The Daily - A Military That Murders Its Own People

Episode Date: April 5, 2021

Two months ago, Myanmar’s military carried out a coup, deposing the country’s elected civilian leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, and closing the curtains on a five-year experiment with democracy. Since then, the Burmese people have expressed their discontent through protest and mass civil disobedience. The military has responded with brutal violence. We look at the crackdown and how Myanmar’s unique military culture encourages officers to see civilians as the enemy. Guest: Hannah Beech, the Southeast Asia bureau chief for The New York Times. Sign up here to get The Daily in your inbox each morning. And for an exclusive look at how the biggest stories on our show come together, subscribe to our newsletter. Background reading: Four officers speak about life in the Tatmadaw, Myanmar’s feared army, which has turned its guns on civilians again. “The Tatmadaw is the only world” for most soldiers, one said.Myanmar’s security forces have killed more than 40 children since February. Here is the story of one, Aye Myat Thu. She was 10.As the nation’s military kills, assaults and terrorizes unarmed civilians each day, some protesters say there is no choice but to fight the army on its own terms.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. 

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Two months ago, during a pre-dawn raid, the military in Myanmar cut off internet and phone networks and, with tanks, helicopters, and soldiers, carried out a coup, putting the country's elected leader Aung San Suu Kyi under house arrest and ending a five-year-long experiment in democratic rule. Today, my colleague Hannah Beach has been reporting on what has happened since. It's Monday, April 5th. Hannah, the last time we spoke with you,

the civilian leader of Myanmar had just been deposed by the country's military, and this democratic experiment underway there had come to a very swift end. And you described a very uneasy standoff between the people of Myanmar and the military. So how has that progressed, starting with the civilian population? What has happened essentially is that five years of democratic reform have been utterly replaced by a military regime, a resumption of the battle days in which the military raped and killed and assaulted. And people are scared to death that this might happen again.

And so with the February 1st coup, people react by coming out to protest, and they are protesting by the millions. There are peaceful marches, there are these street parties in which people in ball gowns, the transgender community, doctors and engineers and lawyers, they're all out on the street peacefully marching to say that we want our country to resume some form of democracy and we want the military regime out of the country.

At the same time, this great civil disobedience movement begins. And it starts with some doctors in the largest city in Myanmar. And all of a sudden, we look on Facebook and we see this photograph of doctors in their blue scrubs, and they're all holding up their hands with a three-fingered salute from the Hunger Games. And this is a symbol that's come to me now in Myanmar in particular, but sort of all over the world. This kind of secret coded defiance against an autocracy or military regime. Just as in the Hunger Games. Exactly. So this photograph of the doctors holding up their three fingers in the Hunger Games salute goes viral.

70 hospitals and medical departments across Myanmar stopped work to protest against the coup Over a matter of hours and then on days and two weeks Government employees and professionals alike all joined in an attempt to paralyze the country Different professions join in Joining trade unions and groups of workers already taking part in the movement Some police officers in Kaya State broke ranks and joined the protesters. It's railroad workers, it's port workers, bank employees, factory workers, food delivery guys, you know, the bartenders. Among their tactics, railway workers have used their bodies to block

trains, disrupting transportation. We're talking about millions of people, and this isn't a country of 53 million people. It is an enormous chunk of the country that has decided that they are going to stop showing up for work. It will not be easy, but it is possible. This is the one and only solution to end the dictatorship. And Hannah, what exactly is the goal of this civil disobedience? What are people hoping to accomplish by not showing up to work? I think they're hoping that they will bring the Burmese economy to its knees. I mean, the country has really ground to a halt.

Money is not coming in. Money is not going out. There's cargo piled up at the ports. Stuff isn't being imported. Stuff isn't being exported. People are hoping that it will have an incredible impact on the military regime and that will force the military regime to either enter negotiations with the rightful rulers of the country, the elected government, or that they will bring down the military regime wholesale. And on some level, it sounds like these strikes are having their intended effect. And so how is the military reacting? You know, for a while, there was this hope that

maybe the military wouldn't go back to the way it has always done things. Unfortunately it did. Myatwe Twetkain was one of countless thousands in Myanmar who came out to challenge the military's seizure of power. So on February 9th, a woman who was protesting in Naypadar, the capital, she was actually at a bus station getting ready to leave, and suddenly she was shot in the head. It's the first death among opponents of the military coup since they began protesting two weeks ago. The military said, oh no, we didn't use live ammunition, but there was a bullet in her head and it was pretty clear that they did use live ammunition. She was in a coma,

she died about 10 days later. Scenes of grief, which must inflame public fury against the military junta, but reminds them too of the cost of resisting it. And then by the time that we hit March, a month after the coup, it was this drumbeat of death and more death and more death. And we had unarmed protesters being shot on the street. There were politicians from the ruling party who were dragged from their homes in the middle of the night. And then they turned up dead the next day with signs of torture. And the military would say, oh no, they weren't tortured. They just kind of fell from somewhere and somehow ended up dead

with signs of torture. And now there've been more than 540 people who've been confirmed killed by the security forces since the coup. And there are probably a bunch more whose deaths haven't been confirmed, and thousands have been arrested. If you decide to go protest, you're really taking your life into your own hands. And a lot of the protesters who, before they go out each day, will write a message on Facebook or a handwritten letter saying, you know, if I don't come back today, please, you know, here are the instructions for my death. And these are students, these are young people, these are people who should have their futures ahead of them who are making this kind of existential decision to go out on the streets. But what has also happened is that there has been this campaign of randomized terror.

And so somebody is sitting in their house and suddenly maybe a protester is running away from the security forces and comes into your neighborhood and you go out to look what's happening and you get shot in the head or you're sitting in your living room and you're kind of cowering because you know that bad stuff is happening and a bullet comes through the window. And this campaign of terror is such that nobody is safe. And it creates this tremendous sense of insecurity among everyone. We had kids in their houses being shot in their homes. Wait, kids in their houses being shot in their homes by the military? By the military, yeah. There are at least 40 children who have been killed. And these kids were, one of them was sitting in her father's lap. One of them was serving tea. One of them was going outside to get a pot of water.

And I reported one story about a little girl, a 10-year-old girl in southeastern Myanmar. It was the afternoon and the father has five girls and he wants to cool down his kids. And so he goes to his coconut palm tree. He gets a coconut. He's cracking it open with a machete. And the first little girl to get a slice of coconut was the fourth of his five children.

And she takes the coconut and she hears these noises just outside of her house that sound like the pop of firecrackers. And so she goes toward the trees and her father looks up and he sees that she's maybe stumbled. Something has happened to her and she's kind of on her stomach. And so he thinks, oh, she must have tripped on something. So he puts down his machete, he puts down his coconut, and he runs over and then scoops her up. And he wants to tell her, it's okay, I'll get you another piece of coconut. And then he discovers that his hands are bloody and that there's blood everywhere.

And he can't figure out where the blood is coming from. And this happened at around 5.30 in the afternoon. And within three quarters of an hour, it was dark and she was dead. Wow. She had been shot by the military? She had been shot by the military. And, you know, this was not a neighborhood where protests were going on. Just beyond the trees that were the perimeter of their house, there was a camouflaged presence. Nobody saw him, but he was shooting. And one of the shots entered her head. And, you know, from a military perspective, a single shot to the head is an execution. It is a deliberate attack. And it seems very unlikely that it would have been a mistake to do that. And I think what this has done more than anything is to harden the resolve of people

in Myanmar to fight the military regime because a group of soldiers and a group of policemen that do this, that are given orders to execute children, is something that cannot stand. So Hannah, how do you, how does anyone make sense of the fact that soldiers in Myanmar are so wantonly taking the lives of their own people, people who are protesting in a nonviolent manner, people who in some cases are not protesting at all. I mean, how is it that the military can take the lives of their own neighbors, their own countrymen, women, children? Yeah, Michael, I mean, this is a question that those of us who cover Myanmar have been asking, and this comes to the heart of what Myanmar is. You know, we know who the victims

of the military's terror campaign are, the girl with her coconut. We don't know much about this faceless rank of people who make up the Myanmar military. And what we've discovered is that this is a deeply insular, secretive culture that is unlike any other military in the world. We'll be right back. So Hannah, what have you found about the military culture in Myanmar? And has it helped you answer the question of how soldiers can carry out the murder of their own civilian population. So the Myanmar military is called the Tamadaw, and it says that it has a standing force of up to half a million men. Again, this is a country of 53 million people, so that's a lot of people.

It's often portrayed as this kind of robotic rank of warriors who are bred to kill, and that's certainly true. From the beginning, when they're in boot camp, the troops from the Tatmadaw are taught one lesson above all, which is that they are the guardians of the country and a religion, Buddhism, that will crumble without them. And why would it crumble without them? that will crumble without them. And why would it crumble without them? So Myanmar was founded as the country of Burma in 1948. And since that very moment of Myanmar's founding, the Tatmadaw has been fighting something which is unusual for a military force,

which is it's not fighting outside forces. It's not fighting outside countries. It's fighting its own people. And the people that they've been fighting have been ethnic armed groups, communist guerrilla groups, even student democracy activists who took to the jungle after previous crackdowns. So the military, instead of being a force that protects the people of Myanmar, has since its very moment of inception been focused on fighting its own people. And that's what makes it pretty unique in the world. So it's trained to see the people of Myanmar as potential enemies at all times. What is the internal culture of it?

at all times. What is the internal culture of it? The Myanmar military occupy a parallel privileged state within a state. So soldiers live apart from the rest of society. They work apart from the rest of society. They socialize from the rest of society. And they have an entire ecosystem that's dedicated just to them. And that means that they are isolated from the very people who they should be designed to protect. I mean, when you say agencies, mobile network operators, stock options for good little soldiers, and even vegetable farms. The military runs its own television stations. It has its own publishing houses, film industry, and this entire ecosystem includes the internet. And so the Tatmadaw, even on social media, is cloistered as well.

There are officers who are trained in psychological warfare who in Facebook chat groups will plant these conspiracy theories about democracy or about the political opposition. And people tend to believe it because they think that they're connecting to the outside world, but they're actually inhabiting these relatively narrow digital silos. It's fascinating. And in many cases, the children of military officers marry the children of other military officers, or they marry the progeny of business tycoons or cronies of the military. And so the family trees of the military are incredibly

connected. And it gets to the point where the military has this kind of unspoken rule that if one of your comrades is killed in battle, then the soldiers will draw, and the widow of that fallen comrade will marry one of the other members of the battalion. So it's this entire world unto itself that has very little intersection with the rest of Myanmar. A kind of country within a country in which there's really no way to get an outside perspective. in which there's really no way to get an outside perspective. If a soldier isn't marrying a civilian and getting a perspective of that civilian or going on the real internet, how are they possibly going to see a perspective beyond the military?

Yeah, and I think because they are sequestered from the rest of society, they don't see the protesters as humans, as fellow Burmese. They see them as the enemy. You know, they're being fed a steady diet of propaganda in which anybody who questions the military is fraying the unity of the country. And so to be a protester, to be out on the streets and calling for a resumption of democracy is to be an enemy from the military's perspective. But, you know, we have found some soldiers who are tired of following unjust orders. atmosphere in which these orders day in, day out to kill unarmed civilians, to kill children, have propelled them to a breaking point where they just can't do it any longer. And tell me about one of these soldiers.

So one of the soldiers who we've been focusing on is, he's a captain. His name is Captain Tun Myat Ong. In many ways, he is kind of a prototypical soldier. He was born in a small village in an ethnic minority area in Myanmar. And his mother died when he was 10 years old. His father became an alcoholic and he was essentially an orphan and got sent to a boarding school in Yangon and then took the entrance examination for the Defense Services Academy, which is kind of like the West Point of Myanmar. Did very well, studied English. And as a kind of quasi-orphan, the military became his family. in Thun Myat Ong is that even though he's really part and parcel of the Tatmadaw, he finds a way out, at least in his mind and online. And he breaks out of the digital silos of the Tatmadaw

and is meeting people online who aren't soldiers. And because he speaks English, he accesses a whole world out there which is not bound by the rules and regulations and unjust orders of the military. And he starts realizing that the Tatmadaw's prescriptions, which is that you're defending the Tatmadaw before the country, are not really what he believes in. So by the time that the coup happens, he realizes, you know, oh my God, this institution that I have loved is turning against its own country. And then one day in early March, he is asked by his superior to carry out a duty that fills him with ultimate dread. He is asked to pick up bullet casings on the street. And as he's picking up these shells, he's got sort of nausea in his throat.

He feels like he's about to throw up. He says, you know, I know that these shells mean that the rifles, that real rifles have been used on real people. And that night, he logs onto Facebook again, and he discovers that several civilians have been killed in Yangon by soldiers of the Tatmadaw who are men in uniform, just like him. And it's at that moment he decides that he's had enough, that he's going to desert. And one day he just slips off base and he decides that he's never going to return. He's now actually in hiding.

And he said, I love the military so much, but the message I want to give my fellow soldiers is, if you're choosing between the country and the Tatmadaw, please choose the country. Hannah, did he say whether there are other soldiers, perhaps soldiers he's talked to, who share his frustration and his anger and who are willing to leave the military in this moment? Yeah, what was really interesting talking with him, and also with three other soldiers, two of whom are still on active duty,

is that they said there actually is a lot of kind of individual, private unhappiness with the coup. But to take the decision that he made to desert is really, really difficult. And one of the reasons that Captain Tung Myung Ong, frankly, was able to desert was because he's single. And for anybody who's married, if they were to leave, their family members, their wives, their children could be targeted, could be arrested, could be tortured. And so to expect mass dissensions within the Myanmar military, I think, is just not realistic. It's too scary for people to do. So, Hannah, just to bring this full circle, in Myanmar, you now have a civilian population that believes it has nothing left to lose and is willing to give up work, food, shelter in order to protest.

And you have a military that feels it has everything to lose and is willing to murder civilians in order to hold on to power. And given those two realities, it seems you have the makings not just of a standoff, but of something much worse and darker than that. Yeah, I think what you've described are these two immovable forces within Myanmar society. On the one hand, you have these protesters who have all the right ideals on their side, right? They have democracy. They have the moral high ground.

They're protecting political and economic reforms and opening to the world, which hadn't happened for six decades. Then on the other side, you have a military that has been conditioned to believe that they are in the right, that they have enemies at every corner. And the enemies in this case are the civilian population to believe that they are in the right, that they have enemies at every corner.

And the enemies in this case are the civilian population who are protesting and pushing back against their coup. And so as we see this unfolding over the next days and weeks and months, I mean, the kind of sad and horrible reality is that we are probably going to see more killing. We're going to see refugee outflows to Thailand and to India. The economy is going to continue to shrink and shrink and shrink. There's not going to be the economic opportunity for a young generation. And ultimately, you're going to have a country that really could be a failed state. Thank you, Anna. We appreciate it. Thank you, Anna. We appreciate it. Thank you, Michael.

We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. Over the weekend, the U.S. reached a new milestone in its vaccination efforts, administering an average of more than 3 million doses a day. On Saturday alone, the U.S. administered more than 4 million doses. So far, with states expanding vaccine sites and capacity, about 60 million people have been fully vaccinated. And law enforcement officials have identified the suspect in Friday's deadly attack on the U.S. Capitol as 25-year-old Noah Green, a vocal follower of the Nation of Islam, a black nationalist movement,

who had posted online about his personal struggles in recent months. Green is accused of ramming a car into a barrier manned by two Capitol police officers, killing one of them and then lunging at another with a knife before he was shot dead. The attack does not appear to be linked to the January 6th riot at the Capitol. But taken together, the two incidents are raising questions about how close the public should be allowed to get to the U.S. Capitol.

Today's episode was produced by Diana Nguyen, Austin Mitchell, Annie Brown, Michael Simon Johnson, and Luke Vanderplug. It was edited by M.J. Davis-Lynn, Paige Cowett, and Lisa Tobin, engineered by Marion Lozano, and contains original music by Marion Lozano and Rochelle Banja.

That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.