WHY THE PAST CAN’T BE PUT TO REST

By KYAW PHYO THA / YANGON

Though it happened more than two decades ago, U Win Kyu is still haunted by old memories. Daw Khin Htay Win, his wife, is torn between her wish and her husband’s promise to their daughter.

His mind drifts back to a September evening 25 years ago. He was running from ward to ward in Yangon General Hospital looking for his daughter after learning that she was in critical condition after being shot by the army. Around him, the hospital was teeming with patients badly injured by triggerhappy soldiers. He recalls that there were pools of blood on the floors.

“Every year at this time, it all comes back to me,” said the 61-year-old father, recounting the last hours of his daughter Ma Win Maw Oo, who moaned in pain on the hospital bed suffering from a fatal wound caused by a bullet that shred a lung.

The 16-year-old schoolgirl was gunned down in downtown Yangon with other pro-democracy demonstrators on Sept. 19, 1988—the day after a new junta seized power after months of protests. Her fatal shooting was captured in a photograph that shows her blood-soaked body being carried away by two young doctors. That image, which appeared in the Oct. 3, 1988, issue of Newsweek’s Asian edition, soon became an icon of the brutality of the crackdown.

Every year in September when the anniversary of their eldest daughter’s death is approaching, the couple in their sixties faces a great dilemma: should they perform Buddhist rites to release Ma Win Maw Oo’s soul into the afterlife, or fulfill the wish she expressed to her father from her deathbed? Her dying words were, “Don’t call my name to bestow merit upon my soul until Myanmar enjoys democracy.”