Nearly a year after Myanmar’s military was last seen chasing his son, 66-year-old Win Hlaing says he just wants to know if he is alive.
One night last April, a neighbor called to tell her that her son, Wai So Huling, a young father who ran a phone shop in Yangon, had been detained for protesting a February 1 military coup went. Was.
They traced the 31-year-old to a local police station, according to Win Helling and The Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (AAPP), a nonprofit documenting the arrests and murders.
Then the road turned cold. He had disappeared.
Reuters called the police station, but was unable to trace the whereabouts of Wei Soi Hiling’s missing relatives or the two others interviewed for this article.
A spokesman for Junta did not respond to emailed requests for comment and did not respond to phone calls seeking comment.
Wai Sou Huling is among many who activists and families say have disappeared since the turmoil in Myanmar as the military overthrew the elected government led by Aung San Suu Kyi.
The AAPP estimates that more than 8,000 people, including Suu Kyi and her cabinet, are lodged in prisons and interrogation centres, while around 1,500 have died. Reuters was unable to independently confirm the AAPP’s figures.
He says hundreds of people have died after being taken into custody. The public has said that the figures have been exaggerated and that AAPP spreads false information. The junta did not disclose the number of people detained.
look for loved ones
The military does not notify relatives when a person is arrested, and prison officials often do not do so in prison, so families may visit police stations and prisons or seek help from their relatives through local media or Human rights accounts can be trusted. To ask. Group.
A report by Human Rights Watch said that sometimes they send parcels of food and take it as a sign that their relative is being kept there when the package is accepted.
In many cases, AAPP co-founder Bo Kee said, the organization has been able to determine if someone has been detained but not where. Tae-Ung Bak, chairman of the UN Working Group on Forced Disappearances, told Reuters that the group had received reports of forced disappearances from families in Myanmar since last February and was “seriously concerned” by the situation.
In a border town, Aung Nay Myo, a 43-year-old activist who had fled the northwestern Sagaing area, said junta soldiers took his parents and siblings from their home in mid-December and did not know was where they were.
He believes that he was detained because of his work as a satirical writer. Among them is his 74-year-old father, who was disabled by a stroke.
Aang told Myo, “I can’t do anything but worry all the time.”
Two police stations in his hometown of Moniva town in Sagaing area did not respond to phone calls seeking comment.
In some areas, resistance to the junta has turned into conflict, with thousands fleeing across the border in Thailand and India, with thousands displaced across the country, according to the United Nations.
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In northeastern Kaya State, where fighting has been fierce, Banar Khun Naung, director of the non-profit Kareni Human Rights Group, said at least 50 people are missing.
The group is trying to help find the families, asking recently released prisoners about any names they remember.
“The families of the missing are in great pain especially mentally, as it is not known where their loved ones are,” he said.
Myint Aung, in his mid-50s and now living at a camp for internally displaced people in Kaya, said his 17-year-old son, Pascal, went missing in September.
Myint Aung said the teenager told her father that she was on her way to her home in the state capital, Loikaw, to investigate the situation, but never returned.
Instead, he was detained by security forces, Myint Aung told Reuters over the phone, local villagers told him. When he went to the police station to deliver food, he saw the soldiers guarding the area and fled.
Since then, Myint Aung has heard nothing of his son, but the rights group told him he was no longer at the police station, citing conversations with several people recently freed. Reuters was unable to independently verify this information.
Banyar Khun Naung, director of Kareni Rights Group, said the teen was one of two youths shown saluting the “Hunger Games” by protesters as they kneeled on a roadside and detained, by a cop. He was beaten with a rope. In an image widely circulated on social media. His sister confirmed by phone that it was Pascal.
The photo appeared in a viral post from an account that appears to belong to a high-ranking soldier, with the caption, “While letting them do what they want before we put bullets in their heads.” The account was later deleted and Reuters could not reach its owner for comment.
“He is an underage civilian boy and has done nothing wrong,” said his father, Myint Aung.
Police in Loikav did not respond to phone calls from Reuters seeking comment.
Wai So Hling’s family in Yangon told their four-year-old daughter that her father was working remotely. Sometimes, Vin Hluing said, she grumbles about him: “My dad’s gone too long.”
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