Who Killed Who in Burma

8/2/2019 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.



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



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

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Who Killed Who in Burma