🇲🇲 The Sagaing air strike fall out

'There was nothing much left, instead just piles of bodies on the ground'

April 20, 2023

Hello friends!

I promised a look at the whole Mekong region today, but the updates are few and far between. Except for Myanmar which has been very busy a week after the Sagaing air strike stunned the region.

Let’s crack in and revisit the rest next week.Erin Cook

Happy new year to some

The junta released 3,113 prisoners, including 98 foreigners, on Monday as part of the country’s New Year celebrations. Consider the amnesty a “celebration of Myanmar's New Year to bring joy for the people and address humanitarian concerns,” junta state secretary Lieutenant General Aung Lin Dwe said, as per Reuters. Aung San Suu Kyi was definitely not a part of the release, but the Supreme Court will hear her appeal.  

So that’s the good-ish news. The rest is horrendous and troubling. The death toll in Sagaing last Tuesday morning climbed quickly, with new reports by the end of the week quoting 171 villagers killed in the air strike.  

Asean on the air strike

Shortly after sending off last week’s update, Asean released a statement on the atrocity that has been widely debated in the days since. “All forms of violence must end immediately, particularly the use of force against civilians. This would be the only way to create a conducive environment for an inclusive national dialogue to find a sustainable peaceful solution in Myanmar,” the bloc said in the statement. It has again raised questions about the toothlessness of the bloc and questions about strategy.  

The National United Government reiterated its stance for the bloc to disengage with the military entirely. “Asean cannot work with them, they do not have to work with them. They have been warned that those terrorists will go before the international courts,” Aung Myo Min, the NUG’s minister for human rights, said over the weekend as per the Diplomat. 

The aftermath

That’s the talking. Elsewhere, there have been some excellent and very brave reporting from the area. I’ve included a lot of those pieces below but I wanted to highlight this one from the Guardian especially. “I told myself to be strong. There was nothing much left, instead just piles of bodies on the ground, most dismembered, burnt and charred. I then saw the tiny legs of an unborn child coming outside from a pregnant woman who was dead,” one resident told the paper. Staggering. 

Air strikes are increasingly common in Myanmar and it may be because the People’s Defence Force and other armed groups have been doing a great job in pushing back, some analysts noted. “They are even having to use airlifting of their troops to commit atrocity crimes like burning down villages and killing and raping because they dare not to send in their troops from land, and that is how they've lost rapidly on the ground control,” Khin Ohmar, founder of rights group Progressive Voice, told DW. 

Crickets from the ‘international community’

Last week, I flagged an imminent United Nations Security Council chat but if that came to fruition it did so very quietly and I can’t find an update. 

The response from other countries isn’t enough either. “We're very frustrated with them. It took them two years to impose sanctions on Myanmar, and even that sanction came too little and too late,” Mon Zin, an Australian-Myanmar protestor, told the ABC at an event in Sydney over the weekend. 

“We want the Australian Government to consistently and continually fine whatever Australian businesses and investments that are flowing into the Myanmar military junta, which are essentially giving them the funds to commit these kinds of atrocities.” Well said, Mon Zin! And then she dropped the golden words: “They are very far behind even New Zealand.” 

Writing for the Conversation, Tharaphi Than has a look at why the world doesn’t seem to care at all. “To many within the resistance movement, the reluctance of the international community to exert more pressure on the country’s military looks like global collusion. It also has the potential to prolong the violence by funding the military’s campaign,” Tharaphi Than wrote. 

Time (to roll your eyes)

Ignoring the crisis in Myanmar is one (deeply rotten) thing, but handing chief architect Min Aung Hlaing a PR win by naming him one of Time Magazine’s most influential people in the world is particularly stupid. A serious concern of Asean early in 2021 was that he would use visits from Asean representatives as a show of legitimacy to the millions of Myanmar people he is terrorising. They were right. 

And I understand what Time is trying to say, that he is influential because he’s running an enormous civil war. But that’s not really what this list of ‘leaders’ says — it’s all Lula from Brazil and Janet Yellen from the bank and, for some reason, Anthony Albanese. Min Aung Hlaing is in a different, much worse, class than these people on the list his inclusion suggests he’s somehow on par. The whole list is bloody stupid and has been forever but this just seems like butt-covering. The whole world ignores Myanmar until they need to balance out a West-heavy list. 

“What definition of “influence” possessed TIME’s editors to delegate this distinction to a mass murdering war criminal? How does TIME justify situating the orchestrator of an illegitimate coup attempt in a section reserved for “leaders”? One cringes while speculating how US President Joe Biden or Ukrainian First Lady Olena Zelenska might feel about receiving this alleged “honour” alongside such a shameless figure with no internationally or domestically respected claim to power,” Sawanwongse Yawnghwe wrote for Irrawaddy. 

Reading list

We travelled to Inle Lake because it was one of only two places the military government would permit us to visit, outside of the main cities of Yangon and Naypyidaw, which are relatively insulated from the civil war.

This was the first visa the BBC had been given since the coup, officially to cover the huge military parade on Armed Forces Day. The letter authorising our visas also warned that we were not allowed to speak to any proscribed groups, these days a large category of people. With new laws criminalising any negative comment about the military government, who was it safe to talk to, and what could they say?

Chinese companies mining rare earth minerals in Myanmar’s Kachin State have promised to halt activities after more than 1,000 local residents protested, acknowledging the environmental damage caused by extracting the elements key to the production of many everyday tech-heavy devices such as smartphones.

Following the military's 2021 coup and brutal crackdown on dissent, however, groups like the TNLA have become vital to Myanmar's battle for democracy, providing shelter and training for new Bamar-dominated "People's Defence Forces" formed to fight the junta.

"We got sympathy, understanding and support from other people in Myanmar after the coup," TNLA Brigadier General Tar Bhon Kyaw said from the group's territory in northern Shan state.

"People now understand why we were fighting... This is the profit from the coup."

The top level of the NUG’s hierarchy is dominated by men (Aung San Suu Kyi, the state counselor, is the only woman). Women only constitute three out of the 17 members of its cabinet. There are also just three female deputy ministers out of a total of 15. Female members of cabinet currently occupy less influential roles or traditionally gendered portfolios such as women, youth, and children, education, and health. The obvious exception is Minister of Foreign Affairs Zin Mar Aung. However, as with most women who have made it to the top in Myanmar, she hails from an educated urban elite milieu.

It is obvious from the ongoing discussion that the NUG’s strategy of gender inclusion has been to add a few elite women into a structure dominated by men. It is therefore safe to say that it has fallen short of its inclusive credentials in relation to gender, even beyond the obvious fact that there are fewer women than men within the NUG.

Miemie Winn Byrd, a Honolulu-based Asia-Pacific security analyst and retired Burmese-American lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army, says the aerial assault is unacceptable and a war crime because junta forces targeted civilians. Byrd spoke with RFA Burmese reporter Khin Khin Ei about what action the international community should take to try to stop the junta’s atrocities against civilians. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The media scene was thriving, in a sense. Yet the work could be dangerous, involving illegal border crossings, on the part of either exiled reporters or the revolutionaries they needed to speak to. With secret sources came hidden agendas. “There is a lot of misinformation and disagreements about the details,” a journalist friend told me, “especially when reporting on the successes of the military and the revolutionaries.” Security concerns generated constant debate about whether certain reports were worth the risk. Revolutions always seem to be crippled by infighting; in exile, that factionalism felt especially toxic—the press was riven by desperation, guilt, and defensiveness. Speaking with former colleagues, I heard accusations of fabrication, harassment, corruption, and exploitation.

"I've never called my daughter by her name, always daddy's sweetheart. And she loved me." One of their favourite things to do together, he says, was to take bike rides together, with her on the back seat, hugging him.

That night, Soe Nandar Nwe insisted on sleeping by her father's side. His last memory of her was when he kissed her before leaving for work the next morning. She was still sleeping.

Win Zaw says his daughter was a smart girl who wanted to be a teacher.

''She loved helping her friends study. We wanted her to grow up and achieve big things for the country because our country is going through a very difficult time."

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