‘I can’t forget her’- Myanmar’s soldiers admit atrocities

Soldiers in the Myanmar military have admitted to killing, torturing and raping civilians in unique interviews with the BBC. For the first time they have given detailed accounts associated with widespread human rights abuses they say they were ordered to perform.

Warning: This story consists of descriptions of sexual violence and pain

“They purchased me to torture, loot and kill innocent people. ”

Maung Oo states he thought he had been recruited to the military as a safeguard.

But he was part of a battalion who killed civilians hiding in a monastery in May 2022.

“We were ordered to gather all the men and take them dead, ” he says. “The saddest thing was there were to kill seniors and a woman. ”

The testimony of six soldiers, which includes a corporal, plus some of their victims supplies a rare insight of the military desperate in order to cling to power. All of the Myanmar names in this report are actually changed to protect their own identities.

The troops, who recently defected, are under the safety of a local unit of the People’s Defence Force (PDF), the loose network of civilian militia groups fighting to restore democracy.

The military grabbed power from the democratically elected government led by Aung San Suu Kyi inside a coup last year. It is currently trying to crush the particular armed civilian uprising.

On 20 December a year ago, three helicopters circled Yae Myet community in central Myanmar, dropping soldiers with orders to open fireplace.

At least 5 different people, speaking independently from each other, told the BBC what happened.

They say the army entered in 3 separate groups, capturing at men, women and children indiscriminately.

“The order was to shoot anything you find, ” says Corporal Aung from an undisclosed location inside a remote part of Myanmar’s jungle.

He says many people hid in what they will thought was a safe place, but since the soldiers closed within they “started to operate and we shot on them”.

Cpl Aung admits his device shot and smothered five men.

“We also had an order to set fire to every large and decent house in the village, ” he says.

The soldiers paraded around the village torching houses, shouting, “Burn! burn! ”

Cpl Aung set fire to four structures. Those interviewed say about 60 houses were burnt, causing much of the community in ashes.

Most of the villagers got fled, but not everyone. One home in the middle of the village had been inhabited.

Thiha states he had joined the particular military just 5 months before the raid. Like many others, he was recruited through the community and states he was untrained. These recruits are locally referred to as Anghar-Sit-Thar or “hired soldiers”.

At the time he was paid a decent income of 200, 1000 Myanmar Khat (approximately 100 USD) per month. He remembers so what happened at that house vividly.

This individual saw an adolescent girl trapped behind iron bars inside a house they were going to burn down.

“I can’t forget her shouting, I can nevertheless hear it within my ears and remember it in my heart, inch he says.

When he told his captain, he responded, “I told you to kill everyone all of us see”. So Thiha shot a flare into the room.

Cpl Aung was also presently there and heard the girl cries as the girl was burnt lively.

“It was tragic to hear. We noticed her voice repeatedly for about 15 minutes while the house was burning down, ” he recalls.

The BBC tracked down the girl’s household, who spoke in front of the charred remains of the home.

Her relative U Myint said the girl a new mental health condition and had been left within her home whilst her parents went to work.

“She tried to get away but they stopped her and let her burn, ” he says.

She was not the only youthful woman to experience at the hands of these soldiers.

Thiha says he or she joined the army for the money but was surprised by what he was forced to do and the atrocities he observed.

He speaks about a group of young women these people arrested in Yae Myet.

The particular officer handed them to his subordinates and said, “Do when you wish, ” he or she recounts. He mentioned they raped girls but he had not been involved. We monitored down two of such girls.

Pa and Khin Htwe say these people met the troops on the road as they tried to run away. They were not really from Yae Myet, they had been going to a tailor generally there.

Despite their insistence that they were not PDF FILE fighters or even in the village, they were jailed in a local school for three nights. Each night, they were repeatedly sexually abused by their drunk captors, they say. “They blindfolded my encounter with a sarong and pushed me down, they took off my clothes and raped me, ” Pennsylvania Pa says. “I shouted as they raped me. ”

The lady pleaded with the troops to stop but they defeat her round the mind and threatened the girl at gunpoint.

“We had to take it with out resisting because we were scared that we will be killed, ” says her sister Khin Htwe, trembling as she speaks.

Girls were too frightened to get a proper look at their abusers yet say they keep in mind seeing some in plain clothes and a few wearing military uniforms.

“When they captured young women, ” remembers the soldier Thiha, “they would say, ‘this is because you support the PDF’ as they (raped) the girls. ”

At least ten people died in the violence in Yae Myet and 8 girls were reportedly raped over the three-day period.

The brutal killings which hired jewellry Maung Oo required part in happened on 2 Might 2022 in Ohake pho village, also in Sagaing area.

His accounts of members through his 33rd Department (Light Infantry Department 33) rounding upward and shooting people in a monastery matches witness testimonies and disturbing video the particular BBC obtained from the particular immediate aftermath from the attack.

It shows nine dead bodies lined up which includes a woman and a grey-haired man lying close to each other. They are all putting on sarongs and t-shirts.

Signs in the video indicate that they had been shot from behind and at close variety.

We all also spoke in order to villagers who observed this atrocity. These people identified the young woman in the video lined up next to the elderly man. The girl was called Ma Moe, and was carrying her child and a bag containing pieces of precious metal. She pleaded using the soldiers not to get her things.

“Despite the child she had been carrying, they looted her belongings plus shot her in order to death. They also lined up (the men) plus shot them one by one, ” says Hla, who was on the scene but was spared.

The child survived and it is now being cared for by relatives.

Hla says she heard soldiers boasting on the phone they had killed 8 or nine individuals, that it was “delicious” in order to kill people plus describing it since “their most profitable day yet”.

She says they left the community chanting “Victory! Victory! ”

Another woman saw her spouse killed. “They chance him in the thigh, then they asked your pet to lie face down and chance his buttock. Finally they shot his head, ” she says.

She demands he was not a member of the PDF. “He was really a toddy palm worker who seem to earned his living in a traditional way. Excellent son and a girl and I don’t know methods to continue living. inch

Maung Oo says he regrets his actions. “So, I will tell you most of, ” he says. “I want everyone to learn so they can avoid falling into the same fate. ”

All of the six soldiers who spoke to the BBC admitted burning homes and villages throughout central Myanmar. This suggests it is a good organised tactic in order to destroy any assistance for the resistance.

It is about as some say the particular military struggles to maintain its multi-front municipal war.

Myanmar Witness – several open source experts tracking human legal rights abuses – offers verified more than two hundred reports of villages being burnt in this manner over the past 10 weeks.

They say the range of these arson episodes is rapidly escalating, with at least 40 attacks in The month of january and February, followed by at least 66 within March and Apr.

This is simply not the first time Myanmar’s army has used a scorched earth policy. It was widely reported against the Rohingya people in 2017 in Rakhine state.

The country’s mountainous cultural regions have experienced these kinds of assaults for many decades. Some of these ethnic fighters are now helping to train and provide the PDF within this current civil battle against the military.

The culture of impunity in which soldiers are usually allowed to loot and kill at will, as described by the soldiers, has occurred for decades in Myanmar, Human being Rights Watch states.

People are rarely held accountable for atrocities allegedly carried out by the military.

But Myanmar’s army is increasingly having to hire soldiers plus militias due to defections and killings from the PDF.

Several 10, 000 individuals have defected from both army and the law enforcement since the 2021 hen house, according to a group called People’s Embrace, produced by former military and police personnel.

“The military is having difficulties to maintain its multi-front civil war, ” says Michael Martin from the Centre intended for Strategic and International Studies think tank.

“It’s running directly into personnel problems both in the officer ranks and the enlisted rates, it’s taking heavy casualties, problems with recruitment, problems getting devices and supplies and that’s reflected by the undeniable fact that they seem to be shedding territory or power over territory in various regions. ”

Magway and Sagaing regions (where the above incidents happened) were one of the historical recruitment grounds with regard to Myanmar’s military.

But young people here are rather choosing to join the PDF groups.

Cpl Aung was very clear about why he defected: “If I think the military might win in the long term, I actually wouldn’t have turned sides to the individuals. ”

He says soldiers do not dare in order to leave their base alone as they are worried they will be killed by PDF.

“Wherever we go, we can just go in the form of the military column. No-one can say that we have been dominating, ” he says.

All of us put the allegations on this investigation to Common Zaw Min Tun, the spokesperson to get Myanmar’s military. In the statement, he denied that the army continues to be targeting civilians. This individual said both of the raids cited right here were legitimate goals and those killed were “terrorists”.

He denied the army has been burning towns and says that it can be the PDFs that are carrying out arson attacks.

It is hard to say how so when this civil battle might end however it seems likely that millions of Myanmar’s civilians will be left traumatised.

And the longer it takes to find peace, the greater women like rape victim Khin Htwe will be vulnerable to assault.

She says she no longer wished to live after exactly what had happened with her and considered acquiring her own life.

This wounderful woman has been unable to tell her fiance what happened with her.

Graphics by Aghnia Adzkia, Arvin Supriyadi and Revealed Surya