Oakland Socialist
Khin Thiri Nandar Soe, a Burmese woman living in the San Francisco Bay Area explains that the Burmese junta is waging a war against the population of that country and that it learned that strategy from Putin. Text of Khin’s speech below this video
I am originally from Burma also known as Myanmar. Very gross human right violations are happening there at present.
Today, according to the Association for Assistance of Political Prisoners in Burma (AAPPB), there are 13613 prisoners in Myanmar. So far 2750 prisoners have been tortured and killed since February 1, 2021.
The military attempted a coup in Burma (Myanmar) on February 2, 2021. The people overwhelmingly rejected the coup and are still resisting to date after two years. The military has degenerated into a terrorist group and is committing crimes against humanity to subjugate the people by extreme force of arms.
They are arresting, torturing, raping and killing civilians. They are burning crops to starve the people and burning whole villages to make the people sick by depriving them of shelter. The people have taken arms to defend themselves. A civil war has started and there is a big humanitarian disaster in the making. The military is blocking humanitarian aid to areas where the people who are resisting them resides. We don’t even want to call them the military. They are just a gag of criminals and only deserve to be called military terrorists.
The military terrorists have a very clear strategy. One side of this strategy is not to fight the armed resistance called the People’s Defense Forces but to fight the civilian population.
This strategy is a typical Russian military strategy placed in the junta’s mind by Russia. This. Russia does not fight the armed opponent. Russia fights the civilian population. The weapons which are killing the civilians have been provided to the Myanmar.
If somebody looked at how Russian conducted the war in Chechnya, how Russia helped Assad (of Syria) survive, how Russia is today fighting in Ukraine, it was always systematic mass scale hitting on the civilian population. This is what the (Myanmar) junta is doing. The junta is intentionally creating a huge humanitarian disaster. This is not a secondary consequence of the war, this is the primary goal of the junta military strategy to create a huge humanitarian burden, a crisis, a real humanitarian crisis, on the other side burden for every single stakeholder in Myanmar who is challenging the junta. What the junta is doing is criminal!
The other side of that strategy is approaching Ethnic Resistance Forces with the carrot of humanitarian aid and saying to them “Hey, if you do even a temporary ceasefire with the junta, you will be able to get the humanitarian aid”. We see a very dirty misuse of humanitarian aid for political purposes in order to break the alliance of forces against the junta. The UN is helping them. .
To summarize, on the one side we have a very problematic Russian military strategy which is targeting the civilian population and on the other side a very, very dirty game of the humanitarian aid, in which the final purpose is to achieve as many ceasefires to enable humanitarian aid so that the junta can concentrate all of its military power to crush the resistance in the Myanmar heartland of Sagaing and Magway divisions.
We are struggling at present to make the public more aware of this strategy. We need international assistance, especially from our neighbors to get around this but we are getting very little cooperation from our neighbors, China, India and Thailand. This strategy could make the unrest spread throughout the region.