ND Burma
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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- Junta targeting rebel-held areas in northern Myanmar with airstrikes and artillery
- Human Rights Situation weekly update (September 8 to 14, 2024)
- Myanmar National Organizing Committee for ACSC/APF ASEAN Civil Society Conference/ASEAN People’s Forum 2024
- Human Rights Situation weekly update (September 1 to 7, 2024)
- Red Cross chief calls for greater aid access after visit to Myanmar
At least six burned bodies found in Myanmar’s Magway region village
/in NewsMore locals, junta troops and PDF members are believed to have been killed in fighting around Myaing Township.
Two days of fighting between junta troops and People’s Defense Forces (PDFs) in central Myanmar’s Magway region ended with the grisly discovery of charred bodies scattered across a village.
Locals told RFA that at least six burned corpses were found in the remains of Sue Win village in Myaing township on Friday. They said they believed there were more victims as the body parts had been scattered. The corpses were so badly burned they could not be identified.
“There were more than six bodies,” said a local, who declined to be named for safety reasons. “They were not burned in one place. There were many bodies. They were found in four places.”
Battles between junta forces and local militia groups began on Friday and continued the next day. Locals told RFA they believed the military council had burned the bodies along with four houses and they think the dead are a mixture of locals and PDF members. However, since the bodies have not yet been identified, it is not yet known if junta forces were among the dead. Some of the bodies were wearing bulletproof vests and army boots, with scarves tied around their necks in the military style indicating the military was trying to cover up its own casualties. Local junta Capt. Soe Win is believed to be among the dead.
“The bodies were brought here in a vehicle,” said a local PDF member. “There were more than seven or eight bodies including those killed in the fighting on the way to our village.”
The military council has not released any information on the discovery of the bodies and calls to a spokesman by RFA on Monday went unanswered.
Ongoing battles between junta troops and the PDFs have left thousands homeless in Myanmar’s second largest region. On June 15 troops torched more than 3,000 houses in one township.
Locals in Myaing township say residents of more than ten villages in the area have fled from the military council’s scorched-earth operations.Figures from Data for Myanmar show that 22 people had been killed in Magway between February last year and the end of April 2022 but more up to date figures are not available. D4M also reported last month that troops had torched more than 3,000 houses in Magway in the first 16 months following the coup.
RFA News
Weekly Udate 27 Jun – 3 July 2022
/in HR SituationThe resistance is thriving but they need more support. Upon the rise of pro-junta militias is a greater threat to civilian safety and security which must be met with urgency. The National Unity Government must be supported with funds which would ensure PDFs and EROs are well equipped as they defend their communities and fight the illegal, illegitimate and immoral junta.
Military detains three more lawyers representing junta opponents in Mandalay
/in NewsLike other attorneys targeted before them, they were arrested after leaving their clients’ hearings in Obo Prison
Junta authorities arrested three more Mandalay-based lawyers representing political detainees on Wednesday as they returned home from court hearings inside the city’s prison, according to sources within the local legal network.
The detainees—identified as Tin Win Aung, his wife Thae Su Naing, and Thuta—were reportedly leaving Obo Prison after attending hearings for their clients within the closed court there.
Three of their local colleagues spoke to Myanmar Now on the condition of anonymity and confirmed their arrests to Myanmar Now. At the time of reporting it was not known where they were being held in junta custody or why they had been specifically targeted.
“We still don’t know the details of their arrests. I only heard that Thuta’s vehicle was also seized,” one of the lawyers said.
Following the February 2021 military coup, lawyers representing jailed activists and political opponents of the military have also faced threats to their personal security for challenging the practice of arbitrary detentions in a junta-controlled judiciary.
While the number of lawyers detained across the country is unknown, attorneys in Mandalay said that at least 10 of their colleagues had been arrested since the coup and dozens more are wanted by the military authorities.
Among the detainees is 43-year-old Ywet Nu Aung, a prominent lawyer arrested on April 28. She was representing jailed Mandalay chief minister Zaw Myint Maung and other leaders of the ousted National League For Democracy (NLD) government at the time of her arrest. She was later charged with violating the Counterterrorism Law for allegedly providing funding to an armed resistance group, and was transferred to the Obo Prison in May.
Days before Ywet Nu Aung’s arrest, Si Thu, another lawyer known for helping farmers in land disputes with the military, was beaten by soldiers in front of his wife and children before being taken away from his home in Chanayethazan Township.
Last December, attorney Lwin Lwin Mar and three other lawyers—all women—were also jailed by junta authorities.
Following the series of arrests, lawyers representing junta opponents have reportedly become hesitant to go to their clients’ hearings inside Obo Prison.
Lawyer facing life sentence on terror charges sent to Obo Prison
Ywet Nu Aung was being held inside one of Myanmar’s most notorious interrogation centres prior to her transfer to the prison
Lawyers have been targeted outside of Mandalay as well. In the military’s administrative capital of Naypyitaw, Thein Hlaing Tun—who was representing Myo Aung, the ousted mayor under the NLD—was detained after leaving a court hearing in May 2021. Similarly, two lawyers for deposed Karen State chief minister Nang Khin Htwe Myint were arrested and charged with incitement in June.
The military council has placed a gag order on the lawyers of incarcerated State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi, President Win Myint and the NLD’s chief ministers in an effort to restrict information released concerning their trials and charges.
As of Friday, Myanmar’s military council had detained more than 14,000 people since the coup, of whom 3,000 had been released.
Myanmar Now News
Survivors haunted by Myanmar army massacre in Sagaing
/in NewsEyewitnesses to the brutal killing of 28 civilians in Ye-U Township recall a junta attack that was found to have been documented by the soldiers themselves
No one will stay in the eastern parts of Mone Taing Pin anymore, where locals claim that dogs howl without provocation, putrid odours materialise and vanish, and shadowy figures are spotted only to disappear before they can be identified.
In May, the military massacred nearly 30 people in this village in Sagaing Region’s Ye-U Township. Though the victims’ remains have since been cremated and buried, survivors believe, in accordance with Buddhist custom, that their souls cannot transition into the afterlife until certain religious rituals have been performed.
Due to continued Myanmar army attacks, the living have been unable to make offerings to monks to share the karmic energy that would guide their loved ones to the next realm.
Once a sceptic of such practices, Mone Taing Pin villager Ko Linn* said he now believes that the ceremony is necessary, speculating that bone fragments of the victims found in homes burned by junta troops may be binding the spirits of the deceased to the location.
“We are planning to make donations in the name of the victims so that their spirits can cross over,” Ko Linn explained. “We will also invite monks to pray for the village and we will spread consecrated sand all over.”
More than 100 locals were initially detained during a May 10 military raid on the 400-household Mone Taing Pin, following an attack by a local defence force on a junta column outside the village that morning.
Twenty-eight of the captives, all men aged 20 to 60, were later found to have been killed. Three local resistance fighters were also shot dead, bringing the total number of those slain at the site to 31.
More burned bodies discovered in Sagaing’s Ye-U Township
Locals say they continue to find the remains of victims killed by regime troops who occupied their villages last week
Myanmar Now conducted interviews with five survivors of the attack.
Fifty-year-old Thin Kyi hid in Mone Taing Pin’s monastic library with her husband, Thein Aung, when soldiers opened fire on the village with guns and artillery on the morning of May 10.
She recalled bullets hitting the walls around them, and troops entering the compound soon after, capturing the 100 people who had sought refuge on the religious grounds. They separated some 30 men from the women, tying their hands with rope, questioning and beating them.
The remaining women, of whom there were more than 70, were held for three days without food, another survivor said.
The soldiers released eight elderly men, including U Myint, who described to Myanmar Now the interrogations that took place.
“They wanted us to say that we were funding the PDF,” he said, referring to the People’s Defence Force, the armed wing of the civilian National Unity Government (NUG). “They asked us where the PDF stayed, and how many PDF members were in the village. We got beaten when we didn’t know the answers.”
Ten of the men who were detained were killed on May 10, and 18 more the following morning, he said.
“They had their hands tied behind their backs and were blindfolded,” U Myint added.
He escaped with seven other men after the military left Mone Taing Pin on May 12. The soldiers reportedly took three monks from the village with them as hostages.
Remains_of_mone_taing_pin_victims.jpeg
The charred remains of victims of the massacre found in the houses in the eastern part of Mone Taing Pin village (Supplied)
Thein Aung, Thin Kyi’s husband, was last seen being taken away by the soldiers from the monastery.
“Run if you see them, or else you will face the same fate my husband did. They burned him alive,” she said.
Now a widow raising three children, she told Myanmar Now that she did not expect she would ever fully recover from the trauma of losing her husband and neighbours to the junta’s violence.
“Don’t ask me if I hate the military. I will make sure to teach my children to burn with hate upon hearing the word ‘military,’” she said.
Visual evidence emerges
RFA published photographic and video evidence on June 17 of the military committing atrocities in a location later determined to likely be Mone Taing Pin. The cache of more than 100 photos and video clips was reportedly found by a villager on a phone in Ayadaw Township, south of Ye-U, and subsequently turned over to RFA. It is believed to have belonged to a Myanmar army soldier involved in raids in the area.
A revolutionary force in Sagaing also sent the same files to Myanmar Now on June 23.
In the now widely seen video footage, three soldiers are seen filming themselves discussing how many people they have killed, and the manner in which they dismembered their victims.
“I’m an expert in killing,” one of the men—assumed to be the phone’s owner—is heard saying.
Among the photos recovered from the phone was an image, dated May 10, of around 30 men sitting with their hands tied behind their backs in front of a wooden building, guarded by three junta soldiers.
U Win*, a 45-year-old man from Mone Taing Pin, told Myanmar Now that the photo was taken in the village’s monastery, as RFA also suggested.
“I can identify all of the people in the photo. Of all of them, I think only one survived. The rest were all killed,” he said. Mone_taing_pin_villagers.jpeg
Villagers seen being held captive by the military in what is believed to be the Mon Taing Pin monastery (Supplied)
Other photos, including one from the following day, show the soldiers standing over bloody bodies, some of which belonged to men who RFA sources identified as being present in the earlier photo of captives in the monastery.
The bodies of those killed were later burned in houses in the village, they said.
Myanmar Now previously reported that some 30 homes were torched in Mone Taing Pin during the raid, and that it appeared that the bodies of those found inside belonged to victims who had been murdered before they were burned.
“There was blood in the front of the houses, so it looks like they were killed outside and then dragged inside and set on fire,” a villager told Myanmar Now at the time.
RFA contacted the junta spokesperson Gen Zaw Min Tun regarding the evidence, but he declined to comment until the military had carried out its own investigation into the incident.
*Some names have been changed to protect the safety of the individuals
Myanmar Now News
Junta troops kill 9 unarmed civilians, including 4 teens, in war-torn Sagaing region
/in NewsThe group was detained while enroute to receive medical training in a nearby township.
Junta troops in Myanmar’s embattled Sagaing region captured and killed nine unarmed civilians, including four teenagers, as they traveled to receive medical training, according to an official from their group and a family member of one of the victims.
The nine medics with the Wetlet township branch of the Generation Z Special Task Force, an organization aligned with the anti-junta People’s Defense Force (PDF) paramilitary group, were detained by the military, and shot dead on Wednesday near Shwebo township’s Kunseik village while enroute to southeastern Sagaing’s Ayadaw township, some 60 kilometers (37 miles) away.
A spokesman for the Generation Z Special Task Force told RFA Burmese that those killed included four women: Pa Pa Khine, 14, Win Ei Kyaw, 15, Naing Naing Aung, 24, and Thit Thit Hlaing, 34; and five men: Pho Htaung, 17, Phone Kyaw, 17, Thein Than Oo, 21, Aung Kyaw Moe, 27, and Pho Nyein, 27.
The spokesman, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that his group confirmed the identities of the victims after obtaining photos of the slaughter.
“They didn’t have any weapons on them. They were going for medical training in an area where there was no fighting,” he said.
“We sent for them after notifying our allied groups as there were no military activities around here [and could safely return]. We have no idea how they got captured. We heard about some arrests [on Wednesday] and only [on Thursday], when we saw the photos, did we realize they were our team members.”
The mother of one victim said she was devastated by the news that her daughter and her friends were killed at such a young age.
“She wanted to do this, even though she was so young. She always said that she wanted to have a role she could play,” said the victim’s mother, who also declined to be named.
“Now that this has happened, I’m heartbroken. I’m so numb and I feel like I have nothing inside.”
The junta has yet to comment on the incident and calls by RFA to junta deputy information minister, Maj. Gen. Zaw Min Tun, went unanswered on Thursday.
The Generation Z Special Task Force said it will work to obtain justice for the families of the victims of the extrajudicial killings and to bring international attention to the incident with the help of Myanmar’s shadow National Unity Government.
According to the Bangkok-based Assistance Association for Political Prisoners, security forces have killed at least 2,053 civilians since the military’s Feb. 1, 2021, coup, although the group acknowledges its records are incomplete and says the real number of deaths is likely much higher.
Last month, the Institute for Strategy and Policy (ISP), a local think tank, said in a report that it had documented at least 5,646 civilian deaths in Myanmar between the coup and May 10.
The ISP figure included people killed by security forces during anti-junta protests, in clashes between the military and pro-democracy paramilitaries or ethnic armies, while held in detention, and in revenge attacks, including against informers for the regime.
At least 1,831 civilians were killed in shooting deaths, the largest number of which occurred in Sagaing region, where junta troops have faced some of the toughest resistance to military rule in clashes with the PDF paramilitaries that have displaced tens of thousands of residents since the coup, the ISP report said.
Translated by Khin Maung Nyane. Written in English by Joshua Lipes.
RFA News
OPEN LETTER TO AUSTRALIAN FOREIGN MINISTER PENNY WONG FROM 688 CIVIL SOCIETY ORGANISATIONS
/in Press Releases and StatementsThe Honorable Penny Wong
Minister for Foreign Affairs,
Parliament House,
Canberra ACT 2600
29 June 2022
Open letter to Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong from 688 civil society organisations
Re: Urgent change of course and action needed on Myanmar
Dear Minister Penny Wong,
We, the undersigned 688 Burma/Myanmar, regional and international civil society organisations, welcome your appointment as Foreign Minister and note the Australian Labor Party’s commitment to seek “strong and enduring relations with the people of Myanmar” when in government. We note your past comments that Australia “cannot be a bystander to a direct attack on Myanmar’s democracy” and your call for the Australian government “to take a stand” for democracy in Myanmar and to impose targeted sanctions. We acknowledge the Australian government’s commitment to appoint a Special Envoy for Southeast Asia and for increased aid to the region and to implement a ‘First Nations Foreign Policy’.
We are writing to urge you to hear our voices, as we struggle for a federal democratic Myanmar that upholds human rights for all and to protect Burma/Myanmar’s cultures, livelihoods and fragile ecosystems that are under dire threat by the illegitimate military junta.
Since the illegal coup attempt on February 1, 2021, the illegitimate junta has waged a terror campaign against the people of Myanmar, amid widespread and mass resistance. There have been more than 10,000 armed clashes, which include attacks on civilians through indiscriminate shellings and airstrikes, and over 2,000 people have been murdered by the junta. Around 440,000 people have been forcibly displaced since the coup attempt, as the junta carries out deliberate attacks, killing, torturing and raping, and destroying houses, villages and food supplies across the country. In Sagaing Region, the junta torched over 5,600 houses in February to April 2022 alone. The junta’s criminal conduct amounts to war crimes and crimes against humanity, which it commits with total impunity.
The junta has devastated the economy, which has shrunk around 30%, causing widespread food insecurity. The junta has weaponized telecommunications, ordering internet shutdowns in large swaths of the country, blocked access to information through censorship and targeted the people for surveillance. Journalists have been targeted with murder, arrest and torture, as well as doxing campaigns and the dissemination of hate speech and disinformation.
ASEAN is complicit in the junta’s terror campaign. Since the attempted coup, ASEAN has continued to legitimize the junta and ignore the voices of the people. Its failed Five-Point Consensus was agreed with the illegitimate junta alone, which has ignored its own pledge to implement it. ASEAN has repeatedly invited the junta to meetings, events and military training, providing cover for ASEAN members and Australia to engage with war criminals, emboldening their crimes in Australia’s name. The ASEAN Special Envoy on Myanmar defers to the illegitimate military junta and has failed to engage with Myanmar’s legitimate government, the National Unity Government (NUG), the National Unity Consultative Council (NUCC), Ethnic Revolutionary Organizations (EROs) and civil society.
The ASEAN Coordinating Centre for Humanitarian Assistance on disaster management (AHA Centre), an intergovernmental humanitarian disaster management body supported with Australian taxpayer funds, does not have the capacity to handle humanitarian aid in a conflict setting where the perpetrator and the clear aggressor is the partner in delivering aid. It is rather exacerbating the crisis in Burma/Myanmar by allowing the military to weaponize humanitarian aid, offering tactical and political advantage while lending legitimacy to the military junta who is the main perpetrator of violence that is leading to mass displacement. Civil society strongly rejects the AHA Centre’s divide-and-rule approach of meeting with EROs individually, and failure to engage with NUG, NUCC and civil society.
The Morrison Government fell shamefully short to live up to Australia’s values of and commitment to democracy and human rights. Your predecessor failed to impose targeted sanctions, failed to join efforts for international accountability, failed to recognize the National Unity Government (NUG) as the legitimate government and NUCC as the highest consultative body of Burma/Myanmar, and continually legitimized the junta through bilateral and multilateral engagement, including with Min Aung Hlaing. Australia’s Future Fund has maintained investments in businesses that provide arms and revenue to the Myanmar military junta, profiting from Myanmar’s destruction.
We therefore earnestly appeal to you to change course:
For further information, please contact:
List of Signatories
List of signatories include the following 298 Myanmar, regional and international organisations and 390 Myanmar civil society organisations that have chosen not to disclose their names.
Signed by:
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