(Ye Mons’ article from The FRONTIER MYANMAR on 16 September 2022.)
I couldn’t see the soldiers through my blindfold,
but their words were terrifying enough. “If they refused to answer our
questions, we raped them – women and men – and then killed them.” Despite the
casual delivery, it was clear that the soldiers were threatening me. I had read
numerous reports about soldiers sexually assaulting people in detention but I
never imagined it would happen to me.
After covering the aftermath of the February 2021 coup along with my Frontier colleagues, I quietly flew out of Yangon to Thailand in October. The State Administration Council, as the junta calls itself, had been increasingly targeting journalists and I no longer felt safe. I had been living in a safe house for months, and soldiers and police visited my former residence at least twice looking for me.
I made some
enquiries and found I was not on the blacklist at Yangon International Airport,
so I got a Thai visa and bought a ticket. Nevertheless, I didn’t feel relaxed
until the plane actually took off.
After finishing
hotel quarantine, I resumed my work in Chiang Mai. I was close to finishing
several pieces for Frontier when I got some bad news from Yangon: a close
relative was seriously ill. I felt a powerful need to return and care for them.
I knew there
were risks in returning but they’d let me leave Myanmar less than two months
earlier; getting back in would surely be no harder. I expected to face nothing
more than a two-week stay in quarantine when I arrived back in Yangon. But as
my plane landed around 8pm on December 12, I felt an overwhelming sense of
fear.
Many people from
Myanmar will understand this fear. We can be arrested at any time, for no apparent
reason. It doesn’t matter whether you’re involved in fighting the dictatorship
– with the military in charge, you can never be truly safe in Myanmar.
The airport was
eerily quiet. We filed off the plane towards the counter where we needed to
choose whether to spend our quarantine in a hotel or government facility. I
chose hotel quarantine and an official directed me to the immigration counter.
That was where my nightmare began.
Our interaction
started casually enough; I handed my passport over the counter, and the
immigration officer stamped it and entered my arrival date. But then he said
vaguely that I needed to wait a moment while they checked some other things.
Ten minutes
later, four fully armed police officers arrived and took me off into the corner
of the room, a short distance from the immigration counter. They didn’t tell me
why I was being stopped, but I knew it couldn’t be good. I sent a few short
messages to my colleagues that the police had stopped me.
The officers started asking questions, things like, “Did you write anti-SAC articles?” and “Do you have connections to the National Unity Government and People’s Defence Forces?” Then they said, “Do you know that you have been charged under 505A?”.
This set my heart racing. By now, most people from
Myanmar are familiar with the phrase “505A”: an incitement charge in the Penal
Code that carries a potential three-year prison term, and which the junta has
used regularly against its opponents.
I had no idea
what to do but tried to stay calm. I replied that journalists need to speak to
all sides, so I had to contact the NUG and PDFs for my articles. Obviously, I
would not have returned to Myanmar if I knew that I had been charged, I told
them.
At first, I
thought my responses had worked. They took me away in a police car, but dropped
me at the government quarantine centre in Dagon Seikkan Township. Had they just
been trying to scare me?
My heart sank,
however, when the police took my laptop, mobile phone and passport. I realised
I hadn’t wiped my devices as thoroughly as I had on the way out of Myanmar.
They still had some sensitive information on them. I had another phone hidden
in my luggage, and with that I sent a message to Frontier explaining what had
happened.
An hour later,
soldiers and police arrived at my room. I was handcuffed and my eyes were
covered with a black cloth, but I had time to see one soldier had the two-star
insignia of a lieutenant. One of them told me that I would have to stay at a
hotel for 14 days due to COVID-19 prevention measures.
The handcuffs
and blindfold suggested this was unlikely. Thirty minutes after getting into a
vehicle it came to a halt. To this day I still don’t know exactly where I was
taken, but I believe it was one of the junta-run interrogation centres in
Yangon. Since the coup, these centres have earned a notorious reputation for
the torture handed out to detainees, some of whom have died during
interrogation.
They forced me
to sit on the floor and left me alone. After maybe three hours – it’s hard to
tell when you’re blindfolded – several men came into the room and said they
found emails I had sent to the NUG, and a story I had written about the telcos
MPT and Mytel surveilling their customers.
They
particularly wanted to know the identities of the sources in the story. Knowing
what the consequences would be if I gave them the names, I told them I had
promised the sources their identities would remain secret. I also pleaded with
the soldiers to let me go, trying to convince them that I had quit Frontier in
October.
They then
started kicking me in the abdomen and beating me around the head with their
guns. When I asked for a cup of water, they threatened to kick me again. They
kept asking questions, about my work and Frontier. I remained blindfolded the
whole time.
I think this
continued for an hour, after which they sent me back to a hotel in Mingalar
Taung Nyunt Township. It was about 2am and I was starving; I tried to call the
hotel reception but the phone seemed to have been disconnected.
In the morning,
officials from the Ministry of Health turned up for my COVID-19 test and
breakfast arrived at my door. The officials said nothing about the bruising on
my face. I hoped my ordeal was over but spent the day waiting in fear. At about
9pm, the soldiers and police returned and I was again blindfolded and taken
somewhere.
The
interrogation went on even longer that night. They kept repeating the same
questions and beating me when I didn’t give them the answers they wanted. At
some point in the morning, I was sent back to the hotel. I was in so much pain
I couldn’t sleep.
I thought it
couldn’t get worse, but I was wrong. I will never forget the events of the
following day, December 14. I had always considered the 14th of any month to be
a lucky day: my wife and I got married on February 14, and my son’s birthday is
July 14.
Again, I was
blindfolded and taken to the interrogation centre. A soldier gave me a cup of
water, and then they asked me the same questions. As on the previous days, I
refused to give them the information they were after.
I then heard a
girl screaming, possibly from the room next door. A soldier told me, “Min thu ko lote ya meh.” This literally
meant I would have to do something for or to her, but from the context I knew
they meant I would have to have sex with her. If I didn’t, they said, they
would do “something” to me. I was terrified, but I refused.
They asked again: who were the sources for the
article? I told them I couldn’t remember, but they didn’t believe me. That was when they started to rape me. I
begged them to stop, but they just told me to be quiet. It went on for about an
hour.
I was in shock;
I never expected the soldiers would behave like that. It occurred to me that if
they were sick enough to rape me, they could kill me at any moment. I couldn’t
stay silent any longer; all I could think about was getting out alive. I
thought about how to respond while giving away as little information as
possible, to minimise the risk to others.
One of the
things they had been demanding were the phone numbers of three colleagues who
were already out of the country, along with the numbers of an activist and a
lawyer. I couldn’t remember the numbers, but I offered to retrieve them from my
phone. It seemed as though it would be easy enough for them to get the numbers
through other channels, anyway.
Revealing the
identities of sources was a more sensitive matter. I told them the position of
one government official, but said I couldn’t remember their name or number, and
gave a fake name and number for a police officer.
In desperation,
I then told the soldiers I also worked as a national consultant for UNICEF.
This wasn’t a total lie, but my part-time contract with UNICEF had actually
ended months ago – that’s why it hadn’t occurred to me to mention it earlier.
Maybe saying I
was with a UN agency worked, or maybe they just felt they had enough
information, but shortly afterwards they sent me back to the hotel. Despite
what I had experienced, I felt relieved to be alive.
The next day, a
senior military officer came to my hotel together with police from Mingalar
Taung Nyunt and Sanchaung townships. They
told me I would be charged under not only section 505A of the Penal Code, but
also 17(1) of the Unlawful Associations Act and the Counter-Terrorism Law. But
then they offered to withdraw the charges if I agreed not to reveal anything
about my detention, including the sexual abuse I suffered.
They had
prepared a six-point statement for me to sign: Aside from staying silent about
my experience, I would not be able to work for Frontier or contact the NUG or
PDFs, and I would need to inform the Sanchaung Township police station at least
10 days in advance if I wanted to travel domestically or internationally.
The agreement
said I would receive my laptop, mobile phone and passport back within a week.
If I broke the agreement, I would face the original charges. I told them I needed time to think about it.
Although I desperately wanted to get out of detention, the idea of making a
deal with the regime still made me feel sick.
When they came
back the next day, though, I was ready to sign. I was worried about my family,
and what they might do to them if I refused. Once I had signed, the senior officer said I
would be able to go home after completing quarantine on December 20.
This concern
with COVID-19 regulations may seem absurd, but not to those familiar with the
workings of the Myanmar military. It is willing to do anything – no matter how
barbaric – to hold onto power, but at the same time, it feels the need to show
it is upholding and following the law.
The sense of
relief I had expected to feel upon returning home never came. Although my
physical injuries soon started to heal and the doctor told me my damaged
kidneys would repair themselves, I had trouble sleeping and was terrified of
the darkness; just seeing soldiers on social media, let alone on the street,
left me a wreck.
I felt unable to tell my family, including my
wife, the full story of what had happened. After a few months I decided to get
tested for sexually transmitted infections, so I went alone, in secret.
Frontier had
stopped publishing temporarily in October to make it easier for us to quietly
leave the country. The plan was to resume in December but after my arrest they
decided to wait, and eventually relaunched in January this year.
After my
release, I stopped communicating with Frontier so that the authorities wouldn’t
arrest me. But once articles were going up on the website again, the Sanchaung
police started to call me regularly – perhaps around twice a month – to say
Frontier was damaging the reputation of the military and that I would have to
face the consequences.
Unable to work
for Frontier, or even contact my colleagues, I had little to keep me occupied;
inevitably, I could think about little else than what the soldiers had done to
me. The guilt of having potentially put others at risk by returning to Myanmar
also weighed on me.
I soon started to think about ending my life. I felt like I had no future, nothing to look forward to. Most of all I felt alone. For months I struggled on. Then, in April, I told my wife that I had been raped. This helped immediately – finally, someone else knew what I had been through. It wasn’t always at the front of my mind.
Nevertheless, I
was still in a bad way. The only thing I wanted was to get out of the country,
but I was in a bind. Although I didn’t feel safe in Myanmar with the
authorities seemingly watching my every step, trying to leave again seemed like
such a risk.
Eventually I
decided to try to go back to Thailand. As per the terms of the agreement, I
informed the Sanchaung Township police station. It was unclear whether I would
be allowed to leave, and I was terrified they would arrest me again when I went
through the airport. Travelling alone on June 6, I passed through immigration
without a problem and soon landed in Bangkok. My family joined me later the
same day on a separate flight.
Why did they let
me go? Why did they let me leave last year, and then arrest me when I returned
a few months later? The regime’s decision-making is opaque and seemingly
erratic. The police officer from Sanchaung told me they had let some other
junta opponents leave, including known members of the Civil Disobedience
Movement. Perhaps they just thought it was easier if I was out of the country.
Regardless, we
were now finally free of the regime, and this time I really did start to feel
better. Since arriving in Bangkok, Frontier have been providing me with access
to regular counselling and continued treatment for my physical injuries.
But the trauma
of my experience is always present, and deciding whether to write about it was
difficult. I was sure that soldiers routinely used sexual violence against both
men and women during interrogation, but also knew that most victims would not
want to speak up – either because they had (like me) been forced to sign an
agreement, they were worried about the stigma, or both. Part of me also wanted
to stay silent about what had happened.
The military has
a particular sensitivity to allegations of sexual violence and nearly always
denies that such incidents took place. If faced with incontrovertible evidence,
it blames a rogue soldier or soldiers and has insisted for decades there is no
institutional pattern. I decided to write this because I wanted the world to
know that the use of sexual violence is indeed routine, even if it meant
reliving my experience over and over again. I also chose to write under my
name, rather than anonymously, to encourage other survivors to come forward
about what they experienced.
I believe that
the use of rape and other forms of sexual abuse is not just a torture method
designed to get information out of detainees. The soldiers see the people as
their enemies and inflict sexual violence as a form of punishment, and to show
that they have the power to do whatever they want.
I think this attitude comes right from the top of
the military, from Min Aung Hlaing himself. They know the people despise them,
and violence and fear are the only tools they have left to maintain power.
(Ye Mon was born in Yangon and has been a journalist since 2011. He continues to report for Frontier.)
Bumrese people will payback their blood revenge to them with interest
