Another Face of ABSDF

In late 1972 or early 1973 when I was a 16 year-old boy soldier in a rifle battalion of Burmese Army Northern Command in Myitkyinar I had a rather unsettling encounter with a MIS captain.

It was the last few days of our boot camp and he, as the commanding-captain of MIS (Military Intelligence Service) unit attached to our battalion, was teaching us the one-day-course appropriately titled “Information Retrieval from Captured Enemies” or Torture 101 as a couple of college students among us later re-named it.

The MIS Captain was teaching us how to force the information out of a captured or wounded enemy combatant by a systematic torture. That day all 60 of us the green-grunts were sitting cross-legged on the hard ground in a wide semi-circle around him standing in front of his little office-shed near the battalion armoury and stockade.

Strangely, he had a piercing pair of cold black eyes which were so expressionless unlike normal people as if they didn’t have a human soul behind them. Only much later in the jungle I discovered the wild animals like brown bears have same sort of eyes, the killer's eyes.

“The most effective way is to chop one or both ears off, if the prisoner still refuses to tell you where his camp is or his gun cache is hidden. Of course, only after giving him a thorough beating and if he is still stubborn,” the hard-looking MIS Captain simply told us as if he was just teaching us how to strip a G3 rifle.

“But, you can’t just jump him and chop the ears off.  There’s a psychological angle in it,” continued he. “You have to plant a dreadful fear in him. You first have to tell him calmly that you are to cut his dick off. Only after that you pull one of his ears out and slowly cut it off.”

He paused a while for a maximum affect on us and then went on with his lecture. “I emphasize the word ‘slowly’ in the cutting. So that he would receive the worst pain of his life. A blunt knife is even better.”

“My point is once you shock him by chopping his ears off and make him believe that you’re goona chop his dick off too, he will sing all his secrets away to you. What you have to do is put your knife or bayonet to his dick. He will tell you everything you wanna know. The technique worked every time I used it. I never had to cut nobody’s dick once I chopped his ears off!” 

One has to be unbelievably cruel and really inhuman to become a torturer. Many Burmese soldiers I met and served together were definitely killers but most of them are not murderers and they universally hated the torturers among them. The Burmese soldiers hate the MIS men, period. The MIS men basically were animals as that’s what they had been trained and indoctrinated to become. Like Hitler’s Nazi SS Storm Troopers.

Though I tried my best to avoid any MIS man when I was running a Seafood Importing business between Sydney and Rangoon back in Mid 1990s, I was forced into shady business dealings by a powerful MIS Colonel in Rangoon. He was a known gun runner and notorious drug trafficker. He tried and almost killed me when I simply refused to cooperate. And he basically banned me from Burma for life. He has the same soul-less animal eyes as the MIS Captain I met before in 1973. 

I think I immediately know a Burmese MIS man when I see one.

Recently I’ve been doing long hours of research and writing about 1992 ABSDF Northern Army’s atrocities in Kachin land. And the young ABSDF men who committed those atrocious and sadistic crimes have frequently kept on reminding me of the cruel MIS men I encountered during the earlier part of my life in Burma.

The similarities were shockingly striking and the evidence keeps on popping out here and there as if the perpetrators of those 1992 crimes could simply be the MIS men or MIS-trained sleepers among the decent and also gullible students, the so-called 88 Generation.

The first evidence is the near-simultaneous events of MIS Khin Nyunt’s release from Jail and the direct peace offer from Aung Min, the Union Railway Minister responsible for the ceasefire negotiations with various armed-insurgents, to the alleged-criminals Dr. Naing Aung and Moe Thee Zun. 

Both men were former ABSDF Chairmen and both were being accused as fully or partly responsible for the tortures and rapes and murders of fellow ABSDF students in the border jungles after accusing them as MIS spies.

And Aung Min a graduate of DSA Intake 13 was reportedly once the Deputy Director of MIS well before now-retired Senior General Than Shwe (A pure army man) brutally dismantled the universally-hated MIS and put its head General Khin Nyunt in jail during the 2004 power struggle.

How he became the key member of reformist President Thein Sein’s group of moderates is quite questionable as the reason for Thein Sein’s recent release of Khin Nyunt as one of the political prisoners in Burma.

The second evidence is the sworn-accounts of students detained and tortured by the MIS inside various jails in Burma during February 1992, the same time the animals of ABSDF Northern Army led by the likes of Myo Win a blood-thirsty RIT student were murdering their own innocent comrades.

Former student leader Aung Moe Win, also an RIT student, wrote that during interrogation-cum-torture sessions in the Mandalay Prison the MIS men threatened to call the ABSDF Northern Army men if their student prisoners refused to answer their questions.

And following is the direct translation of Aung Moe Win’s narration of what happened exactly in the Mandalay Prison in February 1992.

“Actually while the ABSDF North killings were happening some of my colleagues from Ba-Ka-Tha (Central Students Union – Upper Burma) had been detained in the Mandalay Prison. Every night the Mandalay MIS men dragged them out of their cells and showed them the photos (of students freshly-killed in the ABSDF’s Pajau camp right on the Chinese border) just to confirm the identities of the deceased.

This is Htun Aung Kyaw, isn’t it? Is this one Soe Win Than’s? Who is this bastard?

My friends had to cry silently later (back in their cells) after seeing the photos of close friends already killed by their own comrades. The photos apparently taken just previous nights were arriving there very soon after every killing; their only logical conclusion was that the MIS men inside ABSDF were directly reporting to MIS in Mandalay, prompt and regular.

If that was the case who were the people sending Mandalay MIS those dreadful photos?  One thing so definitely certain is that they were not the ones who had been accused of MIS spies and already been killed for that!”

The third and most direct evidence is the questionable background of ABSDF(N) General Secretary Myo Win a UTC (University Training Corps) Sergeant from RIT (Rangoon Institute of Technology) and the really sadist torturer and blood-thirsty murderer.

The following eye-witness account is from Soe Lynn a former RIT student and also a former classmate and dorm-mate of Myo Win in RIT’s Popa Hall a boys-only-dormitory for junior RIT students. (Coincidentally, I was one of the three hall-tutors in that dormitory during the 1980-81 academic-year when I was a tutor in RIT just after my graduation from the Mechanical Engineering Department.)

“I have to write some unsettling things about Myo Win (ABSDF-N) from the time when we were just young RIT students. Just something I want you all to think about. I and Myo Win got into RIT same year. In our Third Year we were in the same dormitory too (Popa Hall). What I now want to say about had happened in that year.

One day a guest from Rangoon (City) visited Win Maw (Ye-Oo) and stayed for a while there. Same time a watch was stolen (from Myo Win’s room and the suspect was the city man). So Myo Win grabbed him and searched him all over. He couldn’t find the watch. He then came into my room and told me the whole thing and asked us to help him.

At that time in my room with me were my room-mate Kyaw Zwar Myint (Mogoke) and some other Mandalay students. So we followed him to Win Maw’s room to challenge that suspected thief again. 

Once he saw us and after hearing some terrifying threats from Ba Thaw (one of the Mandalay students) he the thief (his name was Ne Win Soe if I still remember correctly) admitted and pulled the stolen watch out of his walking-shoe and gave it back to Myo Win. He also arrogantly said to Myo Win that he was so dumb he couldn’t find the hidden watch.

That made Myo Win really angry and we especially Ba Thaw was really concerned about his (Ne Win Soe’s) safety. So Ba Thaw said to him that since you gave our watch back to us you do not worry too much and I would send you up to the bus stop. He then escorted the young man out of the dormitory. Everybody in RIT knew how brutal the students could become whenever a thief was caught.

By then it was dark outside. (Between the main road where the bus stop was and the Popa Hall was a large empty field with the Tha-maing College Canteen right smack in the middle.) Once Ba Thaw and Ne Win Soe reached near the Canteen suddenly appeared from the dark behind the Canteen was Myo Win in his full army uniform from UTC and a mob of RIT students.

They immediately jumped Ne Win Soe and bashed him to death. Ba Thaw was basically pushed out of the way by the mob. We all saw it from a distance and couldn’t do a thing to save that Ne Win Soe. 

If you looked back in the newspapers of those days you will find Ne Win Soe’s death notice. That incident was in late 1986 (just over a year before the 8-8-88 Uprising started by an unfortunate incident where young Phone Maw from RIT was killed by a so-called police operation to contain the student riots born out of a tea-shop brawl between some RIT students and the local mob).”

That was a true story as a few independent eye-witnesses have confirmed that case personally. So why wasn't Myo Win arrested and charged for that murder? Myo Win seemed to have apparent impunity even for murder. In Burma only the MIS agents had had that sort of absolute impunity.
  

What the evidence and the eyewitness accounts above were indicating strongly is that Myo Win and some other so-called student leaders of ABSDF might be the MIS agents placed among the real students as the sleepers.

And as a classic case of double-cross they had blatantly and successfully accused the real student leaders like Htun Aung Kyaw and other genuine students as the MIS agents and tortured the false confessions out of them and finally murdered them all.

The scariest thing is if ABSDF North really has been infiltrated and controlled by the Khin Nyunt’s MIS from the very beginning how about the ABSDF South or Central with similar cases of MIS accusations and killing spree there?