The aftermath of the junta airstrike on Pa Zi Gyi, a village in Sagaing Region’s Kanbalu Township, on April 11, 2023
Mizzima
The Myanmar junta committed 86 mass killings in 2023, nearly twice the number they committed the previous year, according to the National Unity Government (NUG).
The NUG documented 86 mass killings in 2023, up from 44 in 2022, causing the death of 1,342 civilians.
This has continued in the first few days of 2024. In early January, for example, five civilians were killed including a child, as a junta jet launched two airstrikes on a village in Sagaing Region’s Taze Township.
Rakhine areas are experiencing airstrikes on an almost daily basis as the junta reacts to losses there. Junta airstrikes on a resistance-controlled village near Khampat killed 17 people, including nine children, on the morning of 7 January.
The town of Kawlin in Sagaing Region, was liberated by a combined force of the Kachin Independence Army (KIA) and People’s Defence Force (PDFs) in November and is now being administered by the NUG and nearby junta bases have been firing artillery into the town which has killed civilians and displaced people.
The shelling of Kawlin’s market on 2 January killed six people, just days after four people including two children were killed in junta artillery attacks. Furthermore, the junta is blocking the supply of food and other essentials into the town.
According to the campaign group Progressive Voice, none of this should be a surprise, not only because of the recent and long-term history of the Myanmar military’s war crimes and crimes against humanity, but also its explicit threats.
Progressive Voice points out that during talks between the junta and the Three Brotherhood Alliance on 23 December in Kunming, China, Lieutenant-General Min Naing of the junta’s so-called Peacemaking Negotiation Committee threatened the resistance groups saying“ Even if you can militarily seize towns and villages in ethnic areas, your regions will never be peaceful. We will always carry out air raids using the sophisticated weapons we have.”
The junta has no compulsions against perpetrating atrocity crimes and displacing civilians as it desperately tries to assert its diminishing power. According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), there are over 2.3 million people who have been displaced since the junta’s coup attempt, bringing the total to 2.6 million. However, according to Progressive Voice, given OCHA’s lack of access on the ground, the real numbers are almost certainly much higher.
It believes that as the resistance forces make more gains, the junta’s retaliation will also only grow, thus even further increasing the number of displaced population. The documented massacres, airstrikes, and other forms of collective punishment such as weaponization of aid will only continue to increase.
It is imperative therefore that humanitarian aid from international actors reaches these populations via the trusted networks and civil society organisations that have been on the frontline in liberated and contested areas to deliver such assistance, according to Progressive Voice.
It says that is because such networks and organisations have the legitimacy, expertise, capacity, trust of communities in need, and access to border regions and beyond, including central parts of the country, via cross-border and localised channels that the junta and UN agencies, which partner with the junta, simply do not. Such genuine locally led aid provision must be recognized and scaled up.
