When the military seized power in Myanmar two years ago, it ignited unprecedented levels of resistance to its rule. Since then, the country’s people have fought to retake control by a variety of means. The stories presented here explore just a few of them.
The huge protests that greeted the regime in the weeks and months after the coup were met with brutal crackdowns and tens of thousands of arrests. Many remain behind bars, where they face lengthy sentences handed down by junta-controlled courts. For most, their only contact with the outside world is their lawyer. But in a country where any association with regime opponents is dangerous, even lawyers are at risk. And yet many continue to represent poltical prisoners in defiance of the junta’s efforts to threaten and intimidate them.
In Myanmar’s agrarian heartland, countless thousands have risen up in armed resistance to the regime. Areas that have long been free of conflict are now among the most strife-torn. While most poor farmers continue to focus on their bare survival, the military’s extreme brutality has awakened in many a determination to defeat the junta at any cost.
Since the February 2021 military takeover, a new generation has taken the reins of the movement to end decades of repression in Myanmar. Young people who came of age during the country’s brief era of relative freedom are now the lifeblood of that movement. Many, however, have sacrificed their lives in their pursuit of the long-cherished goal of restoring genuine democracy.
Each of these stories demonstrates the depth of feeling that continues to drive opposition to the regime. Myanmar Now has attempted to capture that sentiment, which is ultimately rooted in a belief in human dignity — something that Myanmar’s people have long been denied by successive dictatorships.
As junta squeezes courts, Myanmar’s lawyers are forced to face their worst fears
Even as they face threats to their own safety and freedom, some lawyers remain committed to representing political prisoners
By Tin Htet Paing, Nway Nway Eain
Mei Aye, a lawyer who visits Yangon’s Insein Prison at least twice a week for court appearances, has a ritual that she follows on the days that she has to pass through the gates of Myanmar’s most notorious detention centre.
The first thing she does is tell someone she trusts about her unfinished business. And then she makes a point of saying goodbye to all her loved ones, mindful of the fact that she might not see them again for a very long time.
She says she does this as a way of dealing with the crippling anxiety she often feels about the perils of her job defending political prisoners. This is because she knows all too well how easily she, too, could end up behind bars.
“I have to do these things in case I don’t get to come home from work one day. I never know when I will be taken away to an interrogation centre,” she explains.
As a defence attorney with 10 years of experience, Mei Aye is no stranger to prisons, which she says hold no real terror for her. But interrogation centres are another matter—she has seen too many of her clients after they have emerged from them not to live in fear of what happens behind their closed doors.
Many are badly bruised or scarred, she says, and some even have open wounds that testify to the brutality of the regime’s techniques for extracting information.
“I’m not a doctor, so I can’t really say how serious their injuries were. But I could see that they had been really severely beaten. And I am afraid of having to face the same fate,” she says.
Currently working on 28 political cases, Mei Aye deals with clients facing charges that range from incitement to terrorism and possession of explosive devices. In the eyes of Myanmar’s military, that makes her an object of suspicion, too.
She says her anxiety lifts only after the court hearings have begun. But as soon as they end and she starts preparing to leave the prison, the feeling of dread returns. And it stays with her for at least the next two days, filling her mind with vivid images of what might await her.
“I keep seeing the same scene over and over again: soldiers kicking the door open, rushing in, and torturing me in my own home. I sometimes find myself wondering how many blows I would be able to take,” she says of her state of mind during these periods.
But there is nothing irrational about these fears. While there is no official count, members of Myanmar’s legal community say that at least 20 lawyers have been detained since last year’s coup to face charges related to those of their clients.
‘Worse than ever’
Since seizing power in February 2021, the military regime headed by Min Aung Hlaing has taken over all three branches of government—executive, legislative, and judicial. Under its rule, the independence of judges has ceased to exist.
In February, a year after the military takeover, the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ) reported on the total collapse of Myanmar’s courts as instruments of justice. Among the issues it addressed were the treatment of lawyers—especially those representing political dissidents.
“Lawyers are often threatened in front of judges and are actually arrested in courtrooms for asking witnesses questions about torture and ill-treatment their clients have experienced or for requesting fair trials,” the report said.
According to a retired judge who served under Myanmar’s previous military regimes, the situation now is worse than it has ever been. While the courts have never been free or fair under military rule, it was never normal in the past for lawyers and judges to face such persecution, he said.
One major constraint facing lawyers involved in political cases is that the charges against their clients are usually laid by members of the police force. This puts lawyers at risk of provoking people who have the power to arrest them.
“Lawyers can’t avoid questioning the plaintiffs, who are usually police in these cases, if they are going to defend their clients’ rights. The police don’t like that, so they often pressure and threaten to arrest those lawyers,” said the former judge.
Some of the lawyers now behind bars represented high-profile figures from the ousted National League for Democracy (NLD) government, as well as prominent dissidents.
This includes Ywet Nu Aung, a Mandalay-based lawyer who was arrested in April following a hearing for Dr. Zaw Myint Maung, the deposed chief minister of Mandalay Region. Now being held at Obo Prison, where she was first taken into custody, she faces a life sentence on terrorism charges.
In June, three more lawyers were arrested in Monywa, including Moe Zaw Tun, the defence attorney for Myint Naing, a member of the NLD’s central executive committee who served as Sagaing Region’s chief minister until his arrest just days after the military takeover. Moe Zaw Tun also represented Wai Moe Naing, a Monywa-based protest leader detained since last April after being hit during a protest by a vehicle driven by regime forces.
Tin Win Aung, another lawyer who defended Wai Moe Naing, was arrested at Obo Prison on June 29 along with two other Mandalay-based lawyers. During his interrogation, he suffered multiple injuries, including a broken arm, according to sources close to the victim.
No one else to turn to
With so many reports of lawyers being locked up, it is little wonder that some avoid prison courts altogether, while others have gone into hiding. And this has had the desired effect of further isolating critics of the regime.
“They think they can hold onto authority if they can cut off all support for protesters who have become political prisoners,” said Mei Aye.
It is for this reason alone that Mei Aye refuses to stop her work, which she knows perfectly well is not likely to achieve any meaningful justice as long as the junta remains in power.
Since moving to Yangon in 2018, she has worked as a legal advisor for various organisations and offered her services free of charge to individuals arrested for political offences. Many of her clients have had no one else to turn to.
Mei Aye vividly recalls one case in particular. She said she received a call at around 11pm one night several months after the coup. At the other end was a panic-stricken woman whose first words were, “Please help my son. He’s been taken by the military.”
At the time, there was a 10pm curfew in place, and the woman knew that if she left her home to seek help, she would also be arrested. So she called Mei Aye, who had posted her telephone number on social media, and described what had happened just moments earlier.
“She didn’t know what else to do. She had just witnessed her son being beaten and dragged away. Lawyers don’t usually get emotional in front of clients, but I cried. I couldn’t stop my tears, because we both felt the same helplessness,” she said.
The next morning, the woman called again. She asked Mei Aye to come to the South Okkalapa police station, where her son was being held along with seven other youths.
When she reached the police station, Mei Aye saw a group of exhausted-looking mothers who had been forced to stand for hours as they repeatedly asked the officers on duty for permission to see their detained children.
In the end, their persistent requests were denied, and even Mei Aye was not allowed to see the prisoners she had agreed to represent. However, she was told that she could send them food and clothing, which made their mothers immensely happy, as it indicated that, if nothing else, their sons were still alive.
Another reason lawyers have been in the crosshairs of the regime is that they have often served as the only means for prisoners to communicate with the outside world.
This is why Khin Maung Zaw, the lawyer who leads the legal team defending a number of Myanmar’s ousted civilian leaders, including President Win Myint and State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi, has been ordered not to speak to the media.
Even lawyers who are not under gag orders know that they are at risk if they convey messages from their clients, as they can also be charged with “incitement through spreading false news” if they disclose information about the treatment of prisoners or any other information the regime wants to conceal.
Verdicts ‘from above’
Since the coup, most political cases have been tried in “special courts” set up inside prisons. These makeshift “courtrooms” typically consist of curtained-off spaces in large halls or other prison buildings, usually about 10”x10” in area and with little more than a table and two or three chairs for furniture.
With thousands of trials to conduct against its opponents, the regime has also reduced the role of the people involved in its legal proceedings to the bare basics. Lawyers are allowed to attend hearings only to maintain the pretence of due process.
Judges play an even more perfunctory part in the junta’s sham justice system. They never intervene when prison officials or intelligence officers eavesdrop on conversations between lawyers and their clients, and they invariably pass judgments that are predetermined and “directed from above.”
Lawyers say that judges simply read out verdicts that arrive in sealed envelopes, eliminating the need to actually adjudicate in cases that rarely have any merit to begin with.
“Some judges like living under a dictatorship. They can just do as they please. They no longer feel any need to examine cases,” said one lawyer who has taken part in several post-coup trials.
The treatment of prisoners is also routinely ignored by judges. According to Mei Aye, many of her clients have appeared at hearings covered in cuts and bruises after brutal interrogation sessions, but judges simply turned a blind eye to this obvious evidence of abuse.
“I would submit a request for the judge to acknowledge and record the injuries of the defendants inflicted by the authorities, but they would never respond to those requests. Some judges even told me to stop bringing it up,” she said.
But as bad as Myanmar’s ordinary courts have become, they are still not as arbitrary or oppressive as the military tribunals that handle cases in areas that have been placed under martial law.
These tribunals have been empowered to preside over cases involving alleged violations of 23 separate provisions of the Penal Code. The proceedings are heavily guarded by junta troops, but the accused lack even the most basic legal protections. All cases are handled by military lawyers and military judges, who decide on the fate of defendants who are denied any say in their own defence.
It is under such circumstances that a total of 119 dissidents have been sentenced to death over the past year, including 42 in absentia. Among them were 88 Generation leader Ko Jimmy, former MP Phyo Zeyar Thaw, and anti-coup activists Aung Thura Zaw and Hla Myo Aung, who last month became the first prisoners to be executed in Myanmar in more than three decades.
To boycott or not
Given the regime’s total control over the justice system, some believe that lawyers should simply refuse to have anything to do with it.
“They should boycott a system that lies to the international community and oppresses civilians,” said Kyi Myint, a legal expert who is also a well-known political analyst.
Others, however, argue that not much should be expected of lawyers and others who work in the country’s courts, as they have long operated in a climate of fear that has effectively stripped them of any ability to act independently.
“The person who is most responsible for addressing this situation is the one at the top. As long as he continues to submit to the rulers’ will, this problem will not go away,” said the retired judge who spoke to Myanmar Now about the worsening position of legal practitioners under the current regime, referring to chief justice Tun Tun Oo, who also served under the ousted civilian administration.
For Mei Aye, however, fear has not been the determining factor in her career, as much as it has affected her life. What matters most, she said, is how she can best serve her clients—and through them, her country.
With regard to the latter, she said that she supports the Civil Disobedience Movement (CDM), which she sees as a highly effective means of denying the junta legitimacy and any real hold on power. But she hasn’t joined the movement herself, she said, because she feels that in her case, it would be taking the easy way out.
As a lawyer who mostly handles pro bono cases for political prisoners, she would personally not have much to lose by giving up her job, unlike many others who have joined the CDM. The real losers, she said, would be those in need of any support they can get after sacrificing their own freedom for the future of Myanmar.
“I don’t take on cases because I have any faith in this country’s judiciary. I do it because I need to check on my clients and keep a record of what is being done to them,” she said.
In Myanmar’s heartland, hatred of the military deepens after a village’s destruction
The devastating attack on Yin Paung Taing in Sagaing Region has left a permanent scar on those who lived through it
August 11 was a market day in Yin Paung Taing, so the village of nearly 1,000 households, located in Sagaing Region’s Yinmabin Township, was bustling with residents and visitors. The fact that it was also a full-moon day meant that it was even busier than usual.
It was around 3pm that day that Daw Win*, a vendor who sold deep-fried snacks from a stall next to a local teashop, and her 14-year-old daughter first noticed three military aircraft flying over the village. Moments later, the airstrikes began.
This sent everyone scattering in all directions. Then, as chaos reigned, some 60 junta troops arrived by helicopter in the eastern part of the village. Dressed in sports pants and t-shirts, the only thing that identified them as soldiers was their combat helmets and guns, which they fired indiscriminately in all directions.
Daw Win and her daughter were ordered to lie face down on the ground. It was from this vantage point that they witnessed the killing spree as it unfolded.
Almost immediately, they saw one person fall: a 17-year-old boy named Thaw Bhone Naing, shot dead by rampaging regime forces during a massacre that would claim at least 18 more lives before it was all over.
Among the victims were three elderly villagers between the ages of 70 and 83 and a 10-year-old girl named Khin Khine Win. Only four known resistance fighters, including two from Chin State, were confirmed among the dead.
By the time the soldiers left three days later, the village looked like a slaughterhouse. Daw Win said she personally witnessed five killings in all.
“They just shot at everything that moved, including cows, horses and dogs. Nobody and nothing was spared—least of all people,” she said.
Sworn enemies
According to resistance sources based in the area, the likely target of the attack on Yin Paung Taing was a group of 60-80 anti-regime fighters from Chin State who had stopped in the village that afternoon as they were passing through.
Until last year’s coup, southern Sagaing Region had been largely free of the sort of conflict that has long beset Myanmar’s border regions, where ethnic minorities such as the Chin have suffered under decades of military oppression. Now, however, even the majority Bamar in the country’s heartland have turned against the military, making many of them sworn enemies of a murderous regime desperately clinging to power.
All but 5,000 of the nearly 19,000 homes that have been torched by junta forces since the coup have been in Sagaing, according to monitor group Data for Myanmar. Throughout Sagaing and neighbouring Magway Region (which has seen more than 3,000 houses destroyed by fire over the past year), the military has wreaked vengeance on those who have dared to challenge its right to rule.
The coup regime has also used its air supremacy to punish the people of Sagaing. As in Yin Paung Taing, the junta has deployed military aircraft not only to carry out indiscriminate bombing, but also to transport troops into increasingly hostile territory.
Once they are on the ground, these forces cause as much damage as they can. But before they can start destroying property, they must hunt down anyone seen as a potential threat. This means that most men who are unable to escape are either killed on sight or detained, tortured, and later murdered.
The relatively young are at especially high risk. In Yin Paung Taing, 24-year-old Nyein Thu Aung was one of those shot simply for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
According to Daw Win, he was just metres away from her stall when junta troops opened fire on him.
“We tried to tell the soldiers that he was just buying snacks from my shop, but they wouldn’t listen. Two soldiers shot him at the same time,” she said.
Before he died, Nyein Thu Aung asked Daw Win’s daughter for some water. But she didn’t dare move. She and her mother remained motionless, fearing that they would be next if they did anything to help the dying young man.
“He was in agony,” she said, her voice trailing off as she recalled his final moments. “He died soon after that, just a short distance from my shop.”
Killing in cold blood
After this, the soldiers started herding people at gunpoint into the teashop near Daw Win’s stall. From there, they were moved into the ordination hall at the local Buddhist monastery, where they could all be gathered in one place.
Still in shock at what she had seen, Daw Win’s daughter was trembling so much that she could hardly move. But her mother, terrified at the thought of what would happen if they didn’t obey the soldiers’ orders, made sure they both made their way to the ordination hall, which was full of old people, women, and children. Daw Win was overjoyed to find that her two other children–her 17-year-old daughter and 12-year-old son–were among them.
It was while she was there that Daw Win watched in horror as another young man was killed. The victim, who was in his 20s, pleaded for his life, saying that he wasn’t even from Yin Paung Taing. But far from helping him, this information only triggered an even more brutal response from his captors, who kicked and punched him repeatedly, before finally beating him to death with a mallet used for ringing pagoda bells.
“They hit him twice with the mallet. Blood spewed out of his mouth, and after the second blow, he just stopped moving,” Daw Win recalled.
Another man met a similarly brutal end after it was discovered that he had a tattoo of Myanmar’s ousted state counsellor, Aung San Suu Kyi, on his back. He was paraded in front of the other captives, who were asked if they knew who the person depicted in the tattoo was. When some answered that it was “Amay Suu”, or Mother Suu, the soldiers were furious.
“Once they heard the response, they called the man over and asked him if he loved his mother that much,” said Daw Win. “They kicked him in the back, and then they took him behind the teashop and shot him.”
The fifth murder that Daw Win witnessed was that of a 45-year-old mentally disabled man named Pwa Gyi, who was well-loved by locals. He had been captured during the raid and was bound with ropes and had a bloodied mouth when he was brought out to be identified by the other villagers.
They told the soldiers who he was and begged them to spare his life, but they insisted that he was an informer for the resistance. They took him to a tamarind tree near the teashop and shot him dead, according to Daw Win.
“After they killed him, they took his body to my shop and left there,” she said.
Fleeing barefoot
During the three-day siege, the captured villagers were not allowed to leave the ordination hall.
“They wouldn’t let us go anywhere, even to the latrine. We had to relieve ourselves just outside the hall,” said Daw Win.
Throughout their ordeal, the captives continued to hear the sound of gunshots, signalling that more people were being killed elsewhere in the village.
When the soldiers finally left on August 14, they took around 30 men with them, as human shields and porters.
“They made them carry their weapons and other things. There was a soldier on either side of each villager,” said Daw Win, describing what she could see from the ordination hall as the junta troops left with their hostages.
After the soldiers left, the sound of aircraft returned, raising fears that the military was about to wipe out the village with another aerial assault. Jets engines roared just overhead.
In the end, however, there were no more airstrikes. The villagers emerged, relieved as the sound of the jets faded after a few minutes. But relief soon gave way to fear again as the horror of what they had lived through began to sink in.
Not even bothering to put shoes on their feet, Daw Win and her children fled from the place where they had been penned in like animals, not knowing from one day to the next what horrific fate might await them.
“We just ran barefoot towards the west of the village,” said Daw Win, describing her urgent need to distance herself from the worst experience of her life.
But physically fleeing Yin Paung Taing was much easier than leaving behind their memories of what had happened there.
With her own trauma still fresh in her mind, Daw Win also had to deal with her daughter’s struggle to cope with what she had seen.
“She barely eats now. That boy was shot dead right in front of her and she is still frightened by the incident,” said Daw Win, speaking to Myanmar Now on August 17.
No longer liveable
Soon after the occupation of the village ended, Daw Win’s husband, Soe Win*, managed to track her down. He had been at a friend’s house when the air raid began and was able to escape before the soldiers arrived.
After reuniting with his family, he took them to a safe place and returned to a location near Yin Paung Taing. While there, he spoke to Myanmar Now about his own experience.
At first, he said, he and his friend thought the planes were just passing over Yin Paung Taing. But when the airstrikes began, he immediately hid under a bed and spent the next hour there until the bombing stopped.
But even before the aerial attack was completely over, the sound of heavy gunfire filled the air. He knew then that it was time to run.
“We weren’t able to look outside to see what was happening. But we could hear their steady gunfire, which warned us they were coming,” he said.
He and about a dozen other villagers, including an elderly woman who had been injured by the shelling, fled in the direction of the Yamar River, which flows near Yin Paung Taing. They waded into the river, which was neck-deep in some places, and made their way downstream for about half an hour. But at some point, Soe Win lost his footing and nearly drowned. He lost consciousness, and regained it only after he was rescued.
“I was very lucky I didn’t die,” he said.
But everything he had on him, including his money and his phone, was lost. For the next three days, all he and the others could do was hide and wait for the soldiers to leave.
On August 14, when they received word that the occupation of Yin Paung Taing had ended, a few of them, including Soe Win, formed a small group to check on the situation. When they returned, they were shocked by what they saw.
“It was devastating. Some houses were torn apart by the shelling, and some had been burned down. And there were dead animals and dead people all over the place,” he said.
The smell of rotting flesh was overwhelming, and the village no longer seemed liveable. But Soe Win and some others, including residents of nearby villages, began the difficult work of trying to clean up and rebuild Yin Paung Taing, despite fears that the military could return at any time and lay waste to it all over again.
Some, including Daw Win, have decided that they are in no hurry to return to their homes in a village that will never be the same.
“They have decided that Yin Paung Taing is a ‘rebel village’, so they want us to know that they can come again anytime they please,” she said.
Still struggling to make sense of it all, she knows only that her hatred of the military is now absolute.
“If I had a brother who was a soldier, I would kill him and gouge his eyes out,” she said.
“We cannot and must not lose to them.”
*Sources’ names have been changed for their protection.
Reporting by Swe Win and Tin Htet Paing.
For student who dared to fight, a prison break and death in action
Nay Htet was only 21 years old when he died fighting a regime that had tortured him and robbed his generation of its future
By Han Thit
Under the cover of darkness, a group young insurgents moves slowly through a village located about halfway between the towns of Ayadaw and Wetlet in Sagaing Region. Their target is the police station in Shwe Pan Kone, a community of around 500 households located on the eastern bank of the Muu River.
The plan is to ambush some 30 junta troops based at the police station. And so, at around 4am on October 17, they prepared to carry out their mission.
There is a chill in the early morning air, but Kyaw Gyi, a 31-year-old member of a group called 96 Soldiers, is sweating as he awaits the signal to attack. He is less than 10 metres from a bunker located inside the police station compound, ready to fire an RPG launcher mounted on his shoulder. There are two other members of his team next to him, also bracing for the battle that is about to begin.
One of them is Nay Htet, 21, who Kyaw Gyi regards as a close comrade, despite the difference in their ages. Both took part in Yangon’s anti-coup protests, but didn’t meet until later, after they decided to join the armed resistance movement. They became friends while undergoing military training in a liberated area, and have been together ever since.
When the signal comes, Kyaw Gyi fires his weapon. His ears still ringing from the blast, he is engulfed in noise and chaos, as the police inside the station return fire with machine guns.
In the midst of this commotion, he hears someone shout: “Nay Htet is hit!” But by this time, Kyaw Gyi has already fallen back, so he’s not sure of the actual situation. He doesn’t know yet if his friend is seriously injured, or worse.
Some members of their team provide cover so that others can extract Nay Htet. He is still alive. Kyaw Gyi is busy preparing for a second shot with the RPG launcher, but he wants to speak to Nay Htet before they take him away.
“I asked him if he was shot. He responded by standing still at first, and then he collapsed,” Kyaw Gyi recounted.
The two sides continued to clash for about an hour, until helicopters and jet fighters arrived and forced the resistance fighters to retreat. But even as the battle raged, Kyaw Gyi couldn’t stop thinking about his fallen comrade.
“I was choked up. I couldn’t cry because we were still fighting. I should have been the one who got shot,” he said.
Kyaw Gyi was exhausted and still in a daze of disbelief when he returned to his group’s camp and saw Nay Htet’s lifeless body laid out on a bamboo stretcher. He and one other resistance fighter had been killed.
Arrest and torture
The two men, a decade apart in age, had only known each other for about a year.
After meeting in a jungle training camp, they joined 96 Soldiers, a group that takes its name from the number of members it had when it was first formed. Although their camp was in Myanmar’s south, several members of the group decided to go north, to Sagaing and Magway regions, where the regime was facing staunch resistance to its rule.
It was in late June that Kyaw Gyi, Nay Htet, and a young female member of the 96 Soldiers group decided to embark on their own upcountry journey to an unfamiliar region.
They made it as far as Myit Chay, a small town in Magway Region located about 25km southwest of Pakokku. Not knowing the area at all, they set up camp at a spot that turned out to be near the local police station.
Soon discovered by police officers on patrol, they were taken into custody. They were beaten throughout their interrogation, but ultimately, it was photos on their phones that betrayed their involvement in the resistance movement.
Once their identities had been established, the Myit Chay police decided to send them to Pakokku. But when some members of a local Pyu Saw Htee group learned about their presence in the town—Myit Chay was, unbeknownst to the trio, a stronghold of the military-backed militia—they demanded that the police hand them over.
Luckily for them, that didn’t happen.
“The head of the police station didn’t let the Pyu Saw Htee take us. If he had, we would all be dead right now,” said Kyaw Gyi.
Even though they were spared certain death, their ordeal was far from over. In Pakokku, they were separated and subjected to further beatings before being charged under Myanmar’s Anti-Terrorism Law and sent to Pakokku Prison.
On their way there, they weren’t permitted to speak to each other. All they could do was exchange glances, which was enough to express the pain they were all in. Nat Htet’s face was swollen from the countless punches it had received. Their female comrade was doubled over with abdominal pain. Kyaw Gyi’s head and body also throbbed, but as the senior of the other two, he tried not to show it.
Powerless to do anything else, he decided to risk speaking a few words of encouragement.
“This is nothing,” he said. “Just relax.”
Imprisonment and escape
As prisoners, Kyaw Gyi and Nay Htet were placed in adjacent cells. They soon met other inmates, including one named Wai Phyo who was also facing terrorism charges.
A student activist in his 20s, Wai Phyo was determined to rejoin the fight against the regime, something that he could not do if he remained behind bars. And so, together with Kyaw Gyi, Nay Htet and two other prisoners named Myo Lin Aung and Saw Lin Htun, he hatched a plan to escape.
There was a light rain falling during the early hours of September 11, the morning the five would-be jailbreakers decided to make their move. It was still dark out when they slipped out of the dormitory where they all slept.
At the prison wall, Kyaw Gyi kneeled down and told the others to step onto his shoulders so that they could reach the top and pull themselves up. After several failed attempts, he and Nay Htet switched positions, and the other three managed to get over the wall. Kyaw Gyi went last because he wanted to be the one to pull his friend to freedom.
It wasn’t an easy task, as barbed wire was cutting into Kyaw Gyi’s skin the whole time that he was trying to maintain his grip on Nay Htet’s wrists. Three times, Nay Htet fell back to the ground. Finally, he decided to tell the others to go on without him, before they were all caught.
But Kyaw Gyi was not prepared to give up so easily. Removing his longyi, he lowered it down to Nay Htet and used it pull him up to the top of the wall. In this way, all five were able to make a daring escape.
Despite their success, however, Nay Htet was not happy. The woman who was with him and Kyaw Gyi when they were all arrested two and a half months earlier was not just a comrade, but also his girlfriend. They had fallen in love during their time in the jungle, and now he had been forced to leave her behind.
Fearing for her safety, he resolved to return and rescue her as soon as he could. But the thought of how the regime’s prison officials, with their well-deserved reputation for brutality, might be treating her continued to haunt him until his death a little more than a month later.
Admired by all
Nay Htet was a second-year zoology student at Yangon’s Dagon University when the military staged a coup that threatened to rob his generation of its future. Like so many others, he was determined not to allow that to happen.
A fellow student who remembers Nay Htet’s reaction to the military takeover recalled that he was willing from the start to sacrifice his own life for the sake of others.
“He wanted us to have a good life. He always said, ‘I will live in the jungle, and you can all go abroad.’ He told us that he wouldn’t be coming back—that he wouldn’t come back alive,” said the female former classmate.
Tall and well-built, Nay Htet was nicknamed “Commando” by his new comrades in arms, who were also struck by his fearlessness.
“He was willing to do anything related to fighting. I’ve always been afraid of explosives. I was taught how to plant them, but I just couldn’t do it. But he assembled his own explosives and planted them himself,” said Nyan Gyi, a fellow member of the 96 Soldiers group.
“I always warned him not to be too daring or stubborn. I told him that his overconfidence could get him into trouble,” he added.
He was also criticised sometimes for speaking too curtly. But the fact remained that he was always ready to do his utmost for those who fought alongside him, and so won the admiration of all.
“After he broke out of jail, he could have gone somewhere safe to lie low for a while. But he didn’t. He came right back to fight with us,” said Nyan Gyi.
Zayar Lwin, the leader of their group, said that breaking out of prison only strengthened Nay Htet’s resolve.
“It made him more determined, because he really wanted to rescue his girlfriend and his other comrades left behind in prison,” he said.
Killed just a month and a week after regaining his freedom, Nay Htet was also honoured by the many local civilians who attended his funeral. Although he once told his comrades not to hold a religious ceremony for him if he was killed in action, in the end, they made sure that he received not only Buddhist rites, but also a hero’s send-off.
Resistance fighters, followed by a procession of locals, marched solemnly along a footpath to his final resting place, their faces sad but at the same time full of the same ardour that had defined Nay Htet’s brief existence.
His parents, who he contacted regularly by phone after leaving Yangon, had lost their home because of Nay Htet’s involvement in the resistance. But even after this loss was compounded by news of their son’s death, it failed to diminish a much deeper emotion that they felt at his memory.
“I’m sorry that he wasn’t able to fight more battles. But I’m proud that he died in action,” his father said.
