Everyone was fast asleep in Ree Khee Bu, a village in Kayah (Karenni) State’s Hprsuo Township, when they were suddenly awakened by a loud boom at around 1am on the night of January 17.
The village, which had been host to around 700 internally displaced persons (IDPs) since late December, immediately erupted into a state of panic.
The IDPs had fled their homes in Moso, another village about 30km away, and other nearby villages, after regime troops massacred dozens of people there on Christmas Eve. Now they were ready to run again.
“We were standing before we even realised it. It was like the blast had thrown us up on our feet,” said Rosematin, an ethnic Karenni woman who recalled the sheer horror of that night.
In her limited Burmese, she struggled to find the words to describe the intensity of the explosion. All she could say was that it made her ears ring and gave her a terrible headache.
But that wasn’t the worst of it. The 40-year-old mother of three was struck by terror at the thought that her children were not safe. She grabbed the youngest, her eight-year-old, by the hand and ran barefoot out of the makeshift shelter that her family shared with dozens of others.
“I just ran. I was so scared. It was chaotic,” she said.
In the confusion, she was separated from her two older children. She tried to find them in the darkness, then returned to the shelter to see if they were there.
That’s when she saw a body under a blanket. She felt sick to her stomach.
Her first thought was that it was one of her children. But when she pulled back the blanket, she saw that it was another child that she knew from her home village, a 15-year-old girl named Maria Corrette, who also went by the name Chaw Su.
“She was in pieces. Her belly was burst open, and her intestines were falling out. Her hands were crushed and her lower body was shattered,” she said.
The girl’s torso had been thrown into Rosematin’s room from her own room next door. Her sister, 12-year-old Caroline (called Khine by the other villagers) was also killed in her sleep, her abdomen ripped open and one of her arms thrown some distance from the rest of her body.
“Blood and pieces of flesh and internal organs were strewn across the floor,” said Maget Trude, a former healthcare worker who acted as an interpreter for Rosematin.
‘I thought it would be safe’
The two sisters and their mother had fled to Ree Khee Bu because their father believed it would be the safest place for them. Even after what had happened in Moso on December 24, he didn’t imagine that the military was capable of anything so horrific as carrying out an airstrike on an IDP camp.
“When fighting broke out in Moso, I sent them away because I thought it would be safer than staying here,” said Kaw Reh, the girls’ 50-year-old father, who last saw his daughters alive on January 1.
When he went to Ree Khee Bu after their death, they were already in coffins, ready to be buried.
“I cried out loud. I wailed. I just sat there and cried. I couldn’t take it anymore,” he said, adding that their mother is still almost insane with grief.
“She wakes up early in the morning and starts crying. I try to console her, but I can’t,” he said as his wife wept in the background.
He still doesn’t know why his daughters had to die the way they did. There was no fighting anywhere near the camp on the night that a military aircraft dropped four bombs on it, including the one that killed Chaw Su, Khine and a 51-year-old man named Andrea who was staying in the same shelter.
The junta made no attempt to justify the attack. Usually when it carries out such raids, it simply claims to be targeting “rebels” and “terrorists” hiding in civilian residential areas.
“I’m very angry with the military dictators who did this. My daughters died like this because of them,” said Kaw Reh.
Kaw Reh is no stranger to conflict. When he was young, he said, he was forced to flee from clashes twice. But this was his only experience of the aftermath of an air raid.
“We are just unarmed civilians. Why can’t the international community help us? I try to understand it, but sometimes I just don’t know what to think,” he said.
As much as he hoped for outside assistance, Kaw Reh knew that he couldn’t afford to wait for it to come. He had to do his best under the circumstances, which in this case meant giving his daughters a hasty burial and hoping to have a chance some day to do more to preserve their memory.
“I want to build proper tombs for them when the country is at peace. I want to make nice tombstones for them in Moso’s cemetery,” he said.
Impact of the attack
Two of the bombs dropped on the night of January 17 fell about 100 feet from the shelter where the two sisters and their mother were living with around 200 other IDPs. Two more landed near another building that was still under construction.
Each one left a hole in the ground that was between a metre and a metre and a half deep. Fragments from one pelted the corrugated-tin roof of the shelter, covering it with tiny holes. Shrapnel from another destroyed a kitchen area 15m away, shredding metal pots and pans.
According to a volunteer, the attack also affected the health of those living at the camp. Many children said that their ears were still ringing days later, and some children and adults also complained of sore throats, coughing and runny noses.
Other problems were also reported, especially among children, who made up well over half of the camp’s population.
“After the explosion, some children vomited, and some said they felt dizzy because of the smell of gunpowder. Some also suffered from diarrhoea. I think it was because they were so frightened,” said Maget Trude, the volunteer.
“The families who were not near the site of the blasts were not affected as much, but most who were within a certain distance of it had these problems,” she added.
After the raid, the camp’s inhabitants and residents of the village and surrounding area fled. Many have since taken refuge in nearby villages, or in cities outside of Kayah State, while those with nowhere else to go have stayed closer to the camp.
“When we arrived there that night, they were terrified. They were hiding under trees and cliffs. When we asked them to come out, they wouldn’t dare leave their hiding places,” recalled Maget Trude.
Believing that being gathered in one place made them an easy target, most of the IDPs scattered in small groups after collecting what was left of their belongings.
“I just come back to the camp to cook and eat in the daytime, then spend the night in the forest or in a cave. The planes still fly over us every night,” said one woman.
“It’s summer now, so it’s still possible to live like this because the weather is fine. But it will be difficult in the long run,” said Maget Trude.
“How long can we support them? It will be depressing if this goes on much longer,” she added.
Grim statistics
The IDP camp in Ree Khee Bu was not the only one attacked that night. Hours earlier, on the evening of January 16, an area in the town of Nan Mei Khon where displaced residents were sheltering, in Demoso Township, was also hit by an airstrike.
Three young volunteers—John Arko Steno, 14, Richard, 16, and Bawsaco, 17—were killed in that raid, according to the Karenni State Police (KSP), a force formed in August by police officers who had joined the Civil Disobedience Movement.
As in Ree Khee Bu, there were no clashes anywhere near the Nan Mei Khon camp when it came under attack, the KSP said.
On the day of the air raid on the Ree Khee Bu IDP camp, the Karenni State Consultative Council, a body formed in April by civilian and armed anti-regime forces in the state, released a statement calling for an end to military airstrikes.
Three days later, the Karenni National Progressive Party, the Karen National Union, and the Chin National Front issued an appeal to the international community to impose a military no-fly zone and declare safe zones for civilians.
None of this has stopped the junta from continuing with its attacks on civilians, however. On February 10, another IDP camp in Demoso Township was targeted, this time by artillery fire.
With similar attacks taking place around the country, at least 400,000 people have been displaced since last year’s coup, according to a statement released by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs on January 26.
According to the Karenni Civil Society Network, nearly 180,000 people have been displaced in ethnic Karenni areas of Kayah State and southern Shan State alone.
For Rosematin, the Karenni woman who discovered Chaw Su’s body, this is not just a grim statistic. Still traumatized by her experience, she wonders if she, or the hundreds of thousands of others like her, will ever see their homes again.
“I just don’t know how to go on. I’m not really sure we will survive this,” she said.
