Surgeon ponders killing junta soldiers
Doctors on the front line of the revolt against the military junta in Myanmar have compared the injuries suffered by unarmed protesters to those of the battlefield.
One surgeon described reaching a hospital last week to find civilians with gaping gunshot wounds to their heads and chests after what would become Burma’s bloodiest day since the military coup on February 1.
‘‘These were injuries from a battlefield,’’ the surgeon, a member of the civil disobedience movement, told me from a safe house. For his safety, he cannot be identified.
His and other doctors’ testimony coincides with fears of an even greater clampdown by the junta. Aung Thura, a BBC correspondent, and another reporter were whisked off the streets of the capital, Naypyidaw, on Saturday by men in civilian clothes. More than 2250 people have been rounded up since the coup.
The surgeon received pleas for help from a hospital in the factory district of Hlaing Tharyar after security forces opened fire on protestors last Sunday and dozens of civilians were killed.
It took him 90 minutes to reach the hospital through a war zone. ‘‘I saw burning houses and barricades, I heard gunfire and smelled smoke and tear gas.’’
He abandoned his car at the river to cross a bridge on foot, and convinced protesters to allow him through roadblocks. ‘‘Even when I reached the hospital I felt unsafe because I could hear their shots very clearly,’’ he said.
In the operating room, as he tried to save a man with three gunshot wounds to his abdomen, he could hear the gunfire as security forces hunted down activists. ‘‘I couldn’t help but wonder if it would be better to kill off those who were doing the killings, if the only way for me to save more lives was to drop the scalpel in my hand and switch to holding guns,’’ he wrote later on social media.
By Tuesday the hospital put the death toll from Hlaing
Tharyar at nearly 60, while opposition sources have confirmed nearly 250 killings nationwide. The figure is probably higher as grainy videos have showed troops pulling bodies from the streets. Fresh protests were staged in several cities yesterday. Doctors and nurses were the first government workers to defy the coup by staging strikes designed to make the country ungovernable for the generals. Some have been arrested, and many are moving between safe houses to avoid nightly round-ups.
It was too late for many of those brought into the hospital after lying for hours injured outside. ‘‘There was nothing we could do except close their eyes,’’ said another doctor. ‘‘We had to choose which ones to try to save as there were so many emergency cases. That was devastating.’’
On the streets, the military’s brutal strategy is the one it has followed throughout its decades of vicious campaigns against ethnic insurgents: denying them access to medical care and leaving them to die on the streets.
In the former royal capital of Mandalay, a doctor described a world that was unimaginable just a few weeks ago.
She is part of a team treating wounds at an emergency medical centre that has been given refuge by a Buddhist group after the military authorities shut private and charity clinics.
‘‘The junta says that the injured should go to a military hospital in the centre of the city, but no one will go,’’ the doctor said. ‘‘They fear detention or even being killed there. Doctors are threatened with arrest and the junta has ruled that private ambulances cannot carry injured protesters, so they are a target too.’’