by Thu Thu Aung
Jan 29 (Reuters) – After his son was last seen being transported by the Burmese army nearly a year ago, Win Hlaing says he just wants to know if he is alive.
One night last April, a neighbor called the 66-year-old to inform him that his son, Wai Soe Hlaing, father-of-one and manager of a telephone store in Yangon, the country’s commercial hub, had been arrested in connection with the demonstrations against the military coup of February 1, 2021.
Win Hlaing and the Association for Aid to Political Prisoners (AAPP), a non-profit organization that tracks arrests and killings carried out by the junta, say they traced 31-year-old Wai Soe Hlaing to a post local police.
Then the track got cold. The 30-something has vaporized.
Reuters contacted the police station but was unable to confirm the whereabouts of Wai Soe Hlaing, or the missing relatives of two other people who gave their testimonies.
A junta spokesman did not respond to requests for comment.
Wai Soe Hlaing is one of many people whose disappearance has been reported by NGOs and families since Burma descended into chaos with the military coup in which democratically elected leader Aung San Suu Kyi and her government were ousted from power. Placed since then in detention in an undisclosed location, the winner of the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize is the target of a dozen legal proceedings.
According to AAPP estimates, more than 8,000 people have been detained in prisons or interrogation centers, while around 1,500 others have been killed in the crackdown on protests against the military takeover. . Reuters could not independently verify the data reported by AAPP.
Hundreds of people are said to have died after being taken into custody.
SEARCH FOR DETAINEES
The junta disputes the results reported by the AAPP and accuses it of spreading false information. She did not communicate the number of people arrested.
In the event of an arrest, the army does not notify relatives, and it is rare for prison officials to do so when entering prison. Families therefore laboriously search for their loved ones by contacting and going to police stations and prisons, or relying on information from the local press and NGOs.
A Human Rights Watch report indicates that families sometimes send food packets to prisons; if these are accepted, they take this as a sign that their loved ones are indeed detained.
In many cases, said Bo Kyi, co-founder of the AAPP, the association manages to determine that a person has been arrested, but not their place of detention.
Tae-Ung Baik, who chairs a UN working group on enforced disappearances, told Reuters the group had received reports from Burmese families of enforced disappearances since last February, calling the situation “extremely alarming”.
Aung Nay Myo, a 43-year-old activist who fled the Sagaing region in the northwest, said the army arrested his parents and family members at their home in mid-December and he didn’t know where these were.
He said he believed the arrests were due to his work as a satirical writer. “I can’t do anything except worry every moment,” he said, indicating that his father, 74, was suffering from the aftermath of a heart attack.
Two police stations in Monywa, their home town in the Sagaing region, did not respond to requests for comment.
VIRAL PICTURE
The resistance to the military putsch has shifted in certain regions in armed conflict, with the effect of displacing tens of thousands of people across the country, according to the UN. Thousands of people crossed the borders to Thailand or India.
The clashes are particularly violent in the Kayah region, in the northeast, where a non-profit human rights association has said it deplores the disappearance of at least 50 people. Karenni tries to help the families in their research, by asking people who have recently been released from prison to give the names of detainees they remember.
Myint Aung, a 50-year-old now living in a Kayah IDP camp, said his 17-year-old son Pascalal disappeared last September after announcing he was going to Loikaw to find out the situation there.
In a Reuters telephone interview, he said he was told by villagers that his son had been arrested by security forces. Since then, he has had no news of his son.
Banyar Khun Naung, Karenni’s manager, said the teenager was one of two youths pictured when they were arrested by security forces after saluting anti-junta protesters. Pascalal’s sister confirmed by telephone that it was him.
The photo, widely shared on social media, appeared on an account that appeared to belong to a high-ranking soldier, with the caption: “We let them do what they want before we put a bullet in their head.” This account was subsequently deleted.
Loikaw police did not respond to phone calls from Reuters for comment. (Thu Thu Aung report, with Poppy McPherson; French version Jean Terzian)