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ND-Burma formed in 2004 in order to provide a way for Burma human rights organizations to collaborate on the human rights documentation process. The 13 ND-Burma member organizations seek to collectively use the truth of what communities in Burma have endured to advocate for justice for victims. ND-Burma trains local organizations in human rights documentation; coordinates members’ input into a common database using Martus, a secure open-source software; and engages in joint-advocacy campaigns.
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Authorities retaliate against political prisoners after Monywa Prison strike
/in NewsJust over a month after agreeing to negotiate with protesting prisoners to end a hunger strike, authorities are singling out the participants for punishment
Political prisoners who participated in the September hunger strike in Sagaing Region’s Monywa Prison are facing retaliatory legal penalties a month later, the Monywa People’s Strike Committee said.
In early September, close to 50 inmates took part in the strike to protest repressive treatment at the prison in the Sagaing Region capital, provoking further crackdowns by the prison authorities. After negotiating an end to the strike, authorities are now reportedly adding time to the participants’ sentences.
The Monywa People’s Strike Committee, an activist civil society organisation, said in a virtual press conference on Wednesday that their imprisoned leader Wai Moe Naing was one of nine political prisoners who participated in the strike who have since had their prison terms extended by one year.
Wai Moe Naing, 28, has been serving a sentence for more than 50 years since regime forces arrested him in 2021, after the military coup.
The Monywa People’s Strike Committee also said that 17 other inmates, who protested when prison authorities initially refused to respond to the hunger strike, have now incurred charges under Penal Code Section 147—on rioting—which carry a maximum penalty of two years’ imprisonment.
In solidarity with their oppressed fellow prisoners, other Monywa Prison inmates are challenging the authorities to charge them under the same statute, said strike committee member Shin Thant, citing first-hand accounts from inside the prison.
“Along with the 17 political prisoners who have been charged, the rest of the political prisoners are going to request that the court prosecute all of them together. They say this is to show that all the political prisoners are united,” Shin Thant said.
According to the law, prisoners who adhere to rules set by the prison administration are eligible early release or a reduction of their sentences.
The military council has yet to issue any public statement about extending sentences or bringing additional charges against Monywa Prison inmates.
Last month’s strike began after a special inspection team made up of junta personnel from the military, police, general administration department, and fire department carried out an unannounced raid at Monywa Prison on September 8, confiscating books, food and other personal items from the inmates.
That day, 15 political prisoners collectively demanded the return of their confiscated property. When prison authorities ignored the 15 inmates’ demands, other prisoners including Wai Moe Naing joined them, with nearly 50 initiating a hunger strike the day after the surprise search and confiscation.
The punishment against participating political prisoners comes more than a month after the prison authorities made concessions to the striking prisoners, agreeing to return their property as well as provide them with adequate medical care and ease restrictions on the delivery of care packages from outside the prison.
The additional punishment imposed by prison authorities was gratuitous and a violation of the political prisoners’ rights, Shin Thant said.
“This is just treating them as enemies. They’re already in prison and have already been arrested… So they continue to torture our comrades psychologically. This only shows the brutality of the military dictators,” he said.
Following the hunger strike at Monywa, the military council sacked five members of the prison’s staff, including the superintendent. The Monywa People’s Strike Committee also reported that four prison officials at the rank of corporal received demotions for a period of six months.
Myanmar Now has not been able to verify the military council’s action against the members of the prison administration independently.
According to Shin Thant, some of the hunger strike participants were in poor health.
“As for the health situation, the situation was serious from the beginning. Some have been suffering from the effects of starvation: malnutrition, reduced body weight, and needing injections of intravenous supplements and drugs,” he said.
Since Myo Swe of the junta Ministry of Defense was appointed director general of the Prison Department in July this year, repressive conditions in the prisons have reportedly become worse.
Family members of political prisoners at Monywa Prison have said there are strict limits on items delivered to political prisoners in parcels, and that their movement within the prison and access to television and books is also severely restricted.
The military junta continues to arrest opponents as well as those merely under suspicion of supporting its opponents throughout the country.
According to the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners, the regime continues to keep 19,600 people in detention throughout Myanmar as of October 19, 2023, of whom only 7,799 have been tried and sentenced.
Myanmar Now News
Human Rights Situation weekly update (October 8 to 14, 2023)
/in HR Situation, NewsHuman Rights Violations took place in States and Regions from Oct 8 to 14, 2023
Between October 8th and 14th Military Junta arrested and used as human shields more than 7 civilians from the Sagaing Region . Military Junta burnt and killed 2 civilians including an underaged child from Kale Township in Sagaing Region. Military Junta Troop attacked with heavy artillery to Monelaichat IDP camp in Laiza, Kachin State and 32 civilians including 13 children were killed. The Military Troop also started cutting off Telecommunication in Tedim, Chin State on October 13th.
About 35 civilians died and over 18 were injured by the Military’s heavy and light attacks within a week.They arrested over 22 civilians and killed 7 within a week. 4 children were injured and 15 killed when the Military Junta committed violations.
Infogram
Civic Freedom Violations Committed by Myanmar’s Military Junta
/in Briefing Papers, ND-Burma's Reports, NewsCivil Society Study
PUBLISHED: OCTOBER 2023
After claiming voting irregularities in the 2020 General elections, the Myanmar military staged a coup on February 1, 2021, and formed the State Administrative Council (SAC).
The first violent crackdowns on civic freedoms began on February 9, 2021, when a protester was shot dead by police using live rounds to disperse a peaceful protest. In the two years since the coup, there have been violent crackdowns by SAC security forces on many civic freedoms and human rights.
In this ICNL-supported analysis, Spring Archive and ND-Burma worked together to document civic freedom and human rights violations committed by the Myanmar military since the 2021 coup. The report is based on an examination of violations of freedom of assembly, expression, and association in the two years. The report details numerous protest crackdowns, arrests, and abuses against civic activists, human rights defenders, democracy supporters, journalists, and other members of civil society.
Spring Archive’s data also highlights numerous internet shutdowns and attacks on press freedom, including de-licensing of media outlets, censorship, and restrictions on associations’ operations and fundamental freedoms. The military frequently weaponizes numerous laws and penal code provisions to arrest and detain peaceful dissidents and opponents.
Sources
Blast at Myanmar camp sounded like it came from the ‘world wars’
/in News‘There is nothing left,’ says a farmer who lost 6 family members in the blast that killed 29
A farmer who lost his wife, three children and his mother when a bomb was dropped on his Kachin state village earlier this week said the powerful explosion wiped out buildings up to one mile away and sounded like something “used in the world wars.”
“Houses built by NGOs and the locals are now left with only iron pillars.” Maran Bauk Lar told Radio Free Asia. “This was a type of bomb that has never been used in Myanmar.”
The explosion at the Mung Lai Hkyet internally displaced persons camp at about 11 p.m. on Monday killed 29 people, including 11 children, and left 57 others wounded, relief workers told RFA.
The camp is near Lai Zar in the mountainous border area between Kachin state and China. Lai Zar is the headquarters of the Kachin Independence Army, or the KIA, which has fought the Burmese military for decades and controls areas of northern Myanmar.
KIA information officer Col. Naw Bu told RFA earlier this week that he believed the junta was targeting the headquarters in the attack.
Maran Bauk Lar said he was walking to his farm when he heard the explosion. When he returned, he found a deep pit and the remains of his sister-in-law and the other family members.
“My mother’s body was completely dismembered, and her skull was broken,” he said. “Only the bones remain. My wife and children were killed under the collapsed building. Our dormitories were completely destroyed. There is nothing left.”
‘Emboldened by the indifference’
The Mung Lai Hkyet camp has 658 residents, many of whom are now suffering from psychological trauma as they recover from the explosion, relief workers said.
Survivors have been temporarily relocated to a church in Woichyai, an internally displaced persons camp in Lai Zar.
“At the moment, they are sleeping on the floor of the church,” a person helping them said. “They have to start a new life from scratch. They don’t have a single penny in their hands.” \
The Special Advisory Council for Myanmar, a group of independent experts working to support human rights efforts in the country, urged the United Nations and its member states to hold the junta responsible for the attack.
“The Myanmar military is so emboldened by the indifference of the international community in response to its decades of atrocity crimes that it is now attacking camps for internally displaced people,” said Yanghee Lee, a member of the council and a former U.N. Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Myanmar.
“The military is flagrantly massacring the most vulnerable people in society, and yet U.N. entities in Myanmar will not even publicly name the military as the perpetrator,” he said.
At the State Department, spokesman Matthew Miller said that the United States was “deeply concerned” by reports of the explosion.
“We strongly condemn the military regime’s ongoing attacks that have claimed thousands of lives since the February 2021 coup and continue to exacerbate the region’s most severe humanitarian crisis,” he said on Tuesday.
‘The culture of military dictatorship’
Fighting in the area between junta forces and the KIA has intensified since July. Lately, there have been artillery strikes from the junta almost every day, local residents said.
While some residents said they heard a plane just before Monday’s explosion, others told RFA that they heard nothing.
The KIA has formed an investigation team to determine what caused the blast, Naw Bu said, adding that it may have been a bomb dropped by a junta-operated drone.
“They always target the public, not only in our territory in Kachin state, but across the country,” he said of the junta. “It is the culture of military dictatorship.”
RFA’s calls on Wednesday to Win Ye Tun, the junta’s social affairs minister and spokesman for Kachin state, for comments on the death toll at Mung Lai Hkyet went unanswered.
Junta spokesman Major Gen. Zaw Min Tun told RFA that junta troops were not behind the attack on Mung Lai Hkyet. He speculated that it was caused by an accidental explosion at a warehouse where the KIA stores gunpowder.
A Mung Lai Hkyet resident told RFA that it was “totally untrue” that there are weapons factories and arsenals in the camp.
“There is no arsenal,” he said. “There are only civilians who are displaced persons.”
RFA News
Girl, 14, killed by junta shelling in eastern Bago Region
/in NewsThe child was just the latest to lose her life in recent months due to indiscriminate attacks in the area
Junta shelling killed a 14-year-old girl and injured four others in eastern Bago Region’s Pyu Township on Tuesday, according to resistance sources.
The girl, ninth grader Yu Yati Khaing, suffered a fatal injury after a heavy artillery shell hit the village of Kyaw Hla at around 5pm, an officer of the Pyu Township People’s Defence Team (PDT) told Myanmar Now.
“A shell fell on the village at around 1pm, but no one was injured by that one. Then a second shell landed at around 5pm, and the girl was wounded in the abdomen. She died before she could receive treatment,” said the PDT officer.
Troops stationed in the town of Kanyutkwin were responsible for the incident, he added.
The other victims were members of a household living in the village of Nandamate. Further details were unavailable at the time of reporting, but a member of the Bago Region People’s Defence Force confirmed that at least of the injured was a child.
Children are often among the victims of the junta’s indiscriminate bombing in eastern Bago Region, which includes territory controlled by Brigade 3 of the Karen National Liberation Army, an armed wing of the Karen National Union.
On October 3, a nine-year-old girl and a 46-year-old man were injured by a heavy artillery shell in the village of Ngatoekhin in Mone Township, Nyaunglebin District.
Exactly one month earlier, a 12-year-old child was killed by a junta airstrike on Kyet Tet Nyaung Pin, another village in Mone Township. Six other civilians were also injured in the attack, the Karen Human Rights Group reported at the time.
In late August, a woman and her seven-year-old daughter both died while attempting to escape an artillery assault on the village of Pyin Ye Gyi in Nyaunglebin Township. At least four others were injured.
Earlier the same month, two boys were among four people killed by shelling along the Sittaung River in Kyaukkyi Township, Nyaunglebin District.
In late July, a blast at a public rest stop in In Pin Thar, a village in Pyu Township located on the Yangon-Naypyitaw highway, left four children dead and one gravely injured.
No group claimed responsibility for planting the explosive.
Myanmar Now News
Several children among IDPs killed in junta aerial attack in Kachin State
/in NewsTwenty-nine were casualties confirmed as of Tuesday morning in a suspected drone strike on an IDP camp near the KIA headquarters
Nearly 30 internally displaced persons (IDPs) were killed in a suspected junta drone strike on a village near the headquarters of the ethnic armed organisation the Kachin Independence Army (KIA) in Laiza, northern Myanmar, at around midnight on Monday.
The Myanmar army launched the attack at 11:25pm on the village of Munglai Hkyet, located around two miles from Laiza, which is on Kachin State’s border with China. Around 500 IDPs had been sheltering in a camp in the village.
KIA spokesperson Col Naw Bu told Myanmar Now that as of 8am on Tuesday, they had identified 29 casualties and 56 others who were injured. Forty-four of those wounded were undergoing emergency care at a local medical facility, he said, adding that among the victims were several children and elderly people.
The rescue team was still searching for further bodies at the time of reporting.
“We didn’t hear the sound of any aircraft flying past before the attack. We suspect that it could be a drone strike,” the KIA spokesperson said. “I was told the bomb was dropped right on the camp.”
Col Naw Bu said that there were no KIA military camps near the village but that it had frequently been hit by artillery shells in previous junta attacks. There had been no clashes near Munglai Hkyet on Monday night, he added.
Monday’s attack was the deadliest on KIA territory since the junta’s bombing of a community event in A Nang Pa, Hpakant Township, in October last year. More than 60 people were killed in that assault.
“This is a massacre of our Kachin people through aerial bombings,” Col Naw Bu said of A Nang Pa. “It’s a genocidal act of militarism towards our ethnic people.”
Myanmar Now News