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Like two of the others who spoke with the New York Times, his name is not being published because of the possibility of retribution he is still on active duty. “Most of the soldiers are brainwashed,” said a captain who is a graduate of the prestigious Defence Services Academy, Myanmar’s equivalent of West Point. That makes more bloodshed likely in the coming days and months. While the soldiers say there is some dissatisfaction with the coup, they regard a wholesale breaking of ranks as unlikely. The cumulative effect is a bunkered worldview in which orders to kill unarmed civilians are to be followed without question.
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A steady diet of propaganda feeds them notions of enemies at every corner, even on city streets. The officers described being constantly monitored by their superiors, in barracks and on Facebook. They occupy a privileged state within a state, in which soldiers live, work and socialise apart from the rest of society, imbibing an ideology that puts them far above the civilian population. From the moment they enter boot camp, Tatmadaw troops are taught that they are guardians of a country – and a religion – that will crumble without them. In-depth interviews with four officers, two of whom have deserted since the coup, paint a complex picture of an institution that has thoroughly dominated Myanmar for six decades. Among them were seven children, including two 13-year-old boys and a 5-year-old boy. On Saturday, the deadliest day since the February 1st coup, security forces killed more than 100 people, according to the United Nations. Since ousting Myanmar’s civilian leadership last month, setting off nationwide protests, it has only sharpened its savage reputation, killing more than 420 people and assaulting, detaining or torturing thousands of others, according to a monitoring group. The Tatmadaw, which says it has a standing force of up to half a million men, is often portrayed as a robotic rank of warriors bred to kill. “But the message I want to give my fellow soldiers is: If you are choosing between the country and the Tatmadaw, please choose the country.”Ĭapt Tun Myat Aung, a Burmese soldier who deserted the military to join the anti-coup movement in Myanmar. Days later, the captain, of the 77th Light Infantry Division, notorious for its massacres of civilians across Myanmar, slipped off base and deserted. That night, in early March, he logged on to Facebook to discover that several civilians had been killed in Yangon by soldiers of the Tatmadaw, as Myanmar’s military is known. The shells, he knew, meant that rifles had been used, real bullets fired at real people.
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Capt Tun Myat Aung leaned over the hot pavement in Yangon, Myanmar’s largest city, and picked up bullet casings.