31 July 2022 :

EXECUTIONS COME BACK TO MYANMAR BUT HATRED IS NOT THE ANSWER

Sergio D’Elia – Secretary General Hands Off Cain

In the end, the imperative "order and discipline", which for eighty years - manu military - dominated the life of the Burmese, reached the apex of state violence and death, of a state that in the name of Abel became Cain.
After the January 2021 coup, the military junta has dedicated itself to the bloody repression of anti-militarist demonstrations, to the farce trials in military courts and to the death sentences for crimes known as "terrorism" but so vague and broad in the definition that it can include any criticism to the military regime.
Thus, in a year and a half, more than 2,100 people were killed on the street by the security forces; at least 117 were sentenced to death by military courts. After the death sentences, executions also came.
On 25 July, as promised, the military executed four political prisoners, including two very popular figures in Burma, symbols for public opinion of the fierce resistance to the military regime.
Kyaw Min Yu was better known as "Jimmy" and became famous during the 1988 student revolt against the previous military regime. For his pro-democracy activism he had been in and out of prison for a dozen years. He was arrested again last October, at the age of 53, during a night raid.
Phyo Zeya Thaw was elected to parliament in 2015, in the elections that had ushered in an unfortunately short period of transition to civilian rule. He was a staunch ally of Aung San Suu Kyi, but he was also known as a hip-hop artist. His "subversive" rhymes annoyed the military junta that put him in prison in 2008 for belonging to an illegal organization.
Together with two other men, Hla Myo Aung and Aung Thura Zaw, they had been sentenced to death by a military court in secret illegal trials between January and April.
They allegedly carried out "brutal and inhumane terrorist acts such as the murder of many innocent people," according to the voice of the regime, the English-language newspaper Global New Light of Myanmar. They were executed "according to prison rules", the military authorities said, but without saying where, when and by what method. Perhaps they were hanged, if the usual method was followed and now no longer in use in the country after more than thirty years of de facto moratorium on executions.
It was certainly an act of absolute cruelty aimed at paralyzing the civil resistance movement against the military that a year ago, with the coup d'état, extinguished the light in Burma, sowed terror and made a scorched earth for the hopes of democracy, justice and freedom. The family members who, upon hearing the news from the newspapers, had rushed in front of the prison were not allowed to recover the bodies of their loved ones to give them a proper burial. "They killed them and hid the corpses," as common killers do to cover up their crimes, said Thazin Nyunt Aung, wife of Phyo Zeyar Thaw.
Relatives of the inmates had also gone to Yangon's Insein Prison the week before to visit them, but prison officials allowed only one relative to speak to the inmates via video call. It was a sign that this was going to be their last interview.
To the violence of the power constituted in disorder, to the discipline ordered by fear, the prisoners' families responded with courage, determination, the strength of nonviolence. "We must all be brave, determined and strong," wrote Nilar Thein, the wife of Kyaw Min Yu, in a post published on Facebook. It is the strength of the defenseless. It is the gentle force of nonviolence, of those who have no power but do not stop fighting, of those who love their desperate adversary with hope and against all hope. And with that it disarms him.
A year ago, a little nun, kneeling before the police, succeeded at least for a day in silencing the weapons and blocking martial law. On that happy day, the nonviolence of love, good faith and hope triumphed over hatred, bad faith and the desperation of the established disorder. Now, on this sad day when arrogance and the death of punishment seem to triumph, we do not curse, we do not criminalize, we do not condemn these torturers of human lives and executors of death sentences to death. Let us go back to kneeling before them and to invoke, first of all for them, not sanctions and states of emergency, but the emergence of states of conscience, of law, of humanity. Our “Hands off Cain” also applies to them.