The attacks by the military against the civilian population and the confrontations with the Arakan Army continue. A defector explains why the attack on the monastic school in which 11 students died – which Pope Francis also denounced yesterday – must have been deliberate.
Yangon () – Two other children were victims of a bombardment by the Burmese coup junta in Rakhine state after the massacre at the Buddhist school in Sagaing two weeks ago. Yesterday the Pope publicly asked that the cry of the little ones “not be ignored”: “We see that it has now become a fashion throughout the world to bomb schools,” commented the pontiff bitterly. These tragedies must not happen.”
But the population of Myanmar has no respite: two other seven-year-old children died yesterday in two separate attacks by the military coup that last year toppled the civilian government led by Aung San Suu Kyi. A Muslim child was killed as a result of a shelling on the border with Bangladesh, while another died yesterday after an attack on civilians was carried out from the army headquarters in Kyauktaw.
According to a report by Thomas Andrews, the United Nations special rapporteur on human rights in Myanmar, the civil war has so far left 382 children dead and wounded. More than 1,400 are detained and at least 142 have suffered torture.
A former Tatmadaw (Burmese Army) pilot claimed that junta soldiers deliberately attacked the monastic school in Let Yet Kone village in the central Sagaing region, killing 11 students. Among the victims there were also five adults and dozens of wounded.
According to Captain Zay Thu Aung, who defected from the army immediately after the coup in February 2021, the Mi-35 helicopters that bombed the school building must not have flown higher than 300 to 400 meters. Considering that the school was surrounded by cultivated fields, “there was no reason for the pilots not to see the children below them,” the former pilot explained. A teacher later recounted that at the time of the attack the children were playing in the courtyard and when they sought shelter a bomb had already exploded.
The Mi-35s are generally used to support infantry, but the Burmese army is using them to suppress pockets of resistance concentrated in the central areas of the country by attacking civilians, Capt. Zay Thu Aung explained. After bombing, the military junta also brings down army troops with Mi-17s, a tactic it cannot practice in Chin and Kayah states “controlled by armed ethnic organizations. The military fears that their soldiers will not be able to survive on the ground in those areas.”
For a few months now, clashes between the army and resistance forces have spread to the western state of Rakhine, controlled by the ethnic militias of the Arakan Army. The Arakan Army had signed a truce with the government in November 2020 following the elections that brought Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy to power. According to The Irrawaddy, the Arakan Army has seized some 36 outposts from the Burmese military junta.
