Who Killed Who in Burma
Transcript of Who Killed Who in Burma
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Who Killed Who in Burma
By Saneitha Nagani
When it was reported in the Bangkok Post that Burma’s ex-spy chief Khin Nyunt has said that
he personally intervened to save the life of pro-democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi during an attack onher and her entourage on the outskirts of Depayin Township in Sagaing Division nine years ago. It
was also reported that Khin Nyunt to have said, “I sent my men to snatch her from the mob that
night and they brought her to safety to a nearby army cantonment.”
This unexpected disclosure created quite a stir in the present President U Thein Sein government
that it went as far as to called an emergency meeting and came up with the decision to hold a press
briefing to counter or deny Khin Nyunt’s comments. It was reported that the press briefing did not
impress local journalists saying that it was completely one-sided and it clearly showed how agitated
that the government was about the whole issue.
When I began my career in the Foreign Affairs I was told to study books on ‘Who’s Who in ....’ so
that you get to know the country itself. As for Burma we may need to compiled a book of “Who
Killed Who” so as to understand how ‘political assassination’ has been part and parcel of the culture
of the Burmese. There would have been many books on “Who Kill Who” if people were allowed to
publish what they knew. So far U Kin Oung has written a book called ‘Who Kill Aung San?’ (Later re-
edited and re-published as ‘Eliminate the Elite: Assassination of Burma’s General Aung San and his
six cabinet colleagues.’) But this political assassination pales in comparison of the executions that
took place under Yanaung and Suphayalat’s scheme. On the Valentine’s Day in 1879 the executions
of King Thibaw’s rivals began. No fewer than thirty-one of Mindon’s forty-eight sons and nine of his
sixty-two daughters were killed. They were strangled or trampled by elephants.
Ne Win, before stepping down in 1987 during the emergency session of the Parliament, tried to shift
the blame on to Brigadier Aung Gyi for the killing and blowing up the historic Student Union building
in Rangoon University campus in 1962. Who would take the blame for the killing of thousands of
unarmed students and protesters? Students as young as primary school students and protesters
from all walks of life including monks were gunned down at point blank range and in broad daylight.
Would the blame be on Saw Maung, Khin Nyunt, Maung Aye or anyone else? Not only as a society
that we need to put those ghosts to rest are victims still waiting for answers. In order to face the
past and close the door and to come to a form of social catharsis we need to know who gave the
orders that monks be killed during the 2007 Saffron Revolution. Pol Pot may consider himself
fortunate that he was able to die in bed but should any of those blood-soaked generals be given
such an opportunity after all those atrocities they have committed to die peacefully in their beds?
These kinds of extra judicial killings went on unabated in the ethnic minority’s area. In my home
town in the Shan States my brother and his friend stumbled across the dead and disfigured bodies of
Pao Parliamentarians U Aung Tha and his colleagues just on the outskirts of my hometown. We later
learnt that the assassination was carried out by the agents from the Military Intelligence Unit station
in our town. It was well before the military took-over of power in 1962, it was during the
Parliamentary government period of U Nu. The commander of that unit was none other than the
late Major Bo Ni who became Chief of National Intelligence Bureau (NIB) under the Burma Socialist
Government of U San Yu. His subordinates even bragged about who got the most out of the plot.
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Without any form of enquiry of commission political assassinations in Burma will go unpunished and
unaccounted for. In spite of the claim we made that the twenty-first century is the era of
responsibility for some countries like Burma which has been under the military dictatorship of one
form or another the culture of impunity still prevail. Since Lenin said that, “You can’t make an
omelette without breaking eggs’ I have lost count of how many omelette we have made as many
thousands eggs have been broken for sure. Mao Zedung’s dictum that, “political power grows out of
the barrel of a gun’ still rings true for Burma. Instead of ‘bullets’ they have used ‘ballots’ to stack the
seats of the Parliament with still serving military officials (excluding those who were ordered to don
civilian clothes instead of uniforms).
We now have the International Criminal Court at The Hague to try ‘war crimes and crimes against
humanity’ committed across the globe. Violations of the principles requiring that soldiers act
humanely, that are with mercy and compassion, even as these same soldiers are allowed to kill
enemy soldiers have to be accounted for in accordance with international law. The atrocities
reported to have occurred in the ethnic minorities areas such as Kachin State and Shan State have
not escaped the scrutiny of the world media. They have been well recorded as evidence and are
waiting for justice to be served. Since the trials of Nuremburg the defence of superior orders was
greatly curtailed. There has been no excuse for ordinary American soldiers, on orders from their
officers, routinely brutalising and humiliating jailed Iraqi prisoners to ‘soften them up’ for later
interrogation. As Hugo Grotius stated in his De Jure Belli ac Pacis, “A sense of honour may be said to
forbid what the law permits.”
The reforms that are said to have been taken place under President U Thein Sein’s government may
one day led Burma to the culture of the ‘rule of law’ and not ‘the rule of the gun’. However, as the
Constitution as it is now, it will still be a big ask. It pails in comparison with the apartheid system that
existed in South Africa before it turned into a new country in 1994. The prospects of amending the
Constitution also seems a big task for Daw Suu and her colleagues in a Parliament dominated by
‘thugs’ of former military regime under the cloak of Union Development Solidarity Party (USDP) with
the addition of the twenty-five percent of selected military Members of Parliament.
We, as Burmese, unashamedly regarded ourselves as ‘Buddhists’ but in spite of all the teachings of
the Buddha concerning the virtues of not taking lives, tolerance and so on killing became very easy.
The soldiers having the advantage of the guns in their hands bullied over fellow countrymen in all
aspects of life. They would not hesitate to take advantage of their master’s status to jump the queue
in buying stuff from the hawker in the street. A friend of mine whose father was a military official
encountered an episode where a thief was hanging on to the balcony of the apartment below him.
He has nothing but a flower pot in his hand; as the people on the ground floor were calling out to
him as ‘bogyi’ (captain) and he was saying ‘I’m going to strike you’ the thief gave himself up thing
that my friend’s father had a gun. As they say, ’once a thug is always a thug’ the same goes for
military official even when they are retired they can never be disassociated from guns and violence.
Burmese king Mindon did not choose his successor before he died but rather ignored the issue.
When he died it was left to the senior ministers such as Kinwun and others to do the task. Putting
their interest before the interest of the country they aligned with the Queen of Middle Palace to put
Thibaw, the son of Mindon by a relatively inconsequential queen to the throne. Galon U Saw, putting
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his own interest ahead of the country assassinated Bogyoke Aung San and the majority of his cabinet
colleagues. Are we ever going to learn anything from our history? I guess not. END