But for an average Burmese the
atrocities committed by all the parties involved weren’t that shocking at all.
We were well accustomed or rather climatised to the extreme violence most
people in highly civilised societies would cringe just by thinking of it.
One
well-documented case happened not far from where our house was. It was a
chaotic time and people just took over their neighbourhoods, as there was
absolutely no law and order. The army was safely hidden in their barracks and
the police just simply disappeared.
One early morning a group of young men caught a man allegedly from the Military Intelligence and they just simply decided to kill him on the spot right there. The spot was not far from the local wet market and a large crowd immediately formed around them to enjoy the imminent execution. To some peoples’ surprise, the vigilante group offered the killing task to any volunteer from the crowd.
To
everybody’s amazement a rather young housewife accepted the offer, came up to
the kneeled and bounded prisoner, took the sword from someone’s offering hand,
and started sawing the poor man’s neck, while he was still alive and breathing.
Some men standing nearby helped her later and eventually the head was chopped
off and hanged from the nearby road sign by its long hair. Later we learnt that
he was just a local junkie from another township.
Could
that sort of horrible incident happen in Thailand? I seriously doubt that!
Maybe in the Khmer Rouge’s Cambodia? I still doubt that!
I
basically grew up in a small town called Mawgyun in the delta of Lower Burma.
During the late fifties and early sixties my family and most of my relatives
were the active members or the sympathisers of Burmese Communist Party. One of
my older uncles was the feared boss of the local party branch. But, as the
rebels they controlled only the surrounding villages, not the town itself.
In our
rural region, the majority of the villages were Burmese with a considerable
number of Karen villages dotted among. Communists then controlled the Burmese
villages and Karen villages were ruled by the KNDO. The town itself was
controlled by an army company permanently stationed on the outskirts of our
town.
But
the real lord of the town was the local politician and the leader of the
pro-government militia then called Pyu-saw-hti, a mythical hero from our
ancient history. His name was Bo-Koon, half-Burmese half-Karen. He was big and
tall and really ugly with a pistol in his belt always. If we children saw him
on the street coming in our direction we turned round and ran away from him as
fast as we could.
I
still remembered him as we children used to be dead scared of him. He had many
regular trips with his bands of militiamen to the nearby villages and they
always brought back heads of communists or Karen rebels he and his men had
killed. He then stuck the heads on the bamboo stalks and put them up right in
front of his house, just to frighten the townfolks. Sometimes he brought the
captured rebels alive and ransomed them for large amounts of money from the
fearful relatives. I still remembered seeing the tortured men bound and lying
on the ground at his house.
One
day he captured one of my young uncles and brought him back to the town for
ransom. He sent for my old aunty and we had to rush there with a bundle of
money and some jewellery to get my uncle back. My wounded uncle was hogtied on
the ground and Bo-Koon was standing beside, holding the rope around his neck
like a leash and waiting for his money, with a grin on his twisted face.
But that day was hated Bo-Koon’s last
day on earth. That evening my other uncle sent three men into town and they
walked up to his lounge-room where he was having a dinner with his young
family. They killed the whole family – yes, including his young wife and two
young children and a baby still in a cradle – and took his head back to the
villages just to show it around so that people knew he was dead.
Make
the story short, fast forward to the middle of 1974 and the gruesome scene of
massacre at Thamine Textile Mills. I was on my way home from RIT to the city
when our bus was stopped at Thamine Intersection and we were forced to walk
along the wide Rangoon-Insein Road. Around the bend from where the bus was
stopped,
we ran into the mass of crowd stretching their necks looking out ahead. What I
could see from afar was the mass of protesting workers right in front of the
Textile Mills. Then I heard the drum beat like “Dang Dang Dang” sounds of G3s
from ahead and saw the frightened crowd dispersed and running towards us.
Bravely or stupidly, I didn’t turn and
run with the others as the crowd ran past and I found myself standing alone in
the middle of the road facing the armed soldiers standing only about 200 yards
away blocking the road, their rifle barrels still smoking and the pale-black
cloud of cordite now hanging low above them. Right in front of me only about
150 yards away were the bodies of dead and dying workers they mowed down with
automatic rifles just a few minutes before.
Then
came the 1975 Thakhin Kodaw Mhaine Centenary protest. Or it was 1976, I don’t
remember the exact date now. Somehow we the brave RIT crowd marched along the
U-Wisara Road and ended up right in front of the Thakhin Kodaw Mhaine memorial
on the Shwe Dagon Pagoda Road. Once we got there we couldn’t go any farther as
the lines of armed soldiers now blocked the road just before the South-side
stairs of the beaming Shwe Dagon pagoda.
As their practice they had three
chalked lines drawn about six foot apart from each other on the tarred road
right in front of the standing soldiers with G3s aiming at us students and
ready to fire. I was stupidly holding a banner right at the front and I didn’t
like what I saw.
As I
had seen it before I definitely knew that these bastards were gonna shoot once
I crossed the first chalked line. So I tried to stop, but the people behind us
didn’t really know what was going on at the front and the crowd pressure was
gradually carrying us towards the soldiers as we at the front were now tightly
squeezed shoulder to shoulder.
My
feet just a few feet away from first chalked-line, suddenly I got a bright
idea. I dropped the banner, turned to my left, and squeezed sideways through
the crowd into the narrow laneway between two small buildings on my left. As soon
as I hit the lane way, the soldiers fired and the whole crowd ran backwards
like hell.
Luckily,
the shots were warning shots into the air and nobody, I think no one, got
killed there that day. That was the last day of my rebellious student days and
I’ve never participated in any student protest again. I just didn’t want to die
that young! The Burmese army couldn’t afford the specially-made rubber bullets.
They have only real bullets and are eager to use them if you give them an
opportunity.
As you
can see and conclude now that I was well familiar with the extreme violence
from a young age. So well familiar, even the regular shocking news from my home
town of whole Burmese villages being slaughtered by the Karens or an entire
Karen village wiped out by the militia from neighbouring Burmese villages
didn’t bother me much at all. But what I had witnessed in 1988 actually shocked
me to bone and made me decide to abandon my own beloved country, Burma,
forever.
The date was just before 8-8-88.
Rangoon was already in dangerous chaos and there were running battles between
hated riot-police, Lone-Htain in Burmese, and the protesters all over Rangoon.
By then I was back in Rangoon to start
my own business after saving a few thousand dollars working in a factory in
Bangkok as a production engineer. But wisely, I bought a return ticket from
Thai Airways and also didn’t return my passport as after living four years in
relatively peaceful and prosperous Bangkok. I wasn’t so sure of how my venture
back home would eventually turn out.
That
day my kid brother asked me if I would like to go see what was going on at the
Rangoon General Hospital. The news he heard was that many injured policemen
were at the hospital or on their way to the hospital. So we went and reached
right in front of the hospital. What we saw was not only thousands of
protesters but also a rather large crowd of Buddhist monks from a nearby
monastery.
There must have been at least 100 monks there standing idly near a makeshift roadblock of piled chairs and tables from the high school nearby. I even went up to the group of older monks sitting on the low brick wall by the hospital’s main entrance and gave my respect. As we were talking about what was going on around Rangoon, we saw a police Hino TE21 truck came speeding along Aung San Road, towards the main entrance.
The
crowd of monks and other protesters roared and the lone driver saw them and
immediately stopped his truck well before the roadblock and tried to do a
U-turn. But somehow the gear got jammed and engine stalled and the uniformed
policeman opened the door and tried desperately to run away from the now
chasing crowd. He didn’t even last more than a few minutes in the middle of the
roaring crowd of raging protesters.
He was
dead within a few minutes and they started making a bonfire of all the
school-furniture already on the road. They threw his mutilated body into the
huge fire. Watching the protesters including the young Buddhist monks doing
that such a violent and cruel act, I didn’t feel that badly at first. But what
they did later shocked me to the bone.
One
very young man climbed up to the back of the truck now stranded awkwardly on
the road and discovered there were five more wounded policemen, still alive and
breathing. More of the protesters joined him and they threw them down all onto
the road first, then into the fire burning now with huge flames roaring high.
The
overpowering smell of burning human flesh was almost unbearable and the popping
noises of boiling human fat flowing in large quantity almost overwhelmed the
cheers and the clapping sounds of the excited crowd. One slightly wounded
policeman tried to crawl out of the fire, but the people pushed him back into
the fire with long bamboo sticks and the flame finally consumed him except his
left arm which was now lying just outside of the edge of fire.
To my absolute horror, the respectable
looking old monk talking nicely to me just before stood up, slowly walked
towards the fire, pushed the intact arm back into the fire with his bamboo
walking stick. He then came back to where he was sitting before as if he didn’t
do anything wrong. I think I lost my faith that day. I think I did.
The
next day I went to Thai Airways office near Sule Pagoda and booked the next available
flight to Bangkok. I flew out of Rangoon just before they stopped all the
flights in and out of dilapidated Rangoon Airport.
The day after I arrived in Bangkok, I went to Australian Embassy and inquired for a work-visa. Luckily, the Australian Immigration Councilor felt pity for me after a long chat and she kindly encouraged me to apply for a permanent resident visa instead. It took only three weeks to get my PR visa and as soon as I had been living in Sydney for a required two years residency I successfully sat for my citizenship interview and became an Australian citizen.
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