Myanmar Spring Chronicle – March 05 Scenes
MoeMaKa, March 06 2023
Daily news about battles, arrests, killings, deaths, and damaged houses by fire
Today is the Full Moon day of Tabaung, so normally, the news about going to pagodas should be seen and read as headlines on the news pages, but at this time, these kinds of news are only headlines on propaganda pages, and in other news outlets, it is the opposite.
It has been almost 2 years since the news of civilians being arrested and killed by armed personnel, of civilians being arrested and tortured, of arson attacks on houses, of properties being destroyed and burned, of the number of armed forces killed in the fighting on both sides, of the loss of lives due to heavy weapons, of people being arrested and sentenced to prison terms without a free trial, of family members being held as hostages because they could not find the person they were targeting for arrest, and of the killing of junta informers and those involved in the junta administration have been heard every day.
The number of people killed by gunshots has been counted bit by bit since the military and police cracked down on anti-coup protests in the weeks following the coup, using live ammunition. During the suppression of protests, the number of children killed by the armed forces of the military council, which had nothing to do with the protest, increased one by one, and it was impossible to record it by heart, until it had reached dozens to hundreds to be recorded in statistics.
Soon after that, even though it was called an interrogation, the number of people who were killed in revenge rather than an actual investigation was being counted one by one in the news. Among those numbers, NLD party members and party supporters are the most, and since April 2022, assassinations have appeared under the name of a group called Blood Drinkers (Thway Thout), and the number of dead has reached dozens.
From the middle and end of 2021 until now, news of civilian deaths, killings on suspicion of being members of the armed forces, and the burning, burying or discarding of bodies after killing those on suspicion of supporting the PDFs that are against the military council have been counted by the day, week, and month.
In addition to the news of battles, assassinations, arrests, killings and the destruction of villages, the next type of news is the unbelievable occurrence of crimes everywhere. Bank robberies, robberies and killings at home or on the street, killings for cars, motorcycles, or small amounts of money, have been heard a lot over the last 2 years and seem to have decreased a bit this month.
In the past 2 years, there has been hardly any good news in the daily news. Although we see news from time to time about helping each other, saving lives, adding aid to those fleeing the war, and delivering aid supplies, it must be said that the daily headlines are filled with loss of life and destruction.
The headlines on the daily news pages and on radio include the news that: how many local residents have escaped from prison due to the military’s entry into which township; how many civilians’ dead bodies have been found after being arrested as human shields in which village or township; how many houses have been burned down in which village in how many days, and how many people have been killed in clashes between the military council and PDFs or ethnic armed groups in which township or region, etc.
Every day we see and read news like this, and even though we wish not to read this kind of news in the next days, this wish has not yet been fulfilled. More and more killings, deaths and destruction are in the news as the war rages on.
For those living in Myanmar, when they read the news mentioned above, they are reading with the feeling of when their lives, houses and property will be in danger. They must be thinking about when their house will be robbed, when they will be arrested, or when they will face the danger of explosions.
On the other hand, when political organizations’ statements and public notices sometimes appear in the news as a hope to overcome this bad era, a little hope emerges, but these hopes soon disappear like smoke in the air.
As for the Myanmar people, they feel worried, anxious, sympathy, anger, intolerance and hatred every day, and sometimes they may become less emotional, thinking that the numbers of human deaths are no longer strange but just numbers, when they access daily news from various platforms such as social media, internet websites, YouTube, radios, and satellites.