Sitt Naing stares at the corpse in despair. He lies in the middle of the ashes, his hands tied behind his back. It is charred and it is impossible to recognize its sex. The burnt village gives off an acrid smell. Sitt Naing pulls out his smartphone and takes pictures – there are eight bodies in total. Last May 30, government armed forces soldiers entered here, Hin Thar, a village in Ayadaw township, Sagaing region [dans le centre du pays]. In one day, they burned 23 houses and more than 300 tons of rice, and killed eight people. Two of them were burned alive, according to survivors. Sitt Naing says:
“When I saw this scene, I wondered if the junta soldiers were really human beings.”
Sitt Naing is 37 years old. A former member of the Police Special Branch, an undercover unit tasked with spying on the population, he left the police after the February 2021 coup and joined the civil disobedience movement against the junta. Since May 2021, he has been fighting in Ayadaw in a small resistance unit called Faithful Arrow. He was initially frowned upon for his past as a police spy, but he quickly proved himself on the battlefield and earned his nom de guerre there (Sitt Naing means “conqueror”; as with the other sources living in Burma (Myanmar), we will not give his real name).
After the events of May 30 in Hin Thar, Sitt Naing felt that ambushing junta forces in retaliation was no longer enough. Now he was going to reveal to the rest of the country and the world what is happening in Sagaing. Sitt Naing therefore divides his time between Flèche faithful and the information branch of the resistance. It documents the atrocities committed by the junta and covers the activities of resistance groups – collectively known as the Popular Defense Forces (PDF). He sends this information to the media or disseminates it on social networks.
Sagaing, epicenter of army violence
We could call him a “citizen journalist” but he does not consider himself as such. This work of information is, according to him, an integral part of the fight against the junta. In an environment where the media cannot work safely, people like Sitt Naing provide a vital – though inevitably partisan – source of information about the conflict. He tells :
“What the army is doing here is so horrible that they don’t want people to see it.”
The abuses that took place in Hin Thar are happening throughout the Sagaing region. The coup provoked widespread resistance there, to which the army and militias responded with violent operations. According to data from the organization Data for Myanmar [autre nom de la Birmanie]on August 27, two-thirds of the nearly 30,000 houses burned down by the troops of the