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Death of Mya Thwe Thwe Khine

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This picture from her Facebook page is now used in posters and protest rallies

Mya Thwe Thwe Khine (Burmese: မြသွဲ့သွဲ့ခိုင်; February 11, 2001 – February 19, 2021;[1] variously romanised as Mya Thwe Thwe Khaing or Mya Thwate Thwate Khaing) was a young Burmese woman who became the first known casualty of the 2021 Myanmar protests, which formed in the aftermath of the 2021 Myanmar coup d'état.[2] Pro-democracy protesters and international groups alike have rallied around her shooting.[3]

She has become a focal point for demonstrators, with her image often displayed by people resisting the coup.[4] Her funeral on 21 February 2021 was attended by several thousand protesters.[4]

Shooting

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On 9 February, 19-year-old Mya Thwe Thwe Khaing had joined a protest rally on Taungnyo Road, near the Thabyegon roundabout in the Burmese capital Naypyidaw.[5][6] Riot police quelled the rally, injuring several protesters in the process.[7][8] She was standing under a bus shelter, taking cover from water cannons, while she was shot.[9][10][11] Mya had been wearing a motorcycle helmet at the time of the shooting.[12] Recorded video from bystanders captured the exact moment she was shot in the head.[11] Subsequent analysis of images from the protest conducted by Amnesty International showed police carrying Myanmar-made BA-94 or BA-93 clones of the Uzi sub-machine gun, contradicting the Myanmar military's statement that security forces had only deployed non-lethal weapons.[5][11] Forensic analysis also indicated the shooting had occurred in the early afternoon, between noon and 1:30 pm.[12]

Mya was admitted to Naypyidaw's 1,000-bed general hospital in critical condition.[10] On the morning of 12 February, doctors unsuccessfully attempted to surgically dislodge the bullet from her head.[13][8][10] Doctors declared her medically brain dead, due to the complete loss of brain function,[14] and advised her family to remove ventilation.[10] As of 14 February, her family had decided to take her off life support,[15] but had not finalised the timing.[7] Prayer services for Mya were held at the Mandalay University of Foreign Languages and Yangon City Hall on 14 February.[16][17]

Significance

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Video of the shooting and a photo of an unconscious and blood-stained Mya were widely circulated on Burmese language social media, with supporters dubbing her a protest martyr.[12] Citizens criticized and attacked two officers purportedly involved in the shooting on social media, although the identities of the shooters remain unconfirmed.[18]

The violent use of force in Mya Thwe Thwe Khaing's shooting sparked national outrage, with celebrities and public figures such as Thandar Hlaing criticizing her treatment.[19] Nyi Nyi Tun, the chair of the Myanmar Motion Picture Organisation, stated "We cannot witness any more Mya Thwe Thwe Khaings" and urged the public to join the civil disobedience movement.[20] On 11 February, Mya's sister, Mya Thado Nwe, publicly addressed media outlets, and urged the public to "uproot the military dictatorship" for the sake of future generations.[21]

Thomas Andrews, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Myanmar, mentioned her on Twitter.[22][23] On 11 February, UN Women expressed its condolences to Mya's family and called "on the military and police to refrain from using disproportionate force against demonstrators."[24] On 12 February, Progressive Voice, a coalition of 177 local civil society organisations, published an open letter to the United Nations Security Council, and cited the shooting of Mya as an example of escalating violence by authorities against protesters.[25]

On 17 February, a 15 m (49 feet) long billboard depicting Mya's shooting was unfurled off of a pedestrian bridge in Downtown Yangon.[26][3] Protesters have also used her photos compared with ones of Win Maw Oo on protest signs, and given worldwide coverage such as huge crowds mourn woman killed in protests.[27]

On 19 February, the hospital in the city confirmed her death at 11:00 local time (04:30 GMT).[28] Her funeral was a major occasion attended by about 100,000 people.[4][failed verification]

References

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  1. ^ "Myanmar coup: Woman shot at protest fights for life". BBC News. 2021-02-10. Retrieved 2021-02-16.
  2. ^ Poppy McPherson (2021-02-10). "'It was her spirit': Myanmar teen shot by police was determined to protest coup". Reuters. Retrieved 2021-02-16.
  3. ^ a b "Myanmar gunshot victim fights for life amid online hunt for shooter". CNA. Archived from the original on 2021-02-11. Retrieved 2021-02-16.
  4. ^ a b c "Myanmar coup: Huge crowds mourn woman killed in protests". BBC. 21 February 2021.
  5. ^ a b "Evidence police deployed sub-machine guns against peaceful protesters in Myanmar". Amnesty. 11 February 2021. Archived from the original on 2021-02-11. Retrieved 2021-02-16.
  6. ^ "စစ်ကောင်စီကို အံတုနေသည့် အလွှာစုံလူတန်းစားတို့၏ သန္နိဋ္ဌာန်". Myanmar NOW (in Burmese). Retrieved 2021-02-16.
  7. ^ a b "Family of young woman shot in head during anti-coup protest say they are ready to take her off life support". Myanmar NOW. Retrieved 2021-02-16.
  8. ^ a b "ဦးခေါင်းကိုကျည်ထိမှန်ခဲ့တဲ့ မမြသွဲ့သွဲ့ခိုင် ကွယ်လွန်လို့ ဆရာဝန်ပြော". Radio Free Asia (in Burmese). Archived from the original on 2021-02-12. Retrieved 2021-02-16.
  9. ^ "Family of Protester Shot by Myanmar Police Agree to Remove Life Support". The Irrawaddy. 2021-02-13. Retrieved 2021-02-16.
  10. ^ a b c d "Teenage protester shot by police in Nay Pyi Taw pronounced brain-dead". The Myanmar Times. 2021-02-12. Archived from the original on 2021-02-18. Retrieved 2021-02-16.
  11. ^ a b c "Myanmar police used machine guns against protesters, says Amnesty". Al Jazeera. Archived from the original on 2021-02-11. Retrieved 2021-02-16.
  12. ^ a b c "မမြသွဲ့သွဲ့ခိုင် ပစ်ခတ်ခံရမှုဘယ်လိုဖြစ်ခဲ့လဲ". BBC News မြန်မာ (in Burmese). Retrieved 2021-02-16.
  13. ^ "နေပြည်တော် ဆန္ဒပြမှုတွင် ပစ်ခတ် ဖြိုခွဲရာ၌ ဦးခေါင်းကျည် ထိမှန်ခဲ့သည့် မမြသွဲ့သွဲ့ခိုင်၏ ဦးနှောက် သေဆုံးသွားပြီဖြစ်ပြီး အသက်ရှုစက် တပ်ထားဟုဆို". Eleven Media Group Co., Ltd (in Burmese). Retrieved 2021-02-16.
  14. ^ "Myanmar: End Violent Crackdown on Peaceful Protests, Ensure Right to Peaceful Assembly". Fortify Rights. 2021-02-10. Retrieved 2021-02-16.
  15. ^ "ဦးနှောက်သေဆုံးသွားသည့်မမြသွဲ့သွဲ့ခိုင်အား အသက်ရှူစက်ဖြုတ်ရန် မိသားစုဆုံးဖြတ်". 7Day News - ၇ ရက်နေ့စဉ် သတင်း (in Burmese). Retrieved 2021-02-16.[permanent dead link‍]
  16. ^ "မမြသွဲ့သွဲ့ခိုင်အတွက် ဆုတောင်းပွဲ ရန်ကုန်မြို့ မြို့တော်ခန်းမအနီးတွင် ပြုလုပ်". Eleven Media Group Co., Ltd (in Burmese). Retrieved 2021-02-16.
  17. ^ "မန္တလေးနိုင်ငံခြားဘာသာတက္ကသိုလ် သမဂ္ဂက အထိုင် ဆန္ဒပြ". Eleven Media Group Co., Ltd (in Burmese). Retrieved 2021-02-16.
  18. ^ "The shooting of a young protester". BBC News. Retrieved 2021-02-16.
  19. ^ ""သေနတ် ပစ်ခံရတဲ့ မိန်းကလေးကို သားသမီးချင်း ကိုယ်ချင်းစာတယ်"လို့ သန္တာလှိုင် ဆို". ဧရာဝတီ (in Burmese). 2021-02-10. Archived from the original on 2021-02-18. Retrieved 2021-02-16.
  20. ^ "မျိုးဆက်များ၏ အနာဂတ်အတွက် CDM ပူးပေါင်းပါဝင်ဖို့ ရုပ်ရှင်၊ ဂီတ၊ သဘင်အနုပညာရှင်များ တောင်းဆို". 7Day News - ၇ ရက်နေ့စဉ် သတင်း (in Burmese). Archived from the original on 2021-02-18. Retrieved 2021-02-16.
  21. ^ "စစ်အာဏာရှင်စနစ်ကို အမြစ်ပြတ်တော်လှန်ရန် ဦးခေါင်းသေနတ်ဖြင့် ပစ်ခံရသူ၏အစ်မဖြစ်သူ တောင်းဆို". 7Day News - ၇ ရက်နေ့စဉ် သတင်း. Archived from the original on 2021-02-18. Retrieved 2021-02-16.
  22. ^ "Tweet of Thomas Andrew". Twitter. Archived from the original on 2021-02-10. Retrieved 2021-02-16.
  23. ^ "မမြသွဲ့သွဲ့ခိုင် ပစ်ခတ်ခံရမှုအပေါ် UN အထူးကိုယ်စားလှယ် မေးခွန်းထုတ်". ဧရာဝတီ (in Burmese). 2021-02-10. Archived from the original on 2021-02-10. Retrieved 2021-02-16.
  24. ^ "UN Women calls upon all stakeholders to listen to the voices of women in Myanmar in response to political events". United Nations in Myanmar. Archived from the original on 2021-02-24. Retrieved 2021-02-16.
  25. ^ "မြန်မာအရပ်ဘက်လူထုအဖွဲ့အစည်းများမှ ကုလသမဂ္ဂလုံခြုံရေးကောင်စီသို့ ပေးပို့သော အိတ်ဖွင့်ပေးစာ". Progressive Voice (in Burmese). 2021-02-14. Archived from the original on 2021-02-14. Retrieved 2021-02-16.
  26. ^ "Face of protest in Myanmar: Social media users launch hunt for girl's shooter". WION. 12 February 2021. Retrieved 2021-02-16.
  27. ^ "Woman left brain-dead after Burmese police shooting is now a protest symbol". The Times. 11 February 2021.
  28. ^ "Myanmar coup: Woman shot during anti-coup protests dies". BBC News. 19 February 2021. Retrieved 2021-02-19.
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