(Staff article from the FRONTIER MYANMAR on 20 February 2023.)
23-year-old Kyaw Zin Win lay on his back, hands tied
and eyes blindfolded, as slick warm blood spread from a slash in his throat. “Hey! Make sure you finish it. Are they all
dead?” shouted a man from high above, where Kyaw Zin Win had been struck in the
head and thrown from a ledge before having his throat slashed.
Still shocked to find himself alive, it was only after the soldiers left that Zaw Naing discovered he wasn’t the only survivor. “The first five people were killed, but the remaining three of us escaped with our throats cut,” he told Frontier. He alleged that the attackers were members of the Shanni Nationalities Army, an ethnic armed group that has been accused of collaborating with the Myanmar military since the 2021 coup.
A doctor, Doctor Soe Min, who said he treated Kyaw Zin Win and another survivor, corroborated
the story and showed Frontier pictures of their wounds. He said the two men
came to his clinic in Kachin State’s Mohnyin Township on January 20, the
morning after Kyaw Zin Win said the massacre occurred in neighbouring Sagaing
Region’s Homalin Township.
He said both men
had lacerations on their backs and cuts on their necks, but Kyaw Zin Win’s throat
was much more seriously wounded. “He was
weakened, and his wound was deeper. His whole shirt was stained red with
blood,” the doctor said.
Originally from
Yangon, Doctor Soe Min fled to Kachin around two years ago, shortly after the
military takeover. He joined the mass strike of civil servants known as the
Civil Disobedience Movement to protest the coup, starting his own secret clinic
rather than working for a government hospital.
“They were kept
at our hospital for one day. It’s not safe for them to stay here,” he said,
explaining he was worried that the SNA could raid the clinic and put other
patients in danger. “So, I sent them back to their villages once their
conditions were stable.”
The other man he
treated, Kyaw Zaw, is a 39-year-old from Homalin who came to Nam Pote village
in Kachin’s Hpakant Township to scavenge for gold in March last year. But
instead of striking it rich, he found himself plunged into a brutal war.
 |
| Dr. Soe Min and Kyaw Zin Win (above). |
The razing of Sezin Village
After the coup
and subsequent violent crackdowns on peaceful protesters, dissidents took up
arms against the military, forming militias known as People’s Defence Forces in
cooperation with ethnic armed groups that have been fighting for political
autonomy for decades.
In July last
year, PDFs and the Kachin Independence Army, one of the country’s most powerful
armed groups, clashed with regime soldiers near the Nam Pote gold mining creek,
prompting most scavengers and their families to flee.
Kyaw Zaw fled to
Sezin village, also in Hpakant, which held around 600 households with a
population of around 3,000 at the time, until repeated clashes between joint
KIA and PDF forces and allied troops from the Tatmadaw and SNA left the village
virtually empty. In early January, the junta pressured some displaced civilians
to return, many of whom had to live under tarpaulin shelters because about 400
homes had been allegedly torched in the fighting.
Kyaw Zaw was
among the very few who never left Sezin, although his wife and son fled with
the others. He recalled sheltering in the village monastery on the evening of
August 8 last year, amid the sounds of gunfire and artillery shells. About a
week later, he said the Tatmadaw entered the village, detaining anybody who
remained, including Htin Lin and a friend.
“I was detained
and interrogated for six days, without food or water, because they accused me
of being a PDF fighter,” he told Frontier. “Then, I spent more than six months
in a 10-foot-wide cell with 13 other people in the Sezin police station.”
One of his
fellow prisoners, who was already there when he arrived, was Kyaw Zin Win. Kyaw
Zaw said the oldest detainees were in their 60s, and the youngest, a
14-year-old boy, was brutally tortured.
“The kid’s legs
were hit with a cylindrical ruler, until you could see his shin bone. When his
family came to look for him, the police told them he wasn’t there.”
Kyaw Zaw said
the prisoners could clearly hear any time an outsider visited, but guards would
threaten to kill them if they made any noise. Despite being held in a police
station, their captors were mostly soldiers, commanded by an army officer. He
said they were given only a small amount of rice, curry and water each day, and
he was only able to bathe once during the entire six months.
“Out of the 14
people in the room, four of them died around the month of Tazaungmone
[November]. One of them committed suicide by hanging himself at night,” he
recalled, saying the other prisoners were beaten when the suicide was
discovered. Three others died of illness.
On January 19, Kyaw
Zin Win said the prisoners had their mouths taped shut and their eyes
blindfolded, before being handed over to the SNA at around 9:30pm. The Shanni
troops took them by truck to woods near Thae Zalaut village in Homalin where
the massacre unfolded.
Doctor Soe Min
who treated the survivors railed against the SNA, saying it “does not represent
the Shanni people”, and accused them of being funded by the Tatmadaw to fight
against the KIA and PDFs. He compared the group to the Kayin State Border Guard
Force, an ethnic Karen militia under the military’s command that regularly
attacks the Karen National Union.
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| Shanni Buddhist Militia trained and armed by Myanmar Army. |
‘An ethnic group must have its own army’
But the SNA
didn’t always have this reputation. When the group first entered the fray in
2016, it appeared to be more anti-military than earlier Shanni armed groups.
Even in July 2021, five months after the coup, a Shanni youth told Frontier
that the SNA’s supporters were mostly opposed to the Tatmadaw.
The Shanni (“Red
Shan”) people, also known as the Tai Leng, primarily live in northern Sagaing
and southern Kachin. They have long alleged discrimination and oppression by
the KIA, including forced recruitment and extortion. In 2015, the Tai-Leng
Nationalities Development Party accused the KIA of assassinating two of its
candidates in Hpakant ahead of the election that year.
As with other
inter-minority conflicts in Myanmar, this alleged persecution has at times
driven Shanni communities to arm themselves and collaborate with the military,
with one prominent Shanni militia operating directly under Tatmadaw command.
However, the
SNA’s demand for an autonomous Shanni state put it at odds with the military,
which has long sought to suppress new ethnic movements for self-determination,
while overlapping territorial claims in Sagaing and Kachin also antagonised the
KIA. “The Kachin say we are a vassal of the Bamar, and Myanmar government troops
say we are the Kachin armed groups’ informants,” a brigade commander told The
Irrawaddy in 2019.
As Sagaing and
Kachin became hotbeds of resistance to military rule after the coup, tensions
deepened. The KIA increasingly armed and supported PDF groups operating in
Sagaing, including in areas claimed by the SNA.
The SNA did not
respond to multiple requests for comment by Frontier but released two public
statements last month. In the first, the group accused the media of spreading
conspiracy theories and claimed to be protecting the interests of the Shanni
people while facing attacks “from all sides” to “cripple, weaken and completely
destroy” it.
Another
statement, addressed to human rights groups and international organisations,
warned that the KIA was “accelerating the genocide” of the Shanni people with
the support of PDFs. It said Shanni people “have been subjected to inhumane
killings, torture and forced servitude”.
Sai Kyaw Oo, a former member of the TNDP, said that the SNA traces its spiritual roots to the Wuntho uprising of 1891, when Shanni people rebelled against British colonial rule. “Under that influence, the SNA was born,” he said. “Some of them [Shanni] may not think that [the SNA] represents the Shanni people. However, a true Shanni would say the SNA represents 80 to 90 percent of the ethnic group.”
Kyaw Oo was
evasive when asked about the coup and current political situation. He said
Shanni people have also suffered during this time and heaped blame on the KIA.
“The KIA adheres
to tribalism. They use their weapons to bully the other local ethnic people in
the region,” he said, adding that the SNA cannot compete on their own, so it is
natural they would cooperate with another “organisation”.
Aung Khin,
president of the Shanni Solidarity Party, based in Sagaing’s Monywa Township,
said the Shanni people are “walking their own path. If you ask me what I think
of them [the SNA], I think an ethnic group must have its own army,” he said,
although he insisted his party is not associated with the armed group.
But a
28-year-old Shanni from Kachin’s Bhamo Township had a different perspective.
Yaung Ni, whose deceased father had served in the KIA, told Frontier that some
of the PDFs operating in these contested areas are mostly made up of Shanni
youth like himself. “We Shanni people must have our own army, but the SNA does
not represent us. It only represents the few who support them,” he said,
insisting that PDFs in Homalin and Momauk townships are 80pc Shanni.
“This shows the
SNA doesn’t represent the entire Shanni ethnic group.” But Yaung Ni agreed that
the KIA’s actions may have pushed the SNA to the other side. He said the SNA
initially condemned the coup and clashed with the military, and even quietly
trained some PDFs.
“But things
started to change due to the KIA’s complex political goals. The KIA clearly
doesn’t want the SNA to grow in power. You can see that most of the battles in
Sagaing Region have taken place in the SNA’s territory,” he said. “So that’s
what pushed the SNA to join forces with the Tatmadaw.”
Yaung Ni said
the KIA has extorted taxes and forcibly recruited Shanni people from smaller
villages, but the fact that so many Shanni youth have volunteered to serve in
PDFs under KIA command shows they are prioritising overthrowing the military
regime over anything else.
He added that
despite the SNA’s initial anti-coup stance, the KIA ultimately offered a more
viable means of fighting the junta. “I believe the bulk of Shanni young people
from PDFs opted to serve under the KIA rather than the SNA because the SNA
could only provide training and could not meet their need for weapons or
financial support,” he said.
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| Buddhist Shannis living around the Indawgyi Lake are fighting Christian Kachins. |
Another Shanni youth, 27-year-old Nyi Nyi from Sagaing’s Banmauk Township, who unsuccessfully contested the 2020 election for the SSP, said he has been unable to return to his home for more than a year out of fear of the KIA.
“Lately, Shanni
political, literary and cultural figures are being assassinated in Hpakant and
Mohnyin in Kachin State, as well as in the upper areas of Sagaing. We can’t say
for sure if it was done by the KIA or a PDF because [PDFs] are serving under
KIA”, he said.
On January 23,
an unverified video went viral on social media, seemingly showing KIA soldiers
destroying Shanni cultural artefacts in Homalin. Also last month, the Shan
Ethnic Affairs Society accused the Kachin PDF of assassinating a SSP member in
Mohnyin.
“The motive
behind these assassinations, in my opinion, is that the rising power of the
Shanni threatens the Kachin,” Nyi Nyi said, referring to the demand for Shanni
autonomy in areas also inhabited by Kachin.
“The Kachin and
Shanni people have complex historical and political problems. They did not
start with the coup, but the political game got trickier after it.”
Shannis are forming people militia units to fight back the Kachins