The ‘Apple’ that fell in 44th street
The fatal fall of Wai Wai Myint—or “Apple” to her friends—was testament to her refusal to give in to injustice
In early August, 29-year-old Wai Wai Myint and her 35-year-old husband Soe Myat Thu decided to leave Yangon for a short trip to Mandalay and Pyin Oo Lwin.
The couple, who had recently recovered from Covid-19, just wanted a break from the stress of life in Myanmar’s largest city, where post-coup political tensions and anxiety over the third wave of the pandemic seemed to be coming to a head.
They took their much-needed vacation and were due to return to Yangon by plane on August 10. However, when they learned that their flight would be delayed until the afternoon, they decided to rent a car the day before so they could get back to Yangon by morning. It proved to be a fateful decision.
Just hours after they arrived at their home on 45th Street at around 9am, Wai Wai Myint—known to her friends and family as “Apple”—would be lying dead in a nearby alleyway.
After resting from their journey, Wai Wai Myint went out at around 3pm to meet with friends who lived a short distance away on 44th Street, according to her husband.
“She took 10 or 15 thousand kyat with her to give to her friends. It was soon after she left that it happened,” he recalled.
“I can’t help but blame myself. If only we taken the plane, we wouldn’t have arrived until 6pm,” he said as he tried to make sense of the tragic events of that day.
Lost hope
Soe Myat Thu learned about his wife’s death on social media.
There were reports that five people had fallen from the rooftop of a three-storey apartment building on 44th Street. The details were unclear, but it appeared that they had been trying to escape from a raid by junta troops looking to arrest members of the anti-coup resistance movement.
It was believed that the 50-foot fall had left at least some of the wanted activists dead. Photos shared on Facebook showed seemingly lifeless bodies lying in an alley behind No. 38, 44th Street, including one of a woman in a blue and yellow dress, like the one worn by Snow White in the classic Disney movie.
It was the sight of this dress that shook Soe Myat Thu to the core.
“I kept hoping that it wasn’t her, but at the same time, I could see that the woman in the photo was wearing the exact same dress as my wife,” he said.
Even in the face of this evidence, he couldn’t quite bring himself to believe that it was Wai Wai Myint. He posted something on Facebook to see if he could get more information, and it slowly began to sink in that it was true: his wife was dead.
But this did not end his quest for some glimmer of hope. The following morning, he contacted a doctor he knew at Yangon General Hospital to ask if she had been admitted there. When this failed to yield any new leads, he went directly to the hospital’s emergency department, only to be told that they hadn’t seen any patients fitting Wai Wai Myint’s description.
The Facebook post said there was one person barely alive at the hospital. I couldn’t help but hope it was my wife. She was always a lucky person
He then went from one cemetery to another, beginning with the Kyu Chaung Cemetery in Shwepyithar Township, where the military often takes the bodies of its victims. Next he went to the Kyi Su Cemetery in South Dagon, and then the Yay Way Cemetery in North Okkalapa.
As his grim search continued, he read on Facebook that the five people who had fallen from the building the day before had all been taken to the 1,000-bed military hospital in Mingaladon Township, where one was said to still be clinging to life.
“The post said there was one person barely alive at the hospital. I couldn’t help but hope it was my wife. She was always a lucky person,” said Soe Myat Thu.
But the thought that he might see Wai Wai Myint alive again proved short-lived. Friends at the hospital confirmed that she had died. Four hours later, he would see this with his own eyes when he went to identify her.
After making a futile request for permission to take her body, which was tightly wrapped in white cloth, for burial (she had often said that she didn’t want to be cremated), he was denied another last wish: to keep her ashes.
“We couldn’t take her body home. And we couldn’t have her ashes,” he recalled sadly.
“They said that they couldn’t make any exceptions—that everything had to be done according to the orders from the higher ups.”
‘A peculiar girl’
He still hasn’t told their five-year-old daughter, Nan Hteik Yati, what happened to her mother.
A gemstone dealer by profession, Wai Wai Myint was often away on business. Perhaps that is where their daughter thinks she is now, Soe Myat Thu suggested, before adding that that may no longer be the case.
“I think she found out about her death this morning while we were praying with the monks. She started crying while she was praying,” he said.
Wai Wai Myint was a devoted mother who would only bend her will to please their daughter, Soe Myat Thu recalled, remembering his wife as the sort of person who would never give up in a fight.
“When we argued, she would only start talking to me again if our daughter told her to,” he said.
Wai Wai Myint had lost both of her parents—her father when she was just a child, and her mother while she was in university.
Perhaps it was this that made her so fiercely independent, and at the same time protective towards those who had suffered some injustice, according to some of her closest friends.
“Many people called her Apple. She was such a peculiar girl. She couldn’t stand injustice. She was fierce, and tall—she always wore high heels,” said Htet Arkar Kyaw, a former classmate.
“By fierce, I don’t mean she fought with or bullied people. She was a brave girl. Everyone at school knew that. She used to fight with teachers known to act like dictators with students,” he recalled.
An honours graduate with a degree in English language from Dagon University, she always spoke up when she had to.
“She would always ask the teachers questions, and never gave up until she got an answer that satisfied her. And she was never afraid to tell the truth,” said her close friend Soe Soe.
Seen as “mouthy” by some, to those who really knew her, she was best known for being always ready to come to the aid of those in need, Soe Soe added.
Her husband said this applied as much to strangers as to friends.
“There were many times when she would yell at restaurant managers for scolding waiters,” he said. “She always stood on the side of the weak.”
‘No interest in politics’
Until the coup in February, however, Wai Wai Myint’s strong sense of justice never really extended to the political sphere.
As relatively well-off members of Myanmar’s middle class, she and her husband had friends who supported both the now-ousted National League for Democracy and the army’s proxy party, and they felt no desire to pick sides.
“We weren’t interested in politics at all before the coup. We weren’t on either side,” said Soe Myat Thu, noting that he and his wife both preferred to put most of their energy into their work, which in his case was running a private dental clinic.
But that changed just over a week after the military takeover, when a young protester in Naypyitaw became the first casualty of the newly installed regime’s brutal efforts to crush opposition to its rule.
Mya Thwe Thwe Khine was just 19 years old when she was shot in the head during an anti-coup demonstration in the capital on February 9. Her subsequent death a few days later made a deep impression on Wai Wai Myint.
“It shattered her when Mya Thwe Thwe Khine died,” Soe Myat Thu said about the change in his wife’s political views.
Over the ensuing months, she joined many protests, even when the junta was massacring dozens or even hundreds of civilians on a daily basis. She did so against her husband’s wishes, and eventually stopped telling him what she was doing, he said.
Much of her activity involved cooking and donating food to protesters, according to her friend Soe Soe. In April, she was briefly detained for her involvement in the resistance movement.
She’d always say that she wanted to swap places with the people who died. She just couldn’t stand injustice
During her detention, she suffered a spinal injury after she was slapped and kicked by her captors. But more than that, it pained her that she was released while others were forced to remain behind bars.
“She wasn’t happy, because only she and a few other people were freed. She felt guilty about that. She’d come to me and cry about it,” said Soe Soe.
“She’d always say that she wanted to swap places with the people who died. She just couldn’t stand injustice,” she added.
Through her work in the movement, she made many new friends, including those who were with her on the day she died. According to the junta, Wai Wai Myint was guilty of supporting a group of youths who were making explosives.
Soe Myat Thu said he didn’t know any of the people she was with when the apartment she was in was raided. The four others who fell that day were all young men.
In Soe Myat Thu’s mind, there is no doubt about who is responsible for his wife’s death. She herself had told him that she would take her own life before she allowed herself to be captured and tortured again.
“I’m not the only one crying now. It’s all the system’s fault. My wife wouldn’t have had to die if it wasn’t for that,” he said, laying the blame for her death squarely on the shoulders of Myanmar’s military rulers.
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Tragedy strikes again, as the bringers of death put the savers of lives in their sights
Last Sunday’s murder of student nurse Thinzar Hein highlights the coup regime’s total disregard for human life
Thinzar Hein and her friend Aye Aye were resting under a tree after treating three injured protesters. They could hear gunshots nearby and knew they would have to cut their break short. There would soon be others in need of their assistance.
This was how they lived now—trying to find a moment’s peace in all the mayhem, keeping their heads down as the bullets flew past, saving as many lives as they could.
They were both members of an emergency medical team in Monywa, the largest city in Sagaing region. Thinzar Hein, who was a second-year nursing student, had left her home against her parents’ wishes to join the movement against military rule. She had met Aye Aye, who at 23 was three years older than her, at an anti-coup rally in February.
They had spent many hours together, tending to the wounded or collecting the bodies of the dead. They knew they were risking their lives every time they entered one of the killing zones, where soldiers shot at anything that moved.
Thinzar Hein wrote on her social media page that she didn’t want anybody to take the same risk for her sake.
“Don’t bother with my body if I fall. Just help the others,” she wrote in a March 14 post.
But these are not the words Aye Aye (whose name has been changed for her security) will remember her friend by. “Sister, I don’t want food. I just want a cold drink,” she said, moments before soldiers suddenly appeared and shot her in the head.
Another bullet went through Aye Aye’s shoulder as she sat next to her friend, whose now lifeless body slumped forward and fell into the street. There was no way to save her amid the hail of bullets that just kept coming, she said.
Taking a stand
Thinzar Hein’s parents told her not to go, but she went anyway.
Her father was reportedly a member of the Union Solidarity and Development Party, the army-backed party that had suffered a humiliating defeat in last year’s election. He disapproved of the protests against the February 1 coup, but she was determined to join others who opposed the regime. She left home because she wanted to stand on her own two feet.
She said as much during a speech that she delivered in front of Monywa’s clock tower on February 22, the day of the “five twos” (22/2/2021) general strike that marked the start of an effort to turn weeks of protests around the country into a nationwide uprising.
By this time, public employees had already launched the Civil Disobedience Movement (CDM) that aimed to cripple the regime’s capacity to rule. Thinzar Hein said she had lost respect for teachers at her nursing school who did not join the CDM.
“You should be ashamed if you can’t say in the future that you were a part of the revolution,” she said.
Aye Aye heard this speech and was impressed. But their friendship began when Thinzar Hein started giving her rides to the protests on her motorcycle.
Since Thinzar Hein had nowhere to live after leaving her parent’s home, Aye Aye let her stay at her hostel. That’s when Thinzar Hein taught her how to provide basic emergency medical care, she said.
At first it was just the two of them who went wherever they were needed to help the wounded. That meant anywhere they could hear the sound of gunshots that had become a feature of everyday life in Monywa and cities all over Myanmar since the coup.
Then, on March 3, they saw a man who had been shot in the leg die right before their eyes. Thinzar Hein knew he might have been saved if they had been better prepared to deal with his injuries. And so they decided to form an emergency medical team, raising funds to buy proper medical equipment through their network of fellow protesters.
Facing death
Thinzar Hein used her formal medical training to teach others how to tend to the wounded. In a small room, she instructed 20 people at a time in the first-aid techniques that would make the difference between life and death for victims of a regime intent on terrorizing the country into submission.
“She was very passionate,” Aye Aye said of her friend, recalling Thinzar Hein’s reaction to the death of the man who had been shot in the leg.
“She said she knew there were going to be more shootings,” she added, speaking to Myanmar Now soon after undergoing surgery on her shoulder.
That certainty fuelled Thinzar Hein’s determination to be prepared for any eventuality, including her own death.
In her final message to friends and family, she asked for the forgiveness of those she would have to leave behind if she didn’t survive her dangerous mission.
“I hope my loved ones will forgive me for embarking on a path that doesn’t guarantee a safe return,” she wrote on her Facebook page two days before she was murdered by Myanmar’s terrorist junta.
While regime forces go on a state-sanctioned killing spree, medics and other volunteers around the country continue to put their own lives on the line in the hope that they can save even one injured civilian.
Even when they know there is no one left to save, they return to protest sites day after day to collect the bodies of the dead before they can be taken away and disposed of by their killers.
After a night of bloodshed, people like Thinzar Hein will arrive at a scene of carnage before dawn to attend to both the living and the dead. If they are caught off-guard, they, too, will become casualties of the regime’s war on human decency.
“This is not okay. Even in international wars, medics are not targeted. But here, they’re worried their actions will be exposed, and so they fire at everyone,” said one doctor in Mandalay, describing the behaviour of the junta’s forces.
Dying in agony
Often, medical volunteers will wait for hours for soldiers to leave, knowing that that many victims won’t live long enough to be rescued in the morning.
These are agonizing hours, when they have to listen to people in need of immediate attention moaning in pain. In Monywa, one team spent three hours like this, blocked by soldiers who stood ready to shoot them on sight, until the victim finally fell silent. By the time they were able to reach him, the 30-year-old man had bled to death.
“There was a big cement wall we used as cover, but we couldn’t get to him. We could only pick him up after he was dead,” said a member of the team that attempted to rescue the man.
“Every time we are forced to watch someone die from nearby, it hurts. Every second is important for a bleeding patient,” said the doctor in Mandalay, where many volunteers have had similar experiences.
A member of one rescue team in Myanmar’s second-largest city said he once spent six hours in this situation, as multiple gunshot victims slowly died from their injuries.
“The worst time was in Aung Pin Lal, where they even shot at ambulances and medics had to run for their lives, leaving patients behind,” he said. “Some died of blood loss, and there was nothing we could do about it. It was just a really sad sight.”
Another member of the team was killed at the same time, and his body was never recovered, he added.
Often, he said, family members of people who have gone missing will turn up at emergency clinics in tears, hoping to find them still alive. In many cases, however, the rescue workers can’t even manage to bring back their dead bodies.
And then there are those who somehow escape on their own, but don’t dare seek treatment because of the heavy military presence. Only when their condition becomes truly dire will they come out of hiding.
Keeping the fight alive
It’s unclear how many medical workers the regime has murdered so far. Many, like those trained by Thinzar Hein, were not professionals, but simply dedicated volunteers who had acquired very basic, but still life-saving, skills.
What is clear, however, is that the junta has singled out rescue workers for especially brutal treatment in its all-out war against Myanmar’s civilian population.
This fact has been evident since March 3, when CCTV cameras captured images of four medics in Yangon’s North Okkalapa township being viciously beaten by soldiers and police for “encouraging” protesters to defy the regime.
The four medics—Kyaw Min Lwin, Thant Zin Oo, Min Oo and Soe Htet Aung—were later transferred to Yangon’s notorious Insein prison, from which they were finally released, along with 700 other prisoners, on March 24.
Wai Phyo Aung, a young medic who had volunteered in Hlaing Tharyar two weeks later, was not so lucky. When the township in western Yangon came under assault on March 14, he became one of 58 people killed by regime forces over the next five days.
At around the same time, on March 15, soldiers fired on an ambulance in Myingyan, a city in Mandalay region, according to a local doctor who witnessed the incident.
“They started shooting at the ambulance when it went to pick up some dead bodies,” the doctor said. Photos seen by Myanmar Now confirmed his account, which was similar to reports received from other parts of the country.
When Thinzar Hein was shot, her expressed wish to be abandoned to avoid further death was ignored by another member of her team, who crawled to her body under heavy fire and rolled it to a side street so that he could pick it up and carry it to a clinic, where she was declared dead on arrival.
Like others inspired by Thinzar Hein’s example, her friend Aye Aye vowed to continue her work as soon as she recovered from her injuries.
“I will keep fighting,” she said. “I will always be a part of her team.”
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‘I no longer fear death,’ says teen tortured by regime
Tortured almost to death, a 17-year-old former Covid-19 volunteer is now a committed resistance fighter
Zeya was thrown into a hole with his hands tied behind his back. Blindfolded, he couldn’t see a thing. All he could feel was the beatings, which continued right up until the moment they started to bury him alive.
“They filled the hole, with just my head exposed,” the 17-year-old recalled. His tormentors, who held a shovel to his neck, told him he should be praying for his life.
“I felt that at least it would all be over in a moment if I died. My only hope was to be reincarnated back into my family,” he said.
But then another man arrived who said they needed to interrogate him some more. And so he was pulled out of the hole.
Arrested in early May on suspicion of involvement in a series of bombings in Yangon, the slightly-built youth knows that he is lucky to be alive after spending 10 days in an interrogation centre in the former capital.
Many others have been less fortunate. According to a statement released by the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (AAPP) on June 11, the junta has tortured at least 22 people to death since seizing power on February 1.
But even before the coup, Myanmar’s military was notorious for its extreme mistreatment of prisoners. In a 2019 report, AAPP details the military’s systematic use of torture under successive regimes.
After being tortured so many times for a very long time, I no longer fear death.
Zeya said he was well aware of this history and just assumed that once he was captured, he was as good as dead. First, however, he would have to live through hell.
“They tied me up and blindfolded me, and just started beating me non-stop,” he said of his ordeal.
Day after day, he was pummelled relentlessly as his captors demanded to know where he had learned how to make explosives. It didn’t matter that they had the wrong person.
Somehow he survived. But after being pushed to the limits of his endurance, he knew that his life would never be the same.
“After being tortured so many times for a very long time, I no longer fear death,” he said.
A remorseless enemy
As a teenager, Zeya was not very interested in politics before the coup. He did, however, believe in helping others. That’s why, at the start of the year, he was working as a volunteer at a Covid-19 centre in Yangon’s Yankin Township.
“I was so happy that the pandemic was ending. But then the coup happened, and suddenly we weren’t able to do anything,” he said.
Like many of his fellow Covid-19 volunteers, he decided to leave his PPE suit and mask behind and don a safety helmet and gas mask so that he could join the anti-coup demonstrations.
He soon learned that the enemy he was now facing was even more remorseless than the coronavirus.
On May 2, Zeya was spending a drizzly evening with friends when soldiers suddenly stormed the apartment they were in. The troops, who had shot the lock off the door to get in, destroyed everything in sight as they searched for weapons. They also beat the young men, who they believed had received military training in an area under the control of an ethnic armed group.
Zeya panicked and tried to hide in a water tank. The soldier who caught him in the bathroom hit him in the head with the butt of his gun.
He was then blindfolded and transported to an interrogation centre. The beatings began the moment he arrived.
Zeya lost so much blood from his head injury that at one point he passed out. To stop the bleeding, his interrogators crudely closed the gash with a needle and thread used to repair boots.
“It was like a nightmare. I couldn’t even catch my breath to answer their question, as one guy in front kept beating me as another behind me was stitching up my wounds,” he said.
This continued for 10 days, as he was repeatedly asked about the “explosives crash course” he had supposedly taken, and about who he knew who had taken part in protests.
Daily torture
Every day it was the same routine, at least at first.
For three days, they beat him constantly. If he asked for water, they would beat him first and then splash some water in his face that he assumed had come out of a toilet. He was so thirsty that he tried to catch every drop that reached his lips.
“If I kept asking for water, they would just beat me, and I still wouldn’t get enough to drink. So I lied and told them that I had to use the toilet. Then I would drink as much of the toilet water as I could,” he said.
I would have suffered a lot less if they had just shot me. The torture was unimaginable. It filled me with hatred.
After the third day, they tried a new form of torture on him. If they weren’t happy with his answers, they would keep him out under the hot sun all day long. Then, in the evening, they would put him in a hole in the ground in an area with some trees.
“I was just waiting for the day when they would come to murder me,” he said. “I would have suffered a lot less if they had just shot me. The torture was unimaginable. It filled me with hatred.”
They took the stitches out of his head on the seventh day, and on the tenth day, they sent him to Insein Prison.
However, even Myanmar’s most notorious prison refused to accept him because he was too young. So in the end, he was sent to a juvenile correctional centre, which released him on bail on June 9.
He said he didn’t know what happened to the others who were detained together with him. Even if they were released, he wouldn’t be able to call them, because the military took their phones.
It was possible that they were still behind bars. If so, and assuming they were still alive, there would be no way even their families would be able to contact them.
Fighting back
His experience in the interrogation hell room has only strengthened Zeya’s hatred for the dictatorship.
Now that the third wave of the pandemic has started, the streets are again crowded with ambulances. However, Zeya is in no position to return to volunteering at the quarantine centres.
“I think back to the things they did to me. Every time I feel the scar on my head, my desire to rise up against them grows,” he said, speaking to Myanmar Now by telephone 11 days after his release.
Just a few days after his release, Zeya wrote on social media that he would never forget the time he was tortured “to the point that I didn’t even look like myself anymore.”
A day later, the army came looking for him again at his home.
By the time they arrived, however, he had already fled Yangon to a border area controlled by an ethnic armed group.
“I can’t get caught again. If I am, there is no way I’ll get out of there alive,” he said.
Thanks to his brutal treatment at the hands of the regime, Zeya is now exactly what he was accused of being—one of the legions of young people who have joined the armed resistance.
Holding a pistol, he said that armed struggle was the only way to defeat the dictatorship.
“This is the end game now,” he said as a marching song played in the background.
