This Incident Report describes events that occured in Bilin Township, Doo Tha Htoo (Thaton) District, in June 2022. On June 22nd 2022, State Administration Council (SAC) Light Infantry Battalion (LIB) #404 under Light Infantry Division (LID) #44, temporarily based in See Kon Taung place, located close to P--- village, Meh Pree Hkee village tract, Bilin Township, Doo Tha Htoo District, indiscriminately fired one 60mm mortar into P--- village, injuring two villagers. Saw A--- and Naw S--- were injured, but they were not at risk of dying. Later that day,  they were sent to a clinic in L--- village, Mar Lay Ler village tract, Dwe Lo Township, Mu Traw (Hpapun) District for treatment and have since recovered.[1]

 

 

Part 1 – Incident Details

Type of Incident

Injury from indiscriminate mortar shelling

Date of Incident(s)

June 22nd 2022

Incident Location

(Village, Township and District)

P--- village, Meh Pree Hkee village tract[2], Bilin Township, Doo Tha Htoo (Thaton) District

Victim Information

Name

Saw[3] A---

Naw[4] S---

Age

20

17

Sex

Male

Female

Nationality

Karen

Karen

Family   

Single

Single

Occupation

-

-

Religion

Buddhist

Buddhist

Position

Villager

Villager

Village

P--- village, Meh Pree Hkee village tract, Bilin Township, Doo Tha Htoo District

P--- village, Meh Pree Hkee village tract, Bilin Township, Doo Tha Htoo District

Perpetrator Information (Armed Actors)

Name(s)           

Rank

Unit

Base

Commander’s Name

Unknown

Unknown

Light Infantry Battalion (LIB) #404 under Light Infantry Division (LID) #44

Meh Pree Hkee military camp [temporarily based in See Kon Taung place]

Unknown

 

Part 2 - Information Quality

1. Explain in detail how you collected this information.

A KHRG researcher interviewed and received this information from two local village leaders.  

2. Explain how the source verified this information.

The villagers who provided this information to KHRG witnessed the incident.

 

Part 3 – Complete Description of the Incident

Describe the Incident(s) in complete detail. For each incident, be sure to include 1) when the incident happened, 2) where it happened, 3) what happened, 4) how it happened, 5) who was involved, and 6) why it happened. Also describe any villager response(s) to the incident, the aftermath and the current living situation of the victims. Please use the space prepared below, and create an attachment if needed.

On June 22nd 2022, at around 4:10 pm, State Administration Council (SAC)[5], Light Infantry Battalion (LIB)[6] #404 under Light Infantry Division (LID)[7] #44, originally from Meh Pree Hkee army camp but temporarily based in See Kon Taung place [close to P--- village], indiscriminately fired one 60mm mortar shell into P--- village, Meh Pree Hkee village tract, Bilin Township, Doo Tha Htoo District, injuring two of its villagers.

 

A 17-year-old villager, Naw S---, sustained [minor] injuries to [the back of] her head by shrapnel from the SAC mortar when she was bathing at a [public] water tank in the village, at around 4:10 pm. Saw A---, a 20-year-old villager, was also severely injured on the upper half of his right leg when he was hit by mortar shrapnel. Saw A--- and Naw S--- were injured, but were not in danger of dying. [Later the same day,] both victims were sent to a Karen Department of Health and Welfare (KDHW) clinic in L--- village, Mar Lay Ler village tract, Dwe Lo Township, Mu Traw District for treatment. Naw S--- sustained a minor injury and so recovered quickly. Saw A--- received treatment at the clinic for one month and has now recovered.

 

Part 4 - Permission for Using the Details

Did the victim(s) provide permission to use this information? Explain how that permission was provided.

The two local leaders gave KHRG permission to use this information. 

 

        

            

Further background reading on the human rights and security situation in Doo Tha Htoo District in Southeast Burma can be found in the following KHRG reports:

 
Thu, 09 Mar 2023

Footnotes: 

[1] The present document is based on information received on July 30th 2022. It was provided by a community member in Thaton District who has been trained by KHRG to monitor human rights conditions on the ground. The names of the victims, their photos and the exact locations are censored for security reasons. The parts in square brackets are explanations added by KHRG.

[2] A village tract is an administrative unit of between five and 20 villages in a local area, often centred on a large village.

[3] Saw is a S’gaw Karen male honorific title used before a person’s name.
 

[4] Naw is a S’gaw Karen female honorific title used before a person’s name.

[5] The State Administration Council (SAC) is the executive governing body created in the aftermath of the February 1st 2021 military coup. It was established by Senior General Min Aung Hlaing on February 2nd 2021, and is composed of eight military officers and eight civilians. The chairperson serves as the de facto head of government of Myanmar and leads the Military Cabinet of Myanmar, the executive branch of the government. Min Aung Hlaing assumed the role of SAC chairperson following the coup.

[6] A Light Infantry Battalion (LIB) comprises 500 soldiers. Most Light Infantry Battalions in the Tatmadaw are understrength with less than 200 soldiers, yet up-to-date information regarding the size of battalions is hard to come by, particularly following the signing of the NCA. LIBs are primarily used for offensive operations, but they are sometimes used for garrison duties.

[7] A Light Infantry Division (LID) of the Tatmadaw is commanded by a brigadier general, and consists of ten light infantry battalions specially trained in counter-insurgency, jungle warfare, search and destroy operations against ethnic insurgents. They were first incorporated into the Tatmadaw in 1966. LIDs are organised under three Tactical Operations Commands, commanded by a colonel, three battalions each and one reserve, one field artillery battalion, one armoured squadron and other support units. Each division is directly under the command of the Chief of Staff (Army).

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ဆက်စပ်ဖတ်ရှုရန်

ဒူးသထူခရိုင် မှုခင်းဖော်ပြသည့်မှတ်တမ်းလွှာ- ပေါ် (‌ပေါင်) မြို့နယ်အတွင်း SAC စစ်သားများမှ ကိုယ်ဝန်သည်အမျိုးသမီးတစ်ဦးနှင့် ၎င်း၏ခင်ပွန်းသည်အားပစ် သတ် (၂၀၂၁ခုနှစ်၊ စက်တင်ဘာလ)
ဒူးသထူခရိုင် မှုခင်းဖော်ပြသည့်မှတ်တမ်းလွှာ - ဘားအံမြို့နယ်တွင် SAC မှ လက်နက်ကြီးပစ်ခတ်မှုကြောင့် ရွာသားနှစ်ဦးဒဏ်ရာရရှိခဲ့၍ တစ်ဦးမှာ သေဆုံး (၂၀၂၂ခုနှစ်၊ ဇန်နဝါရီလ)
ဒူးသထူခရိုင်မှုခင်းဖော်ပြသည့်မှတ်တမ်းလွှာ - ဘီးလင်းမြို့နယ်တွင် SAC လက်နက်ကြီးပစ်ခတ်ခြင်းကြောင့် ရွာသားများ သေဆုံးခဲ့ရ (၂၀၂၂ခုနှစ်၊ ဇွန်လ)
ဒူးသထူခရိုင် မှုခင်းဖော်ပြသည့်မှတ်တမ်းလွှာ - ဘီးလင်းမြို့နယ်တွင် SAC မှ လက်နက်ကြီးပစ်ခတ်ခြင်းကြောင့် ရွာသားနှစ်ဦး ထိခိုက်ဒဏ်ရာရရှိခဲ့ (၂၀၂၂ခုနှစ်၊ ဇွန်လ)