‘Kill all you see, whether children or adults’
September 16, 2020 · By Melina Delkic for www.nytimes.com
Pvt. Myo Win Tun and Pvt. Zaw Naing Tun.
‘Kill all you see, whether children or adults’
Two soldiers from Myanmar have publicly confessed to rape, executions and mass burials, in what United Nations officials say was a genocidal campaign against the country’s Rohingya Muslim minority. One of the men, Pvt. Myo Win Tun, said he was ordered by his commanding officer: “Shoot all you see and all you hear.”
The soldiers’ video testimony, shared with international prosecutors, is the first time members of the Tatmadaw, as Myanmar’s military is known, have admitted to the brutal mass killings and erasures of entire villages, adding weight to pending International Criminal Court cases.
Our reporters said details in the soldiers’ testimonies aligned with satellite photos and accounts from witnesses and survivors. Taken as a whole, they show an orchestrated campaign to exterminate an ethnic minority group. Myanmar has repeatedly denied the allegations.
Step back: “There can be, after hearing 100 stories about a village being burned to the ground, a kind of sameness to the stories that detracts from the horror,” Hannah Beech, The Times’s Southeast Asia bureau chief, told us. “To now have the accounts of the people who did it, who were ordered to do it, I think it will make some people in the camps feel some kind of closure or justice.”
