The "Falling Stars" of Myanmar

"Words of condemnation or concern are frankly ringing hollow to the people of Myanmar while the military junta commits mass murder against them."

UN Special Rapporteur Tom Andrews 

"While we are singing the revolution song for him [the deceased at a funeral], security forces just arrived and shot at us."

"People, including us, run away as they opened fire."

Aye, funeral mourner, Yangon

 

"An 11-year-old boy, an 11-year-old girl, two 13-year-old boys, a 13-year-old girl, three 16-year-old boys and two seventeen-year old boys, all reportedly shot and killed."

"A one-year-old baby girl gravely injured after being struck in the eye with a rubber bullet. These were the latest child casualties on the bloodiest day in Myanmar since the military takeover."

"Millions of children and young people have been directly or indirectly exposed to traumatizing scenes of violence, threatening their mental health and emotional well-being."

UNICEF Executive Director Henrietta Fore

Anti-coup protesters run around their makeshift barricade they burn to make defense line during a demonstration in Yangon, Myanmar, Sunday, March 28, 2021. (AP Photo)

 Once again, using live ammunition, and according to some eyewitnesses, even machine guns, Myanmar security forces opened fire on civilians protesting the takeover of the military junta now controlling Burma, after the ouster of the duly elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi. Even while promising the protesters that the junta planned to restore democracy at some point, they haven't hesitated to use raw munitions against their own civilian population determined to restore democracy even at the steep price of loss of life.

The UN Special Rapporteur for Myanmar stated that the army was conducting "mass murder", calling on the world to isolate the junta and halt its access to weapons. This, when a member of the UN Security Council, Russia, has committed itself to supporting the military junta and will continue providing it with the military arms deemed a necessity to pursue its goal of dominating the country by force. The junta should be cut off from funding, from oil and gas revenues, repeated the UN Special Rapporteur.

Sunday was the day for funerals as people gathered to mourn 114 protesters killed the day before in the most disastrous crackdown on protesters since the February1 coup. At a service for 20-year-old student Thae Maung Maung in Bago, close to the capital Yangon, the military opened fire and mourners fled for their lives. The Assistance Association for Political Prisoners advocacy group spoke of another 12 people killed on Sunday bringing the total death toll since the coup to 469.

In Yangon and Mandalay where the brunt of the casualties took place on Saturday large-scale protests were no longer in evidence after the Armed Forces Day celebrations and subsequent killing of 114 people. In Mandalay people surrounded a police station accusing the security forces of arson after five houses were burned down. Six children between ten and 16 years of age were among those killed on Saturday. They were, said the protesters, "Falling Stars".

 

Family members and relatives attend the funeral ceremony of 13 year-old Sai Wai Yan, who was shot dead while playing outside his house in Yangon, Myanmar on March 28

 

"We salute our heroes who sacrificed lives during this revolution and We Must Win This REVOLUTION", one of the main protest groups, the General Strike Committee of Nationalities posted on Facebook. Two dozen ethnic armed groups that control swathes of the country took part in heavy fighting against the army, resulting in 3,000 people fleeing to neighbouring Thailand after military jets bombed areas controlled by the Karen National Union militia.

The Kachin Independence Army fought on Sunday with the military in Hpakant, a jade-mining area of the north where Kachin forces attacked a police station and the military responded in an aerial assault. During the parade marking Armed Forces Day, Senior General Min Aung Hlaing assured the country that the military would protect the people while striving toward democracy.

Mourners attend the funeral of Tin Hla, 43, who was shot dead by security forces during a protest against the military coup in Thanlyin township, outskirts of Yangon, Myanmar on March 27.

Absent Warning, Victims Died

"I could see a body laying on the side of the road. As I got closer, I could see it was my brother. I got one more step closer and I could see blood and he wasn't moving."
"I shut my flashlight off. I turned around and I ran for my life in the dark. I went up the first cottage road ... I turned around and looked down towards the road I had just run from to see a little flashlight flashing around looking for me."
Clinton Ellison, Portapique, Nova Scotia

"The more time you wait to give an answer, the more difficult it is to explain why you didn't use the dedicated alert system."
"And it's taken too long for them [RCMP] to provide answers."
"I think in order to gain the trust of the public they need to explain why they didn't use the system and be transparent about it."
"They need to ultimately take the fault for that."
Yannick Hemond, risk management specialist, professor, Universite du Quebec a Montreal

"Somewhere, somehow, they hit a wall."
"It would have been helpful yesterday if someone had said: 'We certainly could have done better'."
"It's important for leadership to recognize that more could have been done."
Terry Flynn, crisis and risk communications expert, McMaster University

"Some are asking questions about difficult senior operational decisions, without considering how little information is available to our first responders on the ground protecting the public in the middle of a rapidly evolving and highly dangerous crisis."
"Early speculation in advance of the investigation findings damages the morale of the brave men and women who responded to this situation, and who are grieving the loss of their colleague and community members."
Brian Sauve, president, National Police Federation

"The original call to the RCMP was to one of our members at headquarters. There was then a series of phone calls that had to be made to find the officer in charge, then speak to the incident commander, have a conversation about the issuing of a message."
"So a lot of the delay was based on communications between the EMO and the various officers. And then a discussion about how the message could be constructed and what it would say. In that hour and a bit of consultation, the subject was killed."
Nova Scotia RCMP Chief Supt.Chris Leather 

Care worker and first responder Alicia Cunningham looks at a makeshift memorial for RCMP Constable Heidi Stevenson, in Shubenacadie, N.S., on April 22, 2020.

Nothing, no explanations, no prevarications change the fact that a dreadful situation was unfolding where a psychotic killer, armed and raging, went about sacking and killing and injuring people undeterred in his killing lunacy targeting neighbours, friends, acquaintances, strangers. This was no sudden act of impetuous temporary insanity, but a well-thought-out act of vengeance for reasons yet unknown by a man within whom a sense of personal outrage had long simmered.

He had assembled a personal armoury of a variety of lethal weapons. A collector of old decommissioned police vehicles had him registering several and having one of them restored to emulate a current model with all requisite markings. From some source he acquired a genuine RCMP uniform. The murderous rampage he set out on was unstoppable and horrendous, leading to the deaths of 22 innocent people. From Saturday night to Sunday noon he tracked and hunted his victims.

Police block the highway in Enfield, N.S. on Sunday, April 19, 2020.  THE CANADIAN PRESS/Andrew Vaughan

Some just happened to wander either on foot or in vehicles into his line of operation as he travelled the 100 kilometres from Portapique the seaside rural town where everyone knew everyone else to nearby the city of Truro, maiming and killing people as he went. The RCMP resorted to posting several Tweets, and an alert on Facebook, but though the province's Emergency Measures Organization asked that an red alert go out, it ran into a bureaucratic hold-up.

A simple alert that would warn residents of the area to remain at home while a hunt for a mass killer was underway would have been sufficient to decrease the total number of victims. The alert would have been sent to cellphones and would appear on television screens. But high-level bureaucracy was more invested in a series of drafts to assure wording satisfactory to RCMP standards held to be more important than warning a vulnerable public.

Nothing might have prevented the first seven deaths of those attending a  house party that the killer and his girlfriend had been at before he returned and unleashed his killing agenda. Attending RCMP officers found at that scene in response to 911 calls "multiple casualties" inside and outside of the party house, the shooter gone. That first Twitter message asked people to remain within their homes, a message received by some of the RCMP's Twitter followers.

An RCMP investigator inspects vehicles destroyed by fire at the residence of Alanna Jenkins and Sean McLeod, both corrections officers, in Wentworth Centre, N.S. on Monday, April 20, 2020. A neighbour, Tom Bagley, was also killed on the property. Andrew Vaughan/The Canadian Press

Gabriel Wortman, 51, well known to the villagers, continued his rampage dressed in an RCMP uniform, driving a replica RCMP vehicle. He entered homes, killed residents, set the homes on fire. Returning to his cottage where he had left his girlfriend tied up to find she had escaped, he set that house on fire along with his collection of vehicles. More burned vehicles would follow during his 13-hour frenzy of death-dealing. There were, altogether, 16 separate crime scenes to account for the 22 people he murdered.

Eventually, nearing mid-day on Sunday, two RCMP constables stopping for gas, happened to come across the killer driving a vehicle taken from another of his victims. And unlike his run-ins with two other RCMP officers driving police vehicles, where he shot and seriously injured one and continued driving to come across another whose vehicle he rammed, then shot to death the woman officer with 23 years' experience in the Force, this time it was he who was shot and killed by two other RCMP.

RCMP investigators search for evidence at the location where Const. Heidi Stevenson was killed along the highway in Shubenacadie, N.S. on Thursday, April 23, 2020. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Andrew Vaughan