Responding to reports of an aerial attack by the Myanmar military that is said to have killed upwards of 20 civilians, including children, when multiple bombs were dropped from motorized paragliders, Amnesty International’s Myanmar Researcher Joe Freeman said:
“The sickening reports emerging from the ground in central Myanmar following a nighttime attack late on Monday should serve as a gruesome wake-up call that civilians in Myanmar need urgent protection.
“The international community may have forgotten about the conflict in Myanmar, but the Myanmar military is taking advantage of reduced scrutiny to carry out war crimes with impunity.
“It continues to kill civilians on a daily basis, using methods such as motorized paragliders, a disturbing trend that Amnesty International has documented in the same area that this attack occurred.
“This would be the latest in a long line of attacks that stretch back almost five years to the start of the 2021 military coup. As the military attempts to solidify power with a stage-managed election later this year, it is intensifying an already brutal campaign against pockets of resistance.
“As it prepares to convene later this month, the Association for Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) must increase pressure on the junta and revise an approach that has failed the Myanmar people for almost five years, since the coup deposed the country’s democratically elected government. The UN Security Council should also refer the situation in Myanmar as a whole to the International Criminal Court.”
Background
According to reports and information received by Amnesty International, people from communities in Sagaing Region’s Chaung-U Township gathered in a village on the evening of 6 October as part of a peaceful candlelight vigil to call for the release of arbitrarily detained prisoners, to oppose military conscription and to condemn a junta-organized election set for December. The vigil took place on the Full Moon night of Myanmar’s Thadingyut Festival, in an area where armed resistance groups are active.
According to people present at the scene, the first attack at around 8pm initially killed at least 17 people including at least one child under five years old. Dozens of people are said to be in critical condition in local hospitals. A follow-up attack reportedly occurred at around 11pm but did not cause as much damage. Both were said to be carried out with motorized paragliders, which make a distinctive chainsaw-like sound as they approach, with media reporting that more than 20 people were killed in total.
The UN’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights said in September that these paramotor attacks typically involve 120mm mortar rounds dropped from the sky, an indiscriminate form of attack. Amnesty International interviewed witnesses to paramotor attacks in the same township in March in the aftermath of a powerful earthquake that struck central Myanmar.
It is not known if the military’s use of paramotors is related to the lack of resources such as jet fuel which the military needs for fighter jets. In 2022, Amnesty International released a report, Deadly Cargo, about the supply chain of jet fuel to the Myanmar military, and has tracked its changing tactics to import the resource since then.
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