BANGKOK. The day before she was killed by a military bullet, the peaceful teacher and renowned poet Myint Myint Zin published one of her latest messages. Like other Myanmar authors, she exposed herself firsthand using words as an emotional weapon to make everyone understand the need to act against the coup leaders. “Take to the streets like mad dogs,” he wrote. And like a dog she was executed by soldiers who do not like literature or dissidents. He had his blood type tattooed on his arm as many still do in an emergency.
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His assassination took place on the same day, in the same city and in the same circumstances – March 3, a shot in the head fired by military snipers – as the killing of another poet, K Za Win, 39, shot while participating in a march. in the streets of Monywa in the Sagaing region and dragged away by his comrades, leaving a trail of blood on the street renamed “Street of the martyrs”. The two knew each other in person, and K Za Win was also close friends with yesterday’s latest victim, Khet Thi, 45, the third of the voiceless singers of this revolution steeped in tragic romance and appeals to sacrifice that break through. among the militants of civil disobedience.
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Khet, the latest in a long list of jailed, tortured and murdered intellectuals, did not fall on the street under gunfire like his friends Za Win and Myint Myint. He died from torture in the prison where he was locked up in Shwebo, another city in the Sagaing. Like the other two, Khet was also quite well known and now everyone remembers him among the same netizens younger than him for the phrases that have become an epitaph of his provocative thought: “They shoot in the head, but they don’t know that the revolution is in the heart”.
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His wife Chaw Su said she was taken to the same barracks for questioning and that her husband was transferred elsewhere, but he never returned except the body, his belly and chest horribly mutilated. According to her, the signs of a macabre ritual conducted by military surgeons to extract vital organs were evident before returning the body to the family. He does not need to explain that they did it to conceal the wounds inflicted during the torture, but from his description it is as if they wanted to purposely remove that revolutionary heart from him. She too is an activist and knows that there are more and more categories such as poets on the list of the enemies most hated by soldiers because they have a following influenced by their art. It is the same fate of writers, journalists, actors and directors locked up en masse within a few weeks.
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Of all Khet Thi, the last poet killed, was the one who most exposed the travail of his conversion from the Gandhian pacifism of the first movement to the struggle whatever it takes. It happened when he became convinced that words cannot pierce the mental armor of the military and that more drastic choices were needed. Until recently, when bullets were not whistling in the streets, he called himself a guitarist, a pastry chef and a poet, not someone who could shoot a gun. But the magnitude of the tragedy unfolding before his eyes made him doubtful of the efficacy of his own beloved art as a winning weapon: “My people are being killed and I can only shoot poems.” “But when you are sure that your voice is not enough – he added – then you have to choose a weapon carefully. I shoot.”
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The poet K Za Win evidently also reached the same conclusions, who gave the emotional story of this protest another epitaph “Rebel in all ways. Save the future ”. But also this example of humanitarian self-denial inspired by Voltaire: “Even if I have different points of view from yours, I will give my life for all of you”.
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With these precedents, the fate of the hundreds of artists and intellectuals opposed to the coup held in cells together with thousands, perhaps 10 thousand, dissidents is now followed with particular apprehension. On the first day of the coup designed to cut off the political head of the League for Democracy, namely Aung San Suu Kyi, three writers, Than Myint Aung, Maung Thar Cho, Htin Lin Oo, and the director also ended up in various prisons in the country. Min Htin Ko Ko Gyi. They were followed by the famous comedian Lu Min and more recently the equally well-known satirist and comedian Zarganar, under arrest since April 6.
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Intellectuals have traditionally and effectively been in the vanguard of ever larger movements such as the present in Myanmar. During the first military regime, a legendary leader of the Mustache brothers, a very popular comedy group that performed in a Mandalay cellar-theater also visited by tourists, summarized in a bitter gag the condition in which he had been reduced – and returned to suffer – the his country. “Par Par Lay – said the artist speaking of himself in the third person – some time ago he went to India to be treated for a bad toothache. The doctor was amazed to know that he came from so far. ‘Don’t you have dentists in Burma?’ She asked him. ‘Oh, yes, we have them, we have them – Par Par replied – But in my country it is not allowed to open one’s mouth’.
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