Documenting a Terrorist Regime
Matthew Wells of Amnesty International entered some of the worst hits part of Myanmar to hear testimonials and document the aftermath of some of the most severe and violent behavior of the military, eventually publishing a report titled, “Bullets Rained from the Sky.” Following is an excerpt of some of the information this paper included, which became a laundry list of Tatmadaw atrocities. In the following excerpt from our podcast discussion with Matt earlier this year, he describes just some of their findings, which provides an important—yet gruesome— understanding of the military’s behavior.
“As the military moves through, it burned large swaths of these villages, burning homes, burning markets, burning everything!”
“We were on the Thailand-Myanmar border in March and April of this year, looking in detail at the military operations starting from December of 2021 through right now, and looking in real time at the types of operations the military is undertaking in in Karen, Karenni, and Kachin states in particular, and the crimes associated with those.
What we found were widespread assault on civilian populations through unlawful attacks by ground and air. We documented 24 attacks by artillery or mortars, in which civilians were killed or injured, or in which civilian homes or other infrastructure were destroyed. And very often what this was, is just the relentless firing of mortars into villages, day and night for days at a time!
In many of the incidents that we looked at, there were no lawful targets in the area. There were no fighters from an ethnic armed organization nearby, there was no base of an ethnic armed organization or a PDF nearby, the military was just firing relentlessly, mortars or artillery shells into villages!
From March of this year, for example, people were gathering for a Buddhist religious festival, and they were doing traditional Karen dance in the evening. And in the midst of that, two mortar shells landed, and it killed three civilians and injured 11 more. That was one horrific incident, but it was one that was replicated again and again, and we also documented was a number of airstrikes on villages and and even an IDP camp that was hit in January in the middle of the night, killing three people in this case, including two sisters who are 15 and 12 years old. This IDP camp should have been well known to the military in any sort of aerial reconnaissance, you can see that this is a place where civilians were living, and has nothing to do with any sort of fighters or members of of any armed group.
And yet, again, the military is hitting the civilian areas over and over and over again, causing significant numbers of death and injuries, and ultimately leading to massive displacement across these areas.
In addition, we found that many people after they're displaced, they're displaced with nothing more than the clothes on their back and what little that they can carry. After weeks or months of displacement, people often try to then sneak back to their villages to pick up a rice sack or whatever, whatever they could then bring back to their displacement site to feed themselves and their family. But very often, especially men or older boys, who, if they're moving in these areas, if they come across the military, if they come across the checkpoints are other positions of soldiers, then they are arbitrarily detained, and then subjected to torture and in some cases are summarily executed.
We had an example, a case that we documented from late January in Kachin state where were three men again tried tried to go back home in order to just pick up some vegetables and basic food from their from their village, and their families never heard from them again. Several weeks later, in early February, their bodies were found. They'd actually been thrown into a pig latrine after having been killed. When people tried to go and collect their bodies just to be able to bury them, a brother of one of the victims and others were then shot at by the military from a position nearby, just as they tried to collect the bodies. It was ultimately not until the end of March, two months after they went missing, and some six weeks after the bodies were first found, before the family members were finally able to remove the bodies and to give them proper burial. That is just one example but it speaks to a much wider pattern that we saw in the last year, a kind of pattern that I'll talk about quickly, is just pillaging and burning.
When the military is driving people away through this relentless attack by ground and air, the soldiers then go into a village where people have been forcibly displaced from and they steal everything of value. They steal money, jewelry, livestock close race anything that they can take data in truck away. And then at times we had we interviewed witnesses who describe soldiers slashing rice sacks, when they couldn't carry everything, then they just destroy a food supply. That will have an effect on these villages for months to come, and now the food that they harvested last year has been totally destroyed.
In some areas, the military has systematically burned villages as it's moved through. We could see this not just from from witness testimony, but from satellite imagery that we have access to. It's included in the reports that over a number of villages, as the military moves through, it burned large swaths of these villages, burning homes, burning markets, burning everything! In one village, for example, we were able to spot over 250 structures, and it was around two thirds of the village that had been burned by the military over over several periods in February and March of this year.
This speaks to this this collective punishment of the entire civilian populations, and that has profound effects today, and is going to continue to have a profound effect on civilian populations in these areas for for months, and potentially years to come”