The All Burma Federation of Student Unions (ABFSU) confirmed that three of their Mandalay-based members were charged last Friday by the junta with violating Myanmar’s counterterrorism law.
The individuals, who were arrested on March 2 in Amarapura Township, include Aung Myo Ko, chair of the student union at the Mandalay Education College; Thiri Yadanar, upper Myanmar secretary of the ABFSU; and Kyaw Zin Latt, a middle school teacher from Singu Township.
ABFSU chair Aung Pyae Sone Phyo said that the activists had been helping families of detained students send care packages to their loved ones in prison.
“They were actually a part of the democratic movement before but they stopped doing that. They just focused on sending care packages to the detained students and helping the detained students contact their families in distant places,” he told Myanmar Now.
The three detainees—all in their 20s—have been held at the township police station since their arrest, and were formally accused on March 18 of violating Section 50j of the counterterrorism law for funding “terrorist” organisations. The charge carries a maximum sentence of life in prison, Aung Pyae Sone Phyo told Myanmar Now.
A second charge was also added to their cases for being alleged accessories to terrorist acts, as is outlined under Section 52a of the law, and carries a seven-year sentence.
The three student activists are also reportedly being investigated for incitement charges under Section 505a of the Penal Code, but Aung Pyae Sone Phyo noted that the final charge had not yet been formally filed.
“[The military] started by arresting protesters on the streets and now they’re arresting people who are helping the detained civilians. They clearly want to instill fear into the people so that they don’t dare to revolt,” the ABFSU chair said.
The military council has not released any information on the charges allegedly brought against the student activists.
Protests have continued in Mandalay more than one year after the military coup in February 2021. The junta continues to make frequent arrests of dissidents in the region, questioning civilians in public, and sealing off houses belonging to anti-dictatorship figures.
“They are going to decimate each and every one of their opponents. That is why we have been revolting against the junta from the time of Ne Win until Min Aung Hlaing,” Aung Pyae Sone Phyo said, referring to the military leader who seized power in a 1962 coup and the current army chief.
“It’s also essential that we, the people, hold our heads high and keep fighting back,” he added.
Junta hostages found tortured, executed in Sagaing
The bodies of 17 people, including a resistance fighter who was dismembered and disemboweled, are found after a village raid by a junta column under LID 99
A butchered body
From the house where he was being held, Kan Kaung could easily hear the screams and cries coming from the monastery on the opposite side of the village. But he also saw some of those who would later be killed, including a woman in her late 30s or early 40s and an elderly man who were both brought into the house. The woman had her hands tied behind her back and had been accused of having a gun in her house.
The entire village was filled with the sound of soldiers shouting threats at those they had captured, but no shots were fired for the first three hours after the raid began. Then a shootout with local resistance forces started. This clash lasted about half an hour and included the eight soldiers who were guarding the house. Kan Kaung remained perfectly still the whole time, mindful of the soldiers’ threat to kill him if he tried to escape.
After the fighting stopped, another soldier entered the house and showed a photo of a man with multiple gunshot wounds to the two Tar Taing villagers, demanding to know if the man was Kyaw Zaw. After looking at the soldier’s phone, the villagers confirmed that the victim was, in fact, Kyaw Zaw. After receiving the answer he wanted, the soldier went to get a meat cleaver and left the house again.
When he returned about half an hour later, the soldier no longer had the cleaver. But he had a new photo on his phone that he insisted on pushing into the faces of the two captured villagers.
“He showed his phone to the villagers and told them that this is what happened to Kyaw Zaw. He also told them to take notes,” Kan Kaung told Myanmar Now.
The soldier asked Kan Kaung if he wanted to see the photo, too, but he said he didn’t dare look at it. The photo, as he later learned, showed Kyaw Zaw’s body, not just dead, but also decapitated, dismembered and eviscerated.
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Murder in the monastery
U Moe, a Tar Taing resident in his 60s, was among the 100 or so villagers who were held in the village’s monastery throughout the nearly 24-hour ordeal. Soon after he was captured, he and around 10 other elderly villagers were taken to the monastery’s main building, while some others who had their hands tied behind their backs were forced to lie face down on the ground in the monastery compound.
“The soldiers called themselves the ‘Ogre Column.’ They said they weren’t going to torch the village, but were just looking for PDFs,” he said, referring to members of the anti-regime People’s Defence Force.
According to U Moe, the soldiers had a list of names on their phones that they used to separate the villagers into different groups. Around 80 people who were not on the list filled the building that he was in, which housed the monastery’s altar and Buddha images. This group was further divided by gender, with the men staying upstairs and the women downstairs, he said.
The ones lying on the ground outside were all people whose names were on the list. They were also joined by a few villagers accused of trying to escape or of talking back to the soldiers.
The soldiers called themselves the ‘Ogre Column.’ They said they weren’t going to torch the village, but were just looking for PDFs
Although the windows and doors of the monastery’s main building were all closed, U Moe said he could clearly hear what was happening outside. The soldiers were beating the captives they had tied up, who were crying out in agony. Occasionally, this sound would be punctuated by that of a gunshot.
This continued until around 5pm, he said. That was when some of the soldiers came back into the building to get a few of the women, who were told to start cooking dinner for them and the other prisoners. (On the other side of the village, Kan Kaung said he saw soldiers catching chickens for the women to cook. They also stole dried beef from the villagers’ homes, he added.)
After eating, the soldiers settled in for the night. A few were assigned to guard duty, occasionally firing their guns out into the darkness whenever the resistance sources shot at them to remind them that they were still there.
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A trail of bodies
The next morning, the Ogre Column set off in the direction of Nyaung Yin, a village about 4km west of Tar Taing. The column was divided into four groups this time, each one accompanied by a number of hostages. The first group left at around 7am, but the third group, which included Kan Kaung and his friends and five other men, didn’t leave until 8am.
Before reaching Nyaung Yin, Kan Kaung and his friends were separated from the other five, who stayed behind with five soldiers. As he was being led away, Kan Kaung said he heard at least eight gunshots being fired behind him.
“We were scared out of our minds, even though they said they weren’t going to kill us. I asked one of the soldiers what was going to happen to us, and he said that only those who had been tied up would be killed,” Kan Kaung told Myanmar Now.
Later he saw the bodies of other victims—villagers who had gone ahead of them with the first and second groups.
“There were five bodies in one place, and three more somewhere else. Some were on their stomachs, some on their backs. Some had been shot in the head from the behind while kneeling down,” he said.
When they reached Nyaung Yin, they found that its inhabitants had already fled. The soldiers they were with took over the first abandoned house they approached on the eastern edge of the village. And it was at this point that Kan Kaung and his friends were finally released with a final warning: Don’t try anything.
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‘I can’t even describe it’
Others who saw the bodies claimed that the victims were not merely murdered, but also tortured and sexually assaulted.
“They were beaten so badly before they were killed that their skulls had caved in. It was so hard to look at. The female victims also appeared to have been sexually assaulted before they were killed,” said a local who was part of the group that retrieved the bodies on March 2.
Ko Kyaw, a member of a local defence team who also helped to collect the bodies, said the underwear of the female victims had been torn and that onions had been forced into their vaginas. Myanmar Now was unable to verify this information.
Despite the brutal treatment they were subjected to, it appeared that almost none of those who had been killed were members of the armed resistance. Most were farmers or fishermen, and a few were from other villages. One, a 35-year-old resident of the neighbouring village of Shwe Hlay named Chit Kaung, was allegedly captured near Tar Taing while trying to find a missing cow.
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Many of the victims were related. Ko Thein, a 25-year-old Tar Taing native, lost his mother, brother, brother-in-law and aunt that day. He survived only because he was not in Tar Taing when the soldiers arrived.
“They killed my family members in such an unimaginable way. I can’t even describe it,” he said.
Two more bodies were later discovered north and south of Tar Taing. One, belonging to a 25-year-old man named Yarhu, was found south of the village on the bank of the Ayeyarwady River. Like Kyaw Zaw, the only confirmed member of the resistance among all the victims, Yarhu’s body was decapitated and dismembered.
“It looked like they put his neck on some kind of chopping block,” said one local who saw the body.
Terrorist actions
The self-described Ogre Column was, in fact, a group of nearly 70 soldiers that had been transported to the village of Ma Lal Thar in Ayadaw Township, some 50km north of Tar Taing, on February 24.
The same column also raided at least 10 villages in Myinmu and Sagaing townships. A total of 23 locals were killed in just one week and seven of them, including five in the village of Pa Dat Taing and two in Tar Taing, were decapitated and dismembered.
Moe Gyo, the leader of the Sagaing-based Sartaung Moe Gyo People’s Defence Team, encountered the Ogre Column in Kandaw, a village in Myinmu Township. Those same soldiers beheaded two members of his group after capturing them.
“They are taunting us and trying to instil fear in us. That is exactly why we can’t forgive them,” he said.
On March 6, the publicly mandated National Unity Government (NUG) held a press conference highlighting the Tar Taing massacre. Aung Myo Min, the NUG’s human rights minister, said that junta forces have committed at least 32 massacres over the past two years.
“We have proved multiple times how cruel the military is,” he said, addressing the international community. “I have urged you before and I am urging you again. Please stop the military council’s terrorist actions as soon as possible.”
Beheaded bodies of PDF members found in southern Sagaing Region
Resistance forces claim the military captured and executed three of the fighters, while the other two were killed in combat