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The number of mass killings in Myanmar has risen for the fourth year in a row, with at least 435 people killed in massacres in the first nine months of the year, an independent research group said Friday.
Amid widespread opposition to junta rule, Myanmar’s military has embarked on a scorched earth offensive throughout the country’s remote border regions following its Feb. 1, 2021, coup d‘etat.
RFA Burmese regularly receives reports of junta troops arresting, torturing and summarily executing civilians they accuse of supporting rebel groups. And amid battlefield losses to ethnic armies and armed opposition groups, the military has increasingly used heavy artillery and airstrikes to target villages, often resulting in mass casualty events.
On Friday, the Institute for Strategy and Policy-Myanmar, said it had documented the mass killing -- defined as the killing of 10 or more people at once -- of at least 435 people between Jan. 1 and the first week of October.
As of Friday, that number increased to at least 466 - including 25 civilians killed by the junta in Sagaing region‘s Budalin township from Oct. 9-20 and six others killed in an a junta airstrike in Sagaing’s Myaung township on Wednesday, according to data compiled by RFA.
The number of civilians killed in mass casualty events so far in 2024 marks the latest in a yearly increase since the coup, up from 379 in 2023, 245 in 2022 and 113 in 2021, according to ISP-Myanmar.
The research group said that the number of casualties has grown as the junta increasingly uses artillery and airstrikes that target houses, schools and religious buildings, in addition to massacres and arson attacks by troops on the ground.
Civilians treated ‘like animals’
In one of the more recent events, around 100 junta soldiers from No.33 Battalion raided Budalin township’s Si Par village on Oct. 19, arresting and executing 22 civilians, including two elderly men, a resident told RFA.
“The junta forces treat people like animals, not human beings,” said the resident who, like others interviewed for this report, spoke on condition of anonymity due to security concerns. “They killed people of various ages, including in their 60s and 70s ... It was so cruel that I can’t talk about it in detail.”
Another incident occurred on Sept. 5 in northern Shan state’s Namhkan township, which is under the control of the rebel Ta’ang National Liberation Army. A junta airstrike that night killed 13 civilians, residents said.
A day earlier, a junta airstrike on a camp for those displaced by conflict in southern Shan state’s Pekon township killed nine people, including seven children.
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At least 176 civilians were massacred in May alone, including 32 in one artillery strike on a village in Mandalay region’s Myingyan township on May 9.
The ethnic Arakan Army, or AA, announced on June 4 that the junta killed more than 70 civilians in a raid on a village in Rakhine state’s Sittwe township on May 19.
Junta troops shot and killed the victims in Byaing Phyu village and burned others alive in an arson attack after accusing them of supporting the AA, residents said.
A woman whose husband and younger brother were killed in the incident told RFA that she wants justice for their deaths.
“I could not see their bodies. I was told by others that my husband and younger brother were set on fire, and all I had left of them was my husband’s shirt and sarong,” said the woman. “I felt such anguish and pray that no one else is made to suffer like this.”
A lawyer, who also declined to be named, condemned the military’s killing of civilians, calling the acts “war crimes under international law.”
‘Strategy of intimidation’
Attempts by RFA to contact junta spokesperson Major Gen. Zaw Min Tun for his response to the reports of massacres went unanswered Friday, but the military has said that it does not target civilians.
Kyaw Zaw, a spokesperson for the President‘s Office of Myanmar’s shadow National Unity Government, said that the more territory the military loses, the more war crimes its soldiers commit.
“In addition to aerial bombardment, the junta’s ground forces have brutally killed civilians during their offensives,” he said.
Kyaw Win, director of the Burma Human Rights Network, said that the junta is using fear as a weapon in its bid to erode public support for the armed opposition.
“This is a strategy of the junta to threaten the people ... to prevent them from associating with the [rebels],” he said. “It’s a strategy of intimidation.”
On Oct. 16, Kyaw Moe Tun, Myanmar’s ambassador to the United Nations, called on the U.N. Security Council to bring a case against the junta in the International Criminal Court, saying it is impossible to hold the military regime accountable for its war crimes in courts within the country given the conflict.
Translated by Aung Naing. Edited by Joshua Lipes and Malcolm Foster.