Myanmar Spring Chronicle – September 13 Scenes
MoeMaKa, September 15 2022
When reading headlines of the daily news, the news topics are just all similar events that are happening every day. Just the area, city, village, names and groups were different. The cause behind the event of the news were not discussed in the news anymore, and as for the audiences, they just look and understand the news according to their own bias, prejudice, desire and hopes.
If you put the daily headlines into categories: there is battle news between military council troops and ethnic armed forces or regionally emerging PDFs, news of military council soldiers and police being ambushed or bombed, road-side bombs and firings, news of killing military council’s administrators, 100-houses heads and alleged-suspects for spying information, news of sudden protests in the city and occasional arrests, news of military council troops entering villages, burning houses and taking property, news of arresting civilians from townships and villages on suspicion by the military council, news of robberies like banks and gold shops in the city, news of rising prices of the dollar, gold and other imported goods, news of being arrested while sneaking into the neighboring country of Thailand to get a job, news of complaints and protests about labor rights violations in Thailand and news of stealing an enormous amount of environmental resources. These news accounts for 90 percent of the daily news.
It can be said that 90 percent of these news are bad news. It is very difficult to find a silver lining in these topics because most of them are about the loss of human life, which is not easy to describe on the positive side, killing, bullying, violations of human rights, war crimes, the destruction of villages, robbery, assassinations and economic decline, and the need for food and shelter for living. Those who set fire to houses, those who tortured and killed civilians, the assassins, robbers and murderers, are armed people, and in this era of broken law enforcement, it is rare that the perpetrators can be investigated and punished.
After reading the news, it is a situation where people are focusing only on gathering facts for avoiding danger rather than uncovering the truth. It is not even certain in one in ten criminal cases that the perpetrator can be arrested if a case of looting or killing a civilian occurred in which city or village. They no longer report to police stations because they no longer believe that the police are supposed to uphold the rule of law.
Almost every day, we read news about side effects of war, such as civilians losing their lives due to landmines and people losing their lives due to artillery falling onto their homes.
In today’s news, a road worker was killed by a landmine in Laihka, Shan State, and two women were killed on the No. 3 Road connecting Shwebo and Sagaing Districts, Sagaing Division, and a 2-year-old child was found alive nearby. For the road worker in Laihka Township who was hit by a landmine, no one can be blamed for the death of a human life because it is not known which armed group planted a landmine. Regarding the incident where 2 women were killed on the road connecting Sagaing and Shwebo Districts, it will be difficult to know whether it was a politically connected killing by an armed group or by those who committed crimes. A 2-year-old girl, believed to be the child of a murdered woman, survived, but the absence of her mother is a situation that must be regarded as a consequence of armed conflict or lawlessness.
While conflict, killing, fighting for win and the loss of lives continue among these societies, in the economic field, the rise in commodity prices and the loss of jobs, unpaid abuse and human trafficking are the news we read every day.
Recently, news of 7 women who were trafficked, were brought back from Dubai, and there are also reports of Myanmar workers protesting against the violation of labor rights in Thailand.
In the midst of political instability and armed conflicts, we often hear news about the loss of natural resources, over-exploitation, illegal logging, deforestation and rapid depletion of resources.
It is true that if we cannot solve the political problem, we will not be able to solve other issues such as law enforcement, environmental protection, labor rights, but as the years go by, the destruction is coming to a difficult situation to recover from.