Never Forget 13th August!!!
Never Forget 13th August!!!
Never Forget 13th August!!!
BLOODY 13 AUGUST
By Khine Mongan
It
was Sunday on 13 August 1967. The day was cloudy unlike other wet
August days in Sitetway (Sittwe), the capital of Rakhine State in
Western Burma. General Ne Win was at the helm of the Burmese junta
ruling the country.
The capital town is situated at the mouth
of the Kalandan River that flows into the Bay of Bengal. Hundreds of
people marched along is roads and streets, each of the protester held a
banner, and cried out “Rice, rice, - give us rice”, “We Rakhine don't
eat boiled rice”, and “Down with the military regime”. At that time the
Burmese junta started selling rotten boiled rice to tackle the
artificial famine created by themselves in Rakhine State.
Each
year, Arakan (Rakhine) produce rice abundantly: in one working year
Arakan harvests enough rice for three years. That August, the rice
warehouses in every township were full of rice. But the Burmese junta
would not sell enough rice to the people of Rakhine State. Disregarding
the local needs, the junta exported the whole supply of rice stored in
the government warehouses to foreign countries. The farmers received
only 8% of the actual open-market price of rice for their rice sales to
the regime. Hundreds of people: children, old people, pregnant women,
workers and farmers died of diseases caused by malnutrition resulting
from hunger. This happened in Rakhine State, also known as Dhanyawaddy
the Land of rice!
At that time I was a student midwife in the
Akyab General Hospital (now, Rakhine State Hospital, Sittwe). That
Sunday was a day off for me. I went into the downtown area to join the
protesters, but I failed to join them, as I did not know the exact
location of the demonstration. So I went to see my family, and my
mother explained what had happened the night before.
The
rice mills and warehouses are on the Satt-ro-gya, a tributary creek of
the Kaladan River. Many people had already gone there to force the rice
warehouses open, my mother said. Hungry people started raiding the rice
warehouses and taking the rice bags away. My 12-year-old brother had
merely collected 3-4 kgs of rice when the army and navy arrived.
The gun-toting uniformed men caught some demonstrators from the spot.
My brother fled and got on to a boat that operated by a rope: he was
swinging from the end of a rope to cross the stretch of water and reach
the other bank. One soldier saw him and pushed him into the water.
Luckily he was able to swim across the creek. He had to hide from the
view of the military and move surreptitiously from one house to another
before he got home at midnight all wet and with about one kg of rice in
his possession.
My mother fearing all the arrests and
insecurity told me to go back to the student nurses’ hostel. We,
students, were not allowed to go out of our homes after 6 pm. I got to
the hostel at about 3:30pm. The military to bring the situation under
control, stopped people from going to the rice mills and storage areas.
The protesters defied the ban, marched on shouting slogans to open the
warehouses. Finally, as the hungry people desperately needed rice and
kept trying to reach the storage areas braving the repeated warning by
the military, the junta ordered the soldiers to shoot. More than a
hundred people, including women and children, were gunned down. The
military just loaded the severely wounded into trucks and nothing of
them has ever been heard. Many of the wounded never reported to the
hospital but took medical treatment secretly for fear of arrests.
It was about 4 o’clock: the Akyab General Hospital was very quiet. The
view of the Kaladan River from the hospital offered spectacular
scenery. The Principal Surgeon’s house and the nurses’ quarters
compound were to the right in front of the hospital. We noticed
truckloads of soldiers on the road. Soon the soldiers rounded off the
roadside, the hospital compound, the Principal Surgeon’s house and the
nurses’ quarters. Everywhere we saw guntoting soldiers none was allowed
to go on the road or to the hospital. The trucks stopped at the
entrance of the hospital one by one. The soldiers, who were standing in
their trucks, got off when we saw the trucks full of wounded people.
Some women ran towards the hospital, but the soldiers held them at
gunpoint. People came running and tried to pull the women away. The
women refused to go back shouting at the top of their voice.
We saw the wounded people were being carried into the hospital, then
the trucks drove away with some wounded people still inside. WHY? HOW
MANY? WHO were THEY? We asked ourselves awestruck. We then realized
that those people were already dead. I wanted to go there to help, but
only on-duty nurses were allowed to go into the hospital. I could not
sleep the whole night, and got up early next morning and went to the
hospital.
There were many wounded people in the overcrowded
surgical ward, the eye ward, the Buddhist-monks’ ward, and the
gynecological ward. They were lying on beds, on the floor, on the
trolleys and there was a long line in front of the operation theatre
and X-ray room. In the gynecological ward, there were no beds, no
mattresses. All wounded people were lying on the floor with no space
left. It was very difficult even to step around. They were all men. The
female patients had been moved to the nurses’ sickroom. It was the
busiest day of my training life: pushing trolleys and wheelchairs from
place to place, from ward to ward with wounded and groaning people. The
nurses, the students, the doctors and all of the hospital staff were
restless, on duty the whole day and until midnight. From early morning,
crowds of people gathered in front of the hospital, looking for their
missing sons and daughters, husbands and fathers. They looked at the
inpatients’ list and dead people’s list. Many people were missing. No
one knew how many people were dead and wounded. The government stated
that only 21 people were killed. The list of the dead only included
those who died in the hospital.
We heard that the critically
wounded, senseless and dead or presumably dead were picked up and drove
away out of the city and buried in undisclosed grounds. Slowly words
came out from the soldiers’ quarters that even many of the people who
gained consciousness and shouting for help in the trucks were buried
alive to ensure that the true story of what happened that day and how
many were killed remains undisclosed.
The Rakhine people each
year remember with heavy hearts the mass killings on that day,
remembering the atrocities and the ethnic cleansing of the Burmese
junta perpetrated ever since upon their own people. The women hope that
if their missing husbands and sons were alive today they would have
taken up guns against the repressive, inhuman and racist Burmese
military junta to clinch freedom.
Syndication
