Dozens of people, up to more than a hundred depending on the sources, including children, have died in shelling by the Burmese Army on Tuesday against an act of the National Unity Government (NUG)which is declared the legitimate authority of Burma after the riot of 2021, in the Sagaing region (in the northwest), as confirmed to EFE by a NUG spokesperson.
The Burmese Armed Forces (the Tatmadaw) shelled a ceremony of inauguration of an administrative office linked to the NUG in the town of Pazigyi, in Sagaing (one of the main rebel strongholds in the country), and then jet fighters carried out another attack in the afternoon in the area during rescue efforts, said this spokesman.
“They were holding an opening ceremony and, following the tradition, they were serving food to people, so the event had attracted a lot of children,” they told the NUG spokesman, who preferred to remain anonymous, from the ground, adding that the number of fatalities, initially calculated to be at least 50It is difficult to know, since many bodies were mutilated.
Later, the spokesman told EFE, fighter jets bombarded the town again, when volunteers searched for survivors among the rubble and removed the lifeless bodies.
For its part, a statement from the NUG Ministry of Labor released on social networks indicates that the bombings caused “the loss of many innocent lives and injured many more, including children and pregnant women,” describing the attack as “a war crime”.
said ministry brings the death toll to around 100 in his comment on Twitter, while the independent The Irrawaddy stresses that the number could be even higher because, according to witnesses, The event was attended by more than 150 people.
Escalation of military violence
Is about one of the bloodiest attacks of those on record since the Army carried out a coup on February 1, 2021, ending a decade of democratic transition and plunging the country into a spiral of violence and semi-anarchy, with the military controlling barely a quarter of the nation
The NUG spokesman compares the magnitude of this bombardment with the air strike carried out in October during a music festival in the north of the country to commemorate the 62nd anniversary of the founding of the Kachin Independence Organization (KIO), of the ethnic namesake and allies of the NUG, and which he claims left some 80 dead.
On March 27, the leader of the military junta, min aung hlaingwarned that he will “firmly appease” the resistance, lashing out in particular against the NUG and its armed wing, the forces for the defense of the people (PDF), during a military parade for Armed Forces Day.
The NUG, which operates semi-clandestinely, was formed in part by former National League for Democracy (NLD) deputies of Aung San Suu Kyithe government was overthrown by the military, while the PDF emerged shortly after, nurtured above all by young people who joined the armed struggle and were trained by the ethnic minority guerrillas that have been operating in the country for decades.
“Military terrorists are senselessly torturing and killing innocent people in Burma,” denounced the NLD today in a statement, urging the international community to “effectively stop the genocide of the terrorist military regime”.
In line with what was announced, the armed forces have escalated violence recently: at the end of March at least eight people died, including two children, after a bombardment in the state of Chin, while two weeks earlier some thirty were killed near the capital.
The UN Rapporteur for Burma, thomas andrewsdenounced in March that more than 3,000 civilians have been killed, 1.3 million have had to flee their homes and 16,000 have become political prisoners since the coup, including Suu Kyi.
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