In a bid to crush dissent, Myanmar army ‘kills’ 28 people at a monastery including monks
As many as 28 people were allegedly killed in the latest shelling by the Myanmar army at a monastery in southern Shan State, an insurgent group claimed on Monday.
According to the reports, the Karenni Nationalities Defence Force (KNDF) said that soldiers shelled the village of Nan Nein on Saturday.
Since the junta’s coup two years ago, Myanmar has witnessed an increasing number of deadly clashes between its military and armed rebels.
The area between the capital Nay Pyi Taw and the Thai border has seen some of the fiercest combat.
In the recent, the army shelled the village around 16:00 local time (09:30 GMT). The military’s air force and artillery entered the village and killed any civilians they discovered hiding inside a monastery, according to the KNDF.
KNDF is one of the numerous ethnic armies that have joined the fight against the military government.
As per their claim made in a video, three of the at least 21 corpses piled up against the monastery were wearing the orange robes worn by Buddhist monks.
The bodies looked to have been shot multiple times. The footage also reveals numerous bullet holes in the monastery’s walls.
According to a KNDF spokesperson, who was cited in the local newspaper The Kantarawaddy Times, “It was like the military forced them line up in front of the monastery and brutally shot them all, including the monks.”
According to a BBC report, the group had discovered the remaining seven corpses close by in the small village.
In what the KNDF has claimed was a military assault on the hamlet, some of the nearby structures and residences were also set on fire.
According to the organisation, the villagers had thought that finding refuge with the area’s well-respected monks might ensure their safety. Before the soldiers came, other villagers in the village had left.
While the details of the recent incident still to be verified, reports say such incidents are not new in the said region of Myanmar, which has seen some of the heaviest anti-military junta protests since the coup.
According to the KNDF, fighting and clashes have gotten worse since February 25 as junta troops have pushed into the Nan Nein region and its monastery.
The junta thinks that Nan Nein’s location on the main road connecting Shan and Kayah states is essential for the flow of weapons to the rebel groups battling them.
The Pa-O, Shan, and Karenni populations are intermingled and occasionally at odds with one another in this region.
In the region, the Pa-O National Organization and its armed branch are very pro-junta. Locals claim that the army has increased efforts to strengthen pro-junta ethnic militias in the area to counter the opposition’s dominance of the territory.
According to observers, assaults and counterattacks in recent months helped set the stage for the escalation on Saturday.
“The Karenni groups have taken some villages and so the Myanmar military is now shelling them,” a village official near the military outpost of Saung Pyaung told the local The Irrawaddy newspaper.
Local relief organisations claim that this fighting has also forced thousands of people to flee their homes.
In order to offer their government some much-needed legitimacy, Myanmar’s military leaders had hoped to hold elections this year.
However, despite using a lot of aerial bombardment in recent months, they have been unable to put an end to resistance to their rule, making having elections all but impossible.
Eight million children are no longer in schools, 1.5 million people have been displaced, 40,000 homes have been destroyed, and the UN estimates that 15 million people are critically food insecure.
According to the monitoring organisation Assistance Association for Political Prisoners, more than 2,900 individuals have died as a result of the junta’s crackdown on dissent.
