Killing their own: How Myanmar’s military targets those left behind

By the time the junta jets came on March 6, the camp was already exposed. In the hills of Karenni (Kayah) State’s Mese Township, a detention site holding the wives and children of regime prisoners of war had, until recently, remained largely out of sight, its location known only to a small circle of resistance officials and guards. But that changed weeks earlier, on January 18, when more than 80 inmates escaped from a Karenni resistance POW camp in the dead of night, slipping toward the Thai border. Officials and survivors of the attack that came 47 days later say it was anything but random. Speaking to Myanmar Now, they describe how it was carried out with a degree of precision that strongly suggests prior knowledge of the site, and of how people would react once the jets appeared. For May Gyi, the 43-year-old wife of a captured junta soldier, there is no doubt about the connection between the two events. Both dramatically impacted life at the camp, but the latter was by far the more shattering. The morning of March 6 began as usual. People woke at 6am, worked the fields or carried out small tasks around the camp, then gathered together at midday to eat. It was during the lull just after lunch, as food was being handed out to the children, that the sound of the jet first cut through the air. Looking up at the sky, they couldn’t see any sign of the warplane, so at first they thought it might just be passing over. But then it came into view, tearing through the clouds just above them. It seemed laser focused on their position. At that point, everyone started running—some towards a nearby ravine and others to a wooden bunker. Then they waited. When nothing fell, some began to edge back out. But that was when everything changed. “As people came out from the ravine, the jet came back and everyone ran again, very quickly,” May Gyi said. “We knew it was close.” There was no clear plan. Some ran back to the ravine, others took cover near the bunker, everyone shouting to each other as they scattered, trying to select the best place to hide. May Gyi made it to the ravine and crouched low, hoping it would pass. Instead, the bomb landed almost on top of her. The exact spot in the ravine where a junta warplane dropped a 200-pound bomb, killing five civilians and injuring many others (Photo: Caleb Quinley / Myanmar Now) “It was the loudest explosion I’ve ever heard. It shook my whole body. Thick, dark smoke was everywhere—I couldn’t see anything. I thought I was dead.” The explosion tore through the ravine, swallowing it in a thick cloud of black smoke and ash. Coughing and struggling to stand, she opened her eyes to a scene of total devastation: bodies torn apart, children lying among the rocks of the stream, the air filled with screams. Shoes left behind in the ravine mark where victims were killed—some small enough to belong to children as young as seven (Photo: Caleb Quinley / Myanmar Now) In the sheer chaos of those moments, the reality of what had just happened set in with a kind of clarity. Survivors said they suddenly realised that they—the wives and children of regime soldiers—were the target. The military had struck the refuge itself, knowing they were there. It was like they were being told that surrender to the enemy, or even retreat, had stripped their lives of any value. For a moment May Gyi lay still, waiting for the horror to pass. It was only as the screaming began to cut through the ringing in her ears that she realised she had survived. She stood up into the smoke and moved toward the voices, stumbling first across the body of a woman already killed, then toward someone crying out just a few metres away. But before she could reach him, the jet circled back again, forcing everyone to stay down. “When I finally got to him, he was already dead,” she said of the man she had heard amid the mayhem. “He had been alive just moments before, but no one could reach him until it was too late.” As the smoke cleared, survivors found bodies and wounded children scattered across the ground. Medics began treating the injured and evacuating the worst cases. But what lingered even more than the violence was the sense of betrayal. “We are their families. We have supported them. There are no men here, we are civilians,” said May Gyi, still trying to make sense of the military’s actions. Then, after a pause, the confusion hardened into something else. “My husband worked for them for years. I did nothing but support them. But now I truly hate them. I want them to be destroyed.” Officials from the detention camp hold twisted fragments of the bomb (Photo: Caleb Quinley / Myanmar Now) The ones who survived By the time the fighter jet was gone, it had killed five people at the camp for the families of detained soldiers—three women, a seven-year-old girl, and an 18-year-old boy. A Karenni Army base camp about 500 meters away and the men’s POW prison were also targeted, but it was the camp for women and children, which was hit last, that suffered the worst casualties. In addition to the seven-year-old girl who was killed instantly, another girl, 11 years old, was seriously injured. She was later transferred to Thailand for treatment and had to have her leg amputated, women at the camp said. The girl’s mother was one of the women killed in the blast; her father is also believed to be dead, killed in an earlier clash with resistance forces. Another child, a boy in his early teens, also made it out alive despite being badly wounded. His survival is remarkable. An older boy—the 18-year-old who died—threw himself over him as the blast struck, shielding him with his own body. It was an act of selflessness the women in the camp returned to again and again. “He was like our son. He took care of everything for us,” said May Gyi, referring to the dead boy. In the days that followed the attack, no one slept. It was not just the loss of loved ones that kept them awake. It was also the nagging thought that their own lives had been rendered worthless by the same institution—the military—they had once served. “We were all in complete misery,” said May Gyi. “I kept thinking: how could the military do this to us? How can they kill their own people?” The camp’s senior official stands at the base of the ravine, looking up toward the exact point where the bomb struck—tracing the blast path that tore through the hillside above (Photo: Caleb Quinley / Myanmar Now) ‘They knew this place’ Arriving at the camp roughly two weeks after the bombs had fallen, I was led to the exact spot where the strike tore through the ravine, killing residents who had taken shelter there. Asked about fragments, two men scrambled up the rocky slope, sifting through debris and splintered trees. Minutes later, they returned with heavy, jagged pieces of metal—likely from a 200-pound bomb. One official explained that the prison break in January immediately raised fears of attack. “After that, we believed our facilities could be targeted at any time,” he said, adding that it did not come as a surprise to the resistance forces that the junta would attack its own people. The logic for this, he said, comes from the notion that junta troops are not allowed to surrender under any circumstances. Doing so is often seen as a death sentence, according to experts on Myanmar’s military. Another visitor to the camp who was there shortly after the bombing told me that the attack on the site constitutes a war crime. “The camp was clearly civilian in nature, housing the wives and children of junta soldiers who were found inside junta bases overrun by the Karenni resistance,” said Peter Bouckaert, a senior director at Fortify Rights, a group that specialises in investigating human rights abuses. “Such civilian camps, and POW camps, should never be deliberately attacked during war, and because of the prior POW prison escape the junta knew that there were only women and children in the camp. As such, it is reasonable to conclude this was a deliberate war crime targeting civilians,” he added. Bouckaert also confirmed reports that the prison escape was an inside job involving two “rehabilitated” junta troops who had been assigned to serve as prison guards. The pair helped more than 80 prisoners escape, stealing eight firearms before fleeing with them into Thailand. It was also likely, he said, that some of the escapees returned to junta-controlled areas and passed on detailed information about the POW base, the nearby women and children’s detention camp, and other sites—making them complicit in the subsequent attack. He also suggested that the Karenni resistance authorities bore some responsibility for the fate of the civilians in their custody, noting that women and children should not be detained solely because of their ties to current or former military personnel, especially if there are no clear legal processes in place for their release. In general, however, the civilian detainees appear to be well-treated, he said, although they are not allowed to leave the camp and their children do not have access to education. “The director of the detention facility told me that he himself had been detained by the junta authorities for two years in Loikaw for protesting against the illegal coup, and did not want any of the detainees in his custody to suffer the same abuse and humiliation he suffered at the hands of the junta. He insisted that he wants to treat everyone with respect for their dignity,” said Bouckaert. “Even the detainees said that they were treated better in the detention camp than they had been treated in the junta military base,” he added. Eh, a 58-year-old woman who survived the March 6 attack, agreed with this assessment, but expressed concern about security at the camp now that its location is no longer hidden. “We are happy with the conditions here at this camp. We have enough food and the staff do not mistreat us,” she said. “But after this incident, we are afraid that we could be targeted again at any time.” Fragments from the 200-pound bomb were collected and examined two weeks after the blast ripped through a narrow ravine where civilians had been hiding (Photo: Caleb Quinley / Myanmar Now) These days, the possibility of another assault is always on people’s minds. Children are routinely kept inside bunkers for their safety, and one boy who was severely traumatised has been sent to a Buddhist monastery, where caretakers hope the environment will help him recover. “Even when there are no aircraft, they are afraid,” one official said. “They are always looking around, expecting another strike.” Long after the sound of the jet has faded, it is the survivors who will continue to bear the weight of that attack for decades to come. And the nagging question—how could the military repay their loyalty with such brutal betrayal?—may never go away. “They should not do this to us,” says May Gyi, still dismayed by the ruthless cruelty of the regime. “We are their families—we have raised their children, supported their men. We are civilians; we are not fighting.”

Killing their own: How Myanmar’s military targets those left behind

After junta POWs escape their resistance captors, their families are forced to pay the price—by the regime they once served

Subscribe for full access

Subscribe for full access

Related Articles

Myanmar junta airstrike kills two university students in historic Rakhine town

Bangkok says ASEAN should accept Myanmar back at diplomat level

Is Myanmar’s military junta losing patience with China?

Myanmar junta tells country that reliable electricity still 20 years away