Myanmar: Old atrocity, new
implications By Bertil Lintner
YANGON - An atrocity
committed 20 years ago by an armed opposition
student group continues to haunt Myanmar, a bloody
purge that could have far-reaching consequences
for segments of the country's pro-democracy
movement, their foreign backers and the new
quasi-civilian incarnation of the former
military-run regime.
After hiding
their pain and anguish for two decades, the
survivors and family members of victims are now
demanding that those responsible should be brought
to justice. Some of the alleged murderers are
living in Thailand, supported by international
non-government organizations. But if justice is
finally served, would it stop there and how long
would the military allow for backward-looking
investigations into its many past abuses?
Myanmar authorities have kept
conspicuously silent on the issue, knowing full
well that, as one Myanmar source put it, "if the
students after 20 years
haven't forgotten and forgiven those who killed
their own comrades, what about justice for all
those thousands of people who were killed by the
military's bullets in 1988 or were tortured and
had to spend most of their youth in dark prison
cells?"
In early 1992, underground rebels
from the anti-government All Burma Students
Democratic Front (ABSDF) situated near the Chinese
border in northern Kachin State accused almost a
third of their comrades, or 107 out of a total of
350-400 in the "student army", of being spies for
the military government and its intelligence
service.
According to the
accounts of survivors, 36 were executed
or died from torture they sustained during interrogations.
The purge unleashed on other young people who had
for several years fought for democracy in remote
jungle areas was by all accounts extraordinarily
brutal.
Htun Aung Kyaw, the chairman of
the northern ABSDF and a well-known former student
activist from Mandalay, was beheaded after being
tortured with a hot iron, according to the
accounts. He had earlier been forced to drink the
blood still dripping from the head of a
decapitated comrade. Aung Phone, another of those
who had been accused and apprehended, had had tied
to his foot a landmine, which was detonated and
blew off his leg. The following day, he was
beheaded.
A young woman activist was gang
raped and had sharpened bamboo poles thrust into
her vagina, ostensibly to look for poison that was
going to be used to kill the leaders of the
student army, before she was killed. She was also
forced to perform fellatio on the body of her
murdered boyfriend. The woman was a student at
Rangoon Arts and Science University before joining
the armed resistance after the September 1988
massacre of pro-democracy protesters in the then
capital.
The witchhunt began in late 1991
when Chinese police in Yingjiang across the border
from the ABSDF camp arrested 10 young Myanmar men
armed with pistols and grenades. They were sent
back to the camp and madness erupted among the
young activists.
A videotape later
released by the ABSDF shows the accused being
brought to "justice". In the video, a row of
uniformed young men are seated at a wooden table,
looking more like mediaeval inquisitors than the
pro-democracy activists they then purported to be.
One of the accused after another admitted
to their "crimes" in the videotape. Their
statements were in some ways as meticulous in
detail as the "confessions" extracted by torture
in the Khmer Rouge's Tuol Sleng prison in
Cambodia. At night, all the prisoners were kept in
a bamboo hut, shackled together without blankets
on an earthen floor.
"As
our lives were in their hands, we had to bend
according to their whims," says Htein Lin, one of
the survivors and now a well-known artist in
Yangon. Nang Aung Thwe Kyi, another survivor, says
that she had a gun pointed at her head while being
asked a question she did not understand: "What did
they order you to do?"
Then an idealistic student
activist in her 20s, she was accused of being a
"second lieutenant" working for the government's
military intelligence. She now lives in exile in
Sydney and continues to support the struggle for
democracy in Myanmar.
The families of
those accused eventually went to the camp. Some
survivors, including Nang Aung Thwe Kyi, were
released; others, like Htein Lin, managed to
escape just to be caught by government forces and
sent to prison for many years.
Conspicuous silence At the time,
the killings garnered little attention from the
outside world. Yindee Lertcharoenchok, a Thai
reporter for the daily The Nation who visited the
camp in the north, wrote about it in her
Bangkok-based newspaper. This correspondent
highlighted the murders in the July 16, 1992,
issue of the now defunct Hong Kong-based weekly
Far Eastern Economic Review.
Many
international organizations that directly and
indirectly funded the anti-government student
group were silent on the incident. This despite
the fact that the ABSDF's central office on the
Thai border had issued a statement on March 1,
1992, justifying the executions on the grounds
that those arrested were "government spies" who
had "attempted to assassinate" ABSDF leaders.
The ABSDF's then overall chairman, Naing
Aung, visited the camp in the north after the
arrests and reportedly did not condemn the
executions. He also referred to the victims as
"spies" in a statement issued by him at the time.
When he returned to Myanmar on a short visit on
August 31 this year, angry survivors met him at
the airport in Yangon with placards that referred
to him as a "killer".
Ronald Aung Naing,
the secretary general of the ABSDF's northern
bureau at the time of the killings, confessed to
having a role in the events in a chapter of
Thailand-based author Phil Thornton's book
Restless Souls: Rebels, Refugees, Medics and
Misfits on the Thai-Burma Border.
Today, Naing Aung heads the Thai-border
based Forum for Democracy in Burma, while Ronald
Aung Naing is a media trainer in the northern Thai
city of Chiang Mai. Several of those accused of
the killings now receive financial support from
international advocacy organizations - a situation
that is now being highlighted and challenged by
survivors of the killings who live in Myanmar and
in exile.
Naing Aung said in written
response to Asia Times Online questions that he
"regrets" the human rights violations, which he
says happened without ABSDF headquarters "decision
and knowledge". He said he was not aware of the
killings until they were reported in The Nation
newspaper and that his headquarters had "no
physical and constitutional power to take inquiry
and follow up action on what [was] really
happening".
A scholarship Naing Aung
received to study at Harvard University's Kennedy
School of Government was withdrawn in 2002 by the
elite US-based institution after survivors of the
massacre protested. In 2008, Ronald Aung Naing was
hired as a reporter for the British Broadcasting
Corporation's (BBC) Burmese language service but
later lost the position for the same reason.
Survivors and family members
of the fallen who met this correspondent this
month in Yangon were eager to tell their stories
and argue their case. Several retrospective
articles have recently been published in the
Myanmar media about the atrocity.
Maung Maung, alias Shwe Karaweik, a
brother of survivor Smar Nyi Nyi, has written and
published a local-language book entitled My
experience of a modern-day tale of 90,000
hinthas, a gripping account of the purge.
Until now, as one of the survivors said, they and
their family members did not want to go public to
avoid having their accounts being used as
propaganda by the military against the entire
pro-democracy movement.
On the other hand,
the survivors have received little support or
sympathy from the opposition, a silence that if it
endures could discredit the pro-democracy
movement. The government's reluctance to hear
their grievances, however, reflects a broader
sensitive issue: how to deal with atrocities and
human rights abuses committed by the military
against the pro-democracy movement and ethnic
minority groups?
Amnesty International,
Human Rights Watch and other international human
rights organizations have documented in detail the
Myanmar's military's use of lethal force against
peaceful demonstrations, extrajudicial killings,
arbitrary arrests, torture and rape.
"The
ABSDF case should also serve as an example to
other perpetrators of violence, from government
forces to insurgent groups," said David Mathieson,
senior researcher for Myanmar at Human Rights
Watch. "This case could spark a broader public
debate on addressing issues of past abuses and
what mechanism is best suited to end decades of
impunity and abuses."
The first die has
been cast by the survivors of the ABSDF killings.
Yet it remains to be seen if any judicial
institution in Myanmar or elsewhere is willing to
take up their case. "Ignoring past violations
serves to exculpate the abusers, deny the victims
and their families the truth, and potentially
embolden a new generation of men with guns to
perpetrate violence against civilians with
impunity," says Mathieson. "Myanmar's defense
services have rarely if ever faced adequate legal
investigation, nor have ethnic armed groups."
Bertil Lintner is a former
correspondent with the Far Eastern Economic Review
and author of several books on Burma/Myanmar,
including Aung San Suu Kyi and Burma's
Struggle for Democracy (published in 2011)
and Burma in Revolt: Opium and Insurgency
Since 1948 (published in 1994, 1999 and 2003).
He is currently a writer with Asia Pacific Media
Services.
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