Warning: Graphic Content
While anti-regime resistance groups and ethnic rebel armies nationwide treat their prisoners of war humanely, the Myanmar junta’s forces continue their atrocities including brutal and arbitrary executions of not only resistance detainees but also civilians, including children and women, in acts that violate the Geneva Conventions and constitute war crimes.
During their recent major anti-regime operations, many ethnic armies and resistance groups humanely spared the lives of several thousand detained junta soldiers and their family members.
The resistance groups provided proper treatment to injured detainees, in accordance with international law.
However, in the repeated absence of any meaningful action by the UN and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), the junta and its barbaric troops are brazenly continuing the killing and torturing of detained combatants and civilians in the cruelest ways imaginable, including beheading and burning them alive, and mutilation.
In a recent example, two young anti-regime fighters from Yaw Defense Forces (YDF) were burned alive in public by regime forces and allied pro-junta Pyu Saw Htee militias in a pro-military village in Gangaw Township, Magwe Region.
A video of the crime, which occurred about three months ago, went viral on social media this week, drawing fury and sorrow from people around the country.
The video footage shows two resistance detainees being forced to admit that they are members of the People’s Defense Force and to refer to themselves as “dogs” by the junta troops and militias who are standing around them. The two are seen being tortured. Their hands and legs are bound by iron chains as they are dragged to a tree.
The two were burned alive in front of an audience of villagers after being suspended from a tree. In another recently reported incident, a different but equally barbaric junta military unit killed three displaced women detainees, one of them pregnant and the other two with disabilities, and three children aged 3, 5 and 7 after using them as human shields while advancing to Shadaw Township, Karenni (Kayah) State on Monday.
On the same day, two junta fighter jets dropped two bombs and unleashed machine-gun fire on a school—a globally prohibited target—in Dawsieei Village in Karenni State’s Demoso Township, while many schoolchildren were studying. Four children were killed and many others injured. Some 90 percent of the school’s buildings were destroyed.
Prisoners of war must be humanely treated without having their health seriously endangered while in custody, according to the Geneva Conventions. Killing or wounding a combatant who has laid down their arms or no longer has any means of defense is a war crime under the charter.
Killing or taking civilians as hostages, as well as the deliberate bombardment of buildings dedicated to education, are also war crimes.
Since the 2021 military coup, the Myanmar junta’s forces have frequently violated international laws by committing numerous atrocities including massacres and brutal killings of detained combatants and civilians, as well as burning villages and bombing civilian areas, schools, hospitals and religious sites across the country.
For the most part, the treatment of junta troops by anti-regime resistance groups stands in total contrast to the regime’s brutality.
As part of its recent operation attempting to seize Loikaw, the capital of Karenni State, the Karenni Nationalities Defense Force (KNDF) on Nov. 13 spared the lives of over 30 junta troops who were outgunned and trapped in a building at Loikaw University.
A KNDF video shows the group’s deputy commander, Marwi, and his comrades giving a chance to the trapped, injured soldiers to raise the white flag without executing them. Later, the KNDF troops evacuated junta troops from a site being bombarded by junta artillery units and provided treatment to injured soldiers.
“We have shown magnanimity. They have a right to life,” Marwi said in an exclusive interview with The Irrawaddy in November last year.
During the successful, major anti-regime offensive Operation 1027 launched by the Brotherhood Alliance of ethnic armies across northern Shan State, the alliance forces demonstrated their humanity by giving opportunities to junta troops at many military strongholds, including several command headquarters, to raise white flags, and spared the lives of several thousand junta troops including around seven brigadier generals.
The ethnic armies also released all detained soldiers so they could return to their homes.
In its ongoing large-scale offensive across northern Rakhine State in western Myanmar, the Arakan Army (AA), a member of the Brotherhood Alliance, has given chances to all junta strongholds to raise white flags before they rout the bases.
The AA has also spared the lives of several hundred regime forces during its operation.
In response to the recent junta atrocities—the burning alive of the two resistance detainees, the bombardment of the Karenni school and the massacre of the six Karenni displaced civilians—KNDF deputy commander Marwi wrote in a Facebook post on Wednesday: “Don’t let our humanity be damaged by anything.
“We hate this terrorist military. We feel deeply hurt by this terrorist organization. And we want to tear them into pieces. We could treat them as befits their cruelty. We now have the capability to act like them. But we don’t do so, because we are not like them [the regime troops],” Marwi said.
He added, “We have our own law, our own path and our own beliefs. No one can destroy us.”
In reality, in its daily, relentless brutality against its own people, the regime’s military has shown that it is nothing more than a terrorist organization, while the nationwide anti-regime resistance groups are behaving like professional armies, complying with their own rules of engagement as well as international law.
