23rd March 2021
Below is the latest tally of deaths recorded in Myanmar.
The real death toll is actually much more than this due to the new tactics employed by the police and the Tatmadaw. Where possible, they are dragging the bodies away and disposing of them, not reporting back to the next of kin. There are also cases of bodies with gunshot wounds being pulled out of the rivers. Not only are the military disguising the casualty figures, they are inflicting psychological warfare by depriving families of closure regarding the whereabouts of their loved ones.
Regular readers will be aware of my comments about the EAOs. Well they are ramping up the pressure on the Tatmadaw.
An ethnic armed organization, the Karen National Union (KNU) said its Brigade 5 will ensure that no food is supplied to Tatmadaw (Myanmar military) soldiers isolated in Karen State’s Papun District.
KNU Brigade 5 has blocked the routes to Papun, effectively preventing the Tatmadaw from transporting food supplies to its troops based there.
Unable to use supply routes inside Myanmar, the Tatmadaw bought 700 sacks of rice and oil from Thailand, on the opposite bank of the Salween River to Karen State. On Saturday, the food was unloaded on the Myanmar side of the Salween River, but the rice and oil has been stranded there ever since.
“We have stopped them from sending the sacks of rice. If they carry rice in defiance of our order, we will do what we are authorized to do in our territory. We want to throw water before the fire starts. We are taking pre-emptive action to prevent conflicts from escalating. If something happens because they don’t comply with our request, we won’t take responsibility,” said KNU Brigade 5 spokesman Major Saw Kler Doh.
The KNU said it is blocking the food delivery because 500 local Karen people are currently affected by armed conflicts in Papun District, and also because it does not support the military regime and cannot accept the junta killing innocent people across the country.
KNU Brigade 5 issued a warning in both the Burmese and Thai languages saying that it would not tolerate anyone who carries food for the soldiers of Myanmar’s military regime.
“Normally, they send food supplies [to troops in Papun] at this time of year. But this year, they staged a coup and oppressed the people. They are not a legitimate government. The military dictatorship will survive if they can sustain their troops in our territory. We are therefore preventing them from delivering food. People don’t support them, and we are standing by the people,” said Major Saw Kler Doh.
Source the Irrawaddy 23rd March 2021
The headline today is Pillage, Thuggery and Vandalism. Not as you may think by the protesters, which is currently the situation in the UK, but by the defenders of peace and security, the Myanmar police.
In Myanmar’s state-run media these days, security forces are occasionally portrayed as “someone working hard day and night for the rule of law and safety of the people.” Whenever they have to quell protesters, they always follow crowd control protocols. They only apply a “minimum use of force” and use “riot gear” because “live ammunition is not allowed to be used.”
Scenes on the ground suggest differently, however.
Yeah, right.
Contrary to what the state and military-controlled media continue to claim, the men in uniform have behaved like thugs and looters while treating people they have arrested with no respect for human dignity. Arrests and killings have been arbitrary.
Last week security forces fired tear gas, used stun grenades and fired live rounds on anti-regime protesters in Twante Township in southern Yangon. When the protesters fled and residents went into hiding, security forces committed robbery in broad daylight. The ransacked shops and houses, looting everything they saw, from buckets of ice cream to iPads. They stole everything from cash to jewelry to cooking gas cylinders to dried fish. Personal belongings looted by the forces were worth nearly 20 million kyats, local residents said.
“It was an armed robbery. Once they [security forces] stopped their truck, they came into my house, shooting. They also shot open the door of my house and looted everything,” a man who sells dried fish and gas cylinders told The Irrawaddy.
In local wet markets, they took advantage of the absence of people amid the crackdown to steal things. Two policemen were caught on camera taking bunches of bananas from a roadside fruit stall after the vendor had run for his life. When the pictures went viral on Facebook, Myanmar’s popular social media, the police were condemned. “They are like a plague of locusts. They steal everything, even from the poorest of the poor,” one person wrote.
Apart from looting and robbing residents, soldiers and police smashed civilians’ property amid the crackdowns.
Since last week, many residents in Yangon, Mandalay and other cities have reported that their cars and motorbikes — parked right in front of their homes — were destroyed during day and night raids in their neighborhoods. On Monday night alone, more than 20 vehicles in Yangon’s Dawbon Township were destroyed during a night raid, according to local residents.
During a visit to the area on Tuesday morning, The Irrawaddy witnessed cars with smashed windshields, broken windows and damaged hoods. Some were defaced with bullet holes. A stained-glass façade of a nearby building was shattered, apparently from a spray of bullets during the night raid. People were visibly traumatized from the night ordeal. When asked for comments, a resident just said, “You see it all, what happened.”
Thomas H. Andrews, the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Myanmar, told The Irrawaddy, “The theft, destruction of property and other crimes that are being committed by security forces reflects the criminality of their superiors, starting with the theft of a fledgling democracy and government.”
Bertil Lintner, a veteran journalist who has been covering Myanmar for decades, said what the Tatmadaw (military) was doing in urban areas now is “plunder and pure criminal behavior” and equivalent to what they have done for decades in the parts of the country where ethnic minorities live.
“It is as if they want to punish people and destroy their lives because they are having the audacity to challenge the power of the military,” he said.
Source the Irrawaddy 23rd March 2021
This is not going to end well. It is just reinforcing the opposition to the coup and people are getting to the stage where they will be driven into co-operation with the Ethnic Armed Organisations (EAOs). The signs are there that because of more action in the outer states the EAOs are starting to defend their people and looking to create mutual support with EAOs from other regions.
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