The junta has given cash donations to the families of local administrators who were among those assassinated for working with the regime in recent weeks, state-run newspapers reported over the weekend.
Lieutenant General Soe Htut, the military council’s minister of home affairs, gave payments of 500,000 kyat each to seven families at a meeting in Yangon on Friday, the reports said.
The general invited local officials from across Yangon Region to the meeting, which was called following a series of deadly attacks on ward administrators and other pro-junta officials in Yangon and elsewhere.
Several ward administrators have resigned in the wake of the killings.
There are 743 wards in Yangon and 621 village tracts, but footage broadcast on Myawaddy TV suggested fewer than 100 people attended Friday’s meeting.
“It was nothing special,” an administrator who attended the meeting told Myanmar Now on condition of anonymity. “We were just told to take care of ourselves, and that there would be security deployed.”
Another administrator said he and other officials were unable to implement all of the orders they were given by the junta and that they had to make sure they could coexist with residents.
Some 30 administrators were killed between March and early June, according to figures compiled from media reports.
The assassinations have mostly targeted officials and members of the military-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) who were accused of acting as informants for the junta.
Soe Soe Lwin, who was shot at close range in Kyarkwat Thit ward in Tamwe on June 8, was an avid military supporter, according to a resident.
“There were no significant changes in the two months she held the duty,” he said. “I think she only jumped on the opportunity for her own personal gain. She’s not even a resident here.”
Soe Soe Lwin ran a hostel in the ward. A few days before her assassination, there was an explosion outside her apartment.
Forty-five-year-old Myo Lwin, a ward administrator in Lanmadaw, was shot in the head on May 18. Tun Yee, a ward administrator in Dawbon Township, was shot to death at close range early this month.
Two officials have been killed in the industrial township of Hlaing Tharyar, where soldiers murdered dozens of protesters in March. Kyi Win, the administrator of Ward 3, was stabbed to death on May 9.
Then on June 1, Sai Lin Zaw, a township administrator and a former USDP member, was shot to death in his own car.
Last year he ran for a seat for the People’s Pioneer Party (PPP), whose chair Thet Thet Khaing is now the junta’s social welfare, relief and resettlement minister.
Kyaw Zeya, the vice chair of the PPP, said after the killing that the regime was failing to protect its own loyalists.
“I see that the State Administrative Council is very weak in taking responsibility for those it appointed. Not satisfying at all,” he said.
Administrators are entitled to a 70,000 kyat monthly salary and a bonus after they have served for five years.
A number of USDP members and military supporters became ward administrators following the coup, keen to help the new regime enforce its rule.
But that has proved difficult in the face of overwhelming popular resistance. The junta’s own spokesperson, Zaw Min Tun, last month told a press conference that local governance mechanisms were still not functioning properly.
“We admit that we can’t provide full [protection] yet,” he said.
