Mizzima-Oct 20
During his military indoctrination, Kyaw Kyaw recalls, an officer told his class how to avoid a court martial while operating against ethnic armed groups in conflict zones. He advised the recruits to always carry batteries in case they killed a civilian, so they could slip them into the victim’s pockets and claim he or she was planting landmines. “And then you can just get off the hook from charges of murder and killing of a civilian,” Kyaw Kyaw says. “They are teaching that kind of thing, like it’s a smart or right thing to do! Really that is just one small example, like their ideologies are so wrong, against their religion, against the ethnic groups, and everything.”
It would be years later, one month after the coup, when Captain Kyaw Kyaw defected from the military in protest at the seizure of power from the elected democratic government. He took with him critical insights into an organization that is dysfunctional, and in some ways delusional, yet maintains key levers of power in a society shattered by conflict. His personal journey from enlistee, to officer and military doctor, and then to defector has traversed nearly 20 years, juxtaposed to an institution that in some ways seems stuck in time. After graduating high school, Kyaw Kyaw joined the military in 2006 for a mix of reasons. “Back then, military propaganda was a bit strong across the country for young people like us. I partly believed that I could do good for the people while serving,” he says. Another reason was to further his education, given the expense of civilian medical school. Eventually he made the rank of captain as a military pediatrician serving the families of soldiers. Disillusionment with the public service promise came long before the coup, in the first or second year of his enrolment in the military medical academy. There was not much information available on the military’s tactics, neither about the history of the 1988 uprising of protests and nationwide strikes, nor the bloody crackdown that followed. During the 2007 Saffron Revolution, however, Kyaw Kyaw was already enrolled at the medical academy and in Yangon, witnessing first-hand the brutality against monks and civilians by an institution that was supposed to be protecting them. Read more at: https://eng.mizzima.com/2025/10/20/27406
