|
Overcoming his trepidation, Thant Moe Nyunt started going to the protests. The first ones he attended were free of violence. Then he was at a demonstration that turned violent. Soldiers fired tear gas and stun grenades. He heard gun shots. People started running, but he couldn’t. His legs wouldn’t move. “Fear overtook me,” he says. He dropped to his knees. He looked around and saw people much younger than him—including teenage girls—holding up shields and assisting tear-gassed protesters. “They were so brave,” he says. “I breathed and tried to calm down. I asked them why they were so brave.”
The protesters he approached were supportive and said that he had to build up a resistance to fear, as they had. They told him they were dealing with another emotion: anger. They were so enraged that they wanted to drop their shields and attack the soldiers. But they knew that would be counterproductive. “We have to win the war,” one told him. He realized that their desire for democracy allowed them to keep their emotions in check. If they could do that with anger, he could do it with fear. “They wanted to win this war and not not just this battle,” he says. “So that’s how they find their calmness. And that’s how they have been, out on the street every day, holding the shields, being closest to the danger.”
With each foray to a protest, it became easier for him. “But whenever you see a person shot,” he adds, “it’s not easier.”
As Thant Moe Nyunt points out in a yet-to-be released interview with the Insight Myanmar podcast, he and his fellow doctors in this clandestine network are accustomed to blood, but it was shocking for them to deal with gunshots. In ordinary times, there is not much gun violence in Yangon. Bullet wounds were new to the medics. “There was a lot of blood everywhere,” he recalls, “nothing like on the operation table or anything that we have ever seen before. But, okay, this is a gunshot. What am I going to do? We actually prepared for this. We have online seminars on how to deal with gunshot wounds. But when you see it in front of your face, like everyone’s shocked, we don’t know what to do. Okay, so stop the bleeding and send them off to a real hospital where they can do actual surgery.”
He is convinced that some soldiers at the protests were aiming at the heads of protesters and shooting to kill. In some instances, the protesters were not allowed to collect the bodies of their fallen comrades. Instead, the military or the police dragged the corpses away: “They dispose of the body. They just burn it without the permission of the family. There’s just a short notification or a phone call to the family: ‘your son or your daughter—now we are going to cremate them.’ Nothing so much as a goodbye or anything.”
In a somber voice coming over an internet connection that keeps dropping, Thant Moe Nyunt tells me that he doesn’t know how many people he has witnessed shot dead by the government troops. Five, maybe 10. Referring to himself and his fellow medics, he says,”We promised we wouldn’t count,” he says. A promise not to tally the dead? He knows that sounds odd, and he explains: “We are seeing deaths every day. We don’t count the dead. We’re trying to move and mobilize people every day. We try to refrain from bringing news of death from one area to another. There are already people counting and keeping track of the deaths. That’s not for us. And some faces of the dead are not even recognizable. We don’t know who they are. We’re focused on helping people. We get lost in that process.”
As the protests have continued, there has been widespread talk within Myanmar of the remnants of the deposed democratic government standing up an armed force that would represent many of the country’s ethnic groups, and Thant Moe Nyunt and other health care workers have discussed how their underground network could become part of that. What structures will be needed? How can trusted channels of communication be established. Much of the country is waiting to see if such an army arises—and to see if the opposition will appoint a defense minister who can create and lead this force. Resistance members across the country are readying themselves for such a development and even contemplating offensive strikes against the junta. “My job now is to be a combat medic,” Thant Moe Nyunt says. “On that day, they will let me know if I am needed. Then I will have to do my job.”
ABOUT UNITED TO END GENOCIDE