A 5-year-old Shan child, Nang Sap, was abducted by Burmese soldiers in October 1999. Her body was later found bricked up in a pagoda. Photo: FBR
Nang Sap was allegedly bricked up alive in the pagoda. The bodies of two other children and six adults were also found. Typically, pagodas are repositories for holy items. But the soldiers who killed her apprently sought to bring down black magic and bad luck on the Shan in Homong, the former base of narco-trafficker Khun Sa.
Today, more than a decade on, the girl’s mother, Nang Khi, remains traumatized, unable to utter her daughter’s name.
Nang Sap’s untimely death says much about the Tatmadaw, Burma’s military. The death is another statistic among thousands of brutal incidents over half a century. Murder, torture, forced labour, rape–it’s all in a day’s work for soldiers who, when it comes to brutality, on the face of it appear to rank close to the now-defunct, genocidal army of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.
But it is too easy to label Burmese soldiers as ‘baby killers’, as some critics do, and not look at the circumstances and culture in which good men become evil. Soldiers are, after all, people’s sons, brothers and fathers.
This is one of the subjects touched upon but not looked at in depth in the recently released documentary, Burma Soldier produced by first-time filmmaker Nic Dunlop and Annie Sundberg and Ricki Stern and scheduled to be shown on the US network HBO on May 18.
Beyond the screenplay of Burma Soldier, Anglo-Irish filmmaker Dunlop wonders what makes Burmese soldiers do what they do, what makes them murder little girls.
Nang Sap's mother, 43-year-old Nang Khi at the Wan Mai refugee camp in Shan State. She still struggles to speak the name of her murdered daughter. Photo: Nic Dunlop/Panos Pictures
Nang Sap’s murder in Shan State is just one of numerous cases Dunlop has recorded over more than a decade reporting in Burma. Her death is not in his film, as documentaries leave out as much as they include, but it is just one example of the thousands of cases that human rights organizations have on file, hinting at the extent of the horrors perpetrated by the Tatmadaw. But Nang Sap’s death and the other cases do not shine much light on the ‘why’.
As Dunlop points out, when it comes to Western or Burmese exile media images of the Tatmadaw they are too often simplistic. It is easy to paint the Tatmadaw as black and pro-democracy activists as white. Yet the reality of rank and file membership of the Burmese armed forces is likely to be grey.
Dunlop knows from his reporting in Burma that soldiers are ordinary people often pushed into extraordinary positions. He recalls visiting an army frontline position and recognizing that the soldiers were surprisingly normal compared with the “baby-killer” image he had often heard about.
Armed Forces Day in the new Burmese capital of Naypyitaw. The army is modeled on the lines of the Japanese Imperial Army of World War II. Photo: Nic Dunlop/Panos Pictures
His film Burma Soldier tells of the life of just one of these seemingly normal people, Myo Myint, who joined the army in the 1980s and was seriously maimed during fighting, and cashiered out. After being imprisoned for political work in which he questioned the actions of the armed forces, he eventually fled to Thailand and found a comfortable home in the United States.
But the documentary’s made-for-HBO ‘happy ending’ hides Myo Myint’s continuing nightmares and overreliance on whisky to try to blot out the past, including incidents not included in the film.
‘There are many reasons people voluntarily join the Tatmadaw’, Dunlop told Mizzima. ‘They're attracted to the glamour of being a soldier, the power and privilege it brings and the perceived security and the escape from the poverty that wracks the country. Many national heroes are ‘warrior kings’ including Aung San Suu Kyi's father, Aung San, and he was the founder of the Tatmadaw. So these are some of the role models young men are taught about and encouraged to emulate’.
A Burmese army outpost on the frontline in Shan State. Soldiers are often young, uneducated and subjected to a brutal discipline based on unquestioned obedience. Photo: Nic Dunlop/Panos Pictures
Myo Myint says he joined the army because of the glamour and image, and the fact that it offered a career and security in a country steeped in poverty. He had grown up with the common image that soldiers were protectors of the country. What he found was altogether different.
During the years Myo Myint was in the Burmese army, he witnessed firsthand brutality against ethnic groups, including gang rape of women in the minority states, and the racial discrimination that leads to the soldiers using minority people as forced labour, including portering, mine clearing and road building.
Dunlop says there is a perception that joining the army provides a security that doesn't exist elsewhere. ‘People see the generals, the privilege and power they have, and people are drawn to that’, he said. ‘But many of the officer classes come from military families and the children are expected to follow in their footsteps. These families are isolated from much of the rest of the population and so they don't get much exposure to the outside world–there are options limited by their environment’.
The generals of Burma's military regime on Armed Forces Day in Naypyitaw in March 2007. Lieutenant General Aung Htwe, center, was the commander of the Bureau of Special Operations in Karenni and Shan State. Photo: Nic Dunlop
This privileged ‘other world’ was glimpsed in the opulent wedding of Senior General Than Shwe’s daughter, Thandar Shwe, in July 2006. The wedding, which allegedly cost more than three times the country’s annual health budget, upset many Burmese after a YouTube video of the event went viral on the Internet.
The Tatmadaw is split into two dramatically different worlds. The generals’ rich lifestyle contrasts starkly with the lives of rank and file soldiers who do the ‘grunt work’ and face the dangers on the battlefield.
The Tatmadaw soldiers are a mix of volunteers and forced conscripts, sometimes as young as 11. As Andrew Selth, author of Burma’s Armed Forces: Power Without Glory, points out, Burma’s armed forces grew from about 250,000 in 1988 to 400,000 in 2003, but since that time there have been problems in maintaining numbers. In efforts to stem the drop in manpower, boys are kidnapped off the streets or from the villages to bolster the ranks.
Although the Tatmadaw leadership rhetoric talks of an external threat, Burma has been at war with itself for as long as most people can remember. It has been fighting battles with ethnic insurgents and narco-armies since the country gained independence from Britain in 1948. The leaders of the Tatmadaw, largely Buddhist Burmans, portray themselves as the only thing standing in the way of Burma disintegrating and what they believe is a real threat of invasion by foreign forces. This paranoia was demonstrated in the recent building of the junta’s new capital Naypyitaw with its air raid bunkers, and when US and other foreign naval ships downed anchor off the coast but were prevented from offering emergency supplies in the wake of Cyclone Nargis in 2008.
Call it a siege mentality.
Unity is painted as their raison d’etre. The Burman-led junta believes other ethnic nationalities are inferior. Dunlop says this goes back to General Ne Win, who grabbed power in a coup in 1962, and his efforts to promote an ethnic Burman identity. It also works the other way with ethnic nationalities believing they are superior to the Burman majority as well as other 'lesser' peoples or ethnic minorities. The Burmese army, in ethnic areas, is seen as an army of occupation.
Status and hierarchy also play an important part in perceptions and therefore treatment, Dunlop says. ‘Many societies in this part of the world are deeply hierarchical and all these factors contribute to the kinds of atrocities that we've all heard about in ethnic areas’, he notes.
The enemy - Shan fighter at Loi Tai Leng, Shan State. Photo: Jai Wan Mai
Brutality is the stamp of Burma’s military junta and its soldiers. Dunlop says this attitude appears to date back to immediately after the Second World War, when the country nearly collapsed from the weight of numerous insurgencies. The soldiers and the population were told that these people were trying to break up the country and threatened the survival of the state.
‘The soldiers are taught to believe that they are the last line of defence to safeguarding the unity of the country and this is used as part of the propaganda within the military itself’, he says.
The fact that the founding fathers of independent Burma including independence hero Aung San and General Ne Win and were trained during the Second World War by the Japanese army has impacted modern-day military behaviour in the field. ‘The most striking characteristic from the Japanese Imperial Army is a rigid discipline coupled by total impunity in the field’, Dunlop says. ‘Brutality is not only tolerated but encouraged. Innovation and initiative are frowned on and obeying orders is central’.
The Tatmadaw looked to Imperial Japan for inspiration, according to Donald M. Seekins in a paper, Japan's ‘Burma Lovers’ and the Military Regime, written for the Japan Policy Research Institute in the United States. The Burmese army is largely modeled on Japanese rather than British lines. In 1988, when still in a position of power, Lieutenant General Khin Nyunt commented that they would ‘never forget the important role played by Japan in our struggle for national independence’, adding, ‘We will remember that our Tatmadaw was born in Japan’.
Ethnic minorities like the Karen and Shan who have experienced the Tatmadaw counterinsurgency campaigns in the border areas also claim that its brutal behaviour was inspired by the Imperial Japanese Army.
The Japanese army’s bad treatment of prisoners of war and atrocities in Asia during the Second World War are the stuff of books and movies, a notorious legacy that still troubles Japanese society today. Even pro-democracy campaigner Aung San Suu Kyi has weighed in, while criticizing the modern-day Japanese government’s economic engagement with the junta, noting how the Burmese junta’s treatment of ethnic groups has led to ‘forced labour projects where men, women and children toil away without financial compensation under hard taskmasters reminiscent of the infamous (Japanese-built) railway of death of the Second World War’.
As Dunlop explains, to some extent, Burmese soldiers are brainwashed; that ‘enemies’ are trying to break the country up, but they're also an army that follows orders too. ‘It's easier not to engage with the idea that the people you are opening fire on are real people; abstracting your targets comes much more easily than embracing the idea that these are real people you're shooting at. In that sense the Tatmadaw is no different than any other army. Abstracting the enemy is essential to carrying out the order to kill. It's not that difficult to understand. The traditional antipathy to 'the other' coupled with complete obedience results in this degree of brutality that we have seen characterize the Burmese army’.
Young men with guns in a war zone is a recipe for abuse even amongst the professionally trained, as seen in incidents of US army misconduct during the Vietnam War and in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Filmmaker Nic Dunlop working on Burma Soldier. Photo: Nic Dunlop
As Dunlop points out, the soldiers on the ground see the people as potential enemies, much as the Americans in Vietnam did during the Vietnam War. ‘They can't discriminate. They are young and afraid’.
Fear permeates the ranks. According to observers, soldiers are fearful of their superiors as well as the dangers of the battlefield.
Myo Myint does a good job of describing the fear within the military. There is no security from the lowliest soldier to the very top. Military Intelligence agents permeate all the ranks and so there is no dissent. In frontline areas the common enemy keeps them together and in some cases committing atrocities as part of a group unites the men–like gang rape–which make dissent psychologically very difficult, if not impossible. And anything can happen in the jungle.
The presence of such a network of spies and informants is deeply entrenched, making insubordination within the ranks more difficult. That said, insubordination is said to be a serious problem, according to internal regime documents researchers have unearthed.
Dunlop says he remembers a case where soldiers murdered a sergeant who was particularly brutal to the young boys under his command, and then they escaped into the jungle. The ‘fragging’ of officers is not unheard of.
However, the Tatmadaw mindset should be considered in context. ‘These minorities who are in open rebellion are viewed much in the same way Western governments might look at the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan or other terrorist groups. And because of the general ignorance among the population of the nature of the conflict, through lack of information, the population supported the army up until 1988. The 1988 crackdown (on protestors) using soldiers marked a shift in perception’.
The beating and killing of protestors by soldiers during pro-democracy demonstrations in Burma proper, including during the 2007 ‘Saffron Revolution’, graphically illustrated how political dissidents and even Buddhist monks were just as much the ‘enemy’. No longer was it a war ‘out there’––it was a war against their own people.
When Burmans targeted Burmans, it left many Burmese asking questions.
As Dunlop makes clear, this is not a neatly divided crisis between the army and the people. The divisions have split families and friends, with military families having detractors across the table from those who believe in the army.
Ethnic minority soldiers within the Tatmadaw have participated in atrocities; minority armies have committed crimes as well. Many opposition National League for Democracy members are former supporters of General Ne Win and themselves fought vicious campaigns against minority armies.
The overall picture is far more nuanced and complex than a straightforward morality play, says Dunlop.
‘One ex-soldier I met was convinced that at least 50 per cent of the army supported pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi’, Dunlop says, ‘which begs the question– what holds the Burmese military together?’
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