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| KIA massacre of public officials at Saddone. |
After nearly a year on the
front our company was pulled back to Myitkyina for a two month break. Part of our
R&R was we had to do the week-on and week-off escorting of the daily
Mandalay-Myitkyina train. The train was the only connection between Myitkyina
and the rest of Burma. Plane trips were too expensive and the Irrawaddy there
was too shallow to navigate and there were no roads then.
Daily diesel train left
Myitkyina early morning and the sister train left Mandalay in the evening. They
met somewhere in between and swapped the escorting army units and continued the
journeys. If nothing went wrong both would reach their destinations roughly 24
hours later. KIA was frequently attacking the trains, and so the long rail line
and the train itself had to be heavily guarded.
I reckoned that blue train
might be the longest passenger train in the whole wide world. It needed two
diesel locomotives at the front and another two at the rear end to pull and
push all 60 or 70 odd carriages over the mountainous terrain. A flatbed-car
loaded with tons of heavy steel I-beams was attached to the first locomotive as
a heavy pilot car to detonate the possible KIA mines on the tracks and also to
withstand the explosion and prevent the derailment. The train moved so slow, at
some difficult uphill bends one could walk past it.
The escort car we had to ride
in was shielded both sides and bottom with thick steel plates. The side plates
had gun-slits for our MG3 medium machine guns and inside were two long benches
by the walls for the gunners and the open middle was a space for the rest of
us.
KIA’s Brutal Attack on the Passenger Train
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| KIA roaming unit of Murderers and Rapists. |
That day was a very wet day
as a heavy rain was pouring down non-stop since the night before. We didn’t
even hear the gunshots as the loud rain had suppressed them. Only when the
bullets started hammering the steel plates of our escort car we realised we
were being attacked.
A KIA unit had slipped
through the tight cordon of army patrols and now they were taking positions at
the jungle edge and shooting at our car first and then the cars behind us. Our
MG3 gunners returned fire and within a few minutes we were out of their gun
sights as the train had kept on going.
None got hurt in our car but
I immediately knew that the insides of the cars behind ours would be like a
slaughterhouse as these timber carriages have no protection against the high
velocity bullets. As a usual procedure the train didn’t stop till it reached a large
station where an army unit and a civilian medical team from the local hospital
were waiting.
The station had
a small brick stationhouse on the wide concrete platform which was unusually
long unlike other stations’ platforms. As if they were regularly doing it every
time a train was hit, many uniformed soldiers and a large number of locals quickly
carried down the wounded first and later removed the dead bodies from the cars.
On the platform,
a doctor in white duty-coat and a couple of uniformed-nurses were already
treating the mildly injured. A sergeant then brought down the bloodied body of
a dead woman on his arms and laid her down on the platform, not far from where
I was standing now, followed by another body on the arms of another uniformed
soldier. Within an hour, a long line of bloodied corpses was quickly formed on
the platform from one end all the way to other end.
Men, women, a few children, and a couple of pregnant
women, all together nearly one hundred bodies. I started counting the bloodied
and mutilated bodies in my mind, but had to stop counting at sixty as I
couldn’t bear to look at them no more.
Too many of them, all innocent civilians. Burmese,
Kachins, Shans, Chinese, and a few Indians, all races and colors and creeds.
Their lives violently snatched out of their bodies on their merry ways to
Mandalay.
That was my own experience nearly forty years ago of KIA's one atrocious act!
Is KIA a Terrorist Organization?
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| The Mandalay-Myitkyinar passenger train destroyed by KIA mines. |
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| KIA roaming unit of murderers and rapists. |
By the way I’m a retired
judge who has studied a lot about laws both domestic and international. I’d
served as a district judge in two large districts.
Recently, KIA has been desperately complaining about our army using air support in devastating operations against their last stronghold Laiza on the Chinese border. These Kachin insurgents have been loudly protesting against the army’s use of air force jets and helicopter gunships on their positions defending Laiza headquarters.
Recently, KIA has been desperately complaining about our army using air support in devastating operations against their last stronghold Laiza on the Chinese border. These Kachin insurgents have been loudly protesting against the army’s use of air force jets and helicopter gunships on their positions defending Laiza headquarters.
Their main argument was that Burmese army’s air attack
on them was the violation of Geneva Conventions. As far as my extensive
knowledge concerning the Geneva Conventions I do not think our army has
deliberately violated any legitimate restrictions placed by the world famous
Geneva Conventions.
Geneva Conventions comprise four treaties and three
additional protocols which establish the standards of international law for the
humanitarian treatment of war. The details are as follows;
None of the conventions’ treaties and protocols mention
the restriction on the use of air force in suppressing a domestic insurgency. The
desperate KIA’s accusations of army using chemical weapons also have no merits
and the physical evidence necessary to prove the KIA’s accusations.
In reality KIA or Kachin Independence Army is just a
terrorist organization terrorizing the people of Kachin State and Northern Shan
State of our Burma. There are many valid reasons for our government branding KIA
as a terrorist organization.
Deliberately attacking civilian targets such as
Mandalay-Myitkyinar trains, kidnapping civilians (in some cases the whole
families), violating women and girls (rapes), robbery of valuable properties
from local civilian populace, forced-collection of so-called protection money,
and deliberate uses of civilian populace in their war against the army (such as
human shield and forced-portering and laying of landmines) are being repeatedly
committed countless times by KIA all over Kachin State and Northern Shan State.
So our army is justified both morally and legally in
trying to eliminate the terrorist KIA by using any legitimate forces necessary.
Related posts at following links:
KIA Massacre at Saddone
KIA:the Highway Robbers and Rapist Cowards
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| A 15 year-old Kachin girl: the gang-rape victim of a KIA field unit. |
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| KIA's acts of atrocities all over Kachin State and Northern Shan State. |
KIA Massacre at Saddone
KIA:the Highway Robbers and Rapist Cowards