the military junta, Min Aung Hlaing, was warmly welcomed, he agreed that the bloodshed must end and a special envoy should be allowed into the country. But nothing happened. The killing and dying go on.

Because of him, Covid has become an epidemic that threatens people here and in other countries, says the young resistance fighter about Min Aung Hlaing. “While we wait for international aid, we fight it alone and for our survival. Sometimes we give up hope in the UN as if the idea of ​​aid were just a dream. But we still have ourselves and our humanity.”

The protests continue and people still take to the streets. The resistance fighter insists that they can put pressure on the military and soldiers so that the unity of the army falls apart. And the monk U Man Dala Lin Garya says: “I want justice, freedom and democracy. I want it here and now. I want the world to know that we don’t want to live under this dictatorship for a second longer.”