Jakarta: The clandestine clinic was under fire, and the medics inside were in tears. Hidden away in a Myanmar monastery, this safe haven had sprung up for those injured while protesting the military’s overthrow of the government. But now security forces had discovered its location.
A bullet struck a young man in the throat as he defended the door, and the medical staff tried frantically to stop the hemorrhaging. The floor was slick with blood.
In Myanmar, the military has declared war on health care — and on doctors themselves, who were early and fierce opponents of the takeover in February. Security forces are arresting, attacking and killing medical workers, dubbing them enemies of the state. With medics driven underground amid a global pandemic, the country’s already fragile healthcare system is crumbling.
“The junta is purposely targeting the whole healthcare system as a weapon of war,” says one Yangon doctor on the run for months, whose colleagues at an underground clinic were arrested during a raid. “We believe that treating patients, doing our humanitarian job, is a moral job….I didn’t think that it would be accused as a crime.”
Inside the clinic that day, the young man shot in the throat was fading. His sister wailed. A minute later, he was dead. One of the clinic’s medical students, whose name like those of several other medics has been withheld to protect her from retaliation, began to sweat and cry. She had never seen anyone shot.
Now she too was at risk. Two protesters smashed the glass out of a window so the medics could escape. “We are so sorry,” the nurses told their patients. One doctor stayed behind to finish suturing the patients’ wounds. The others jumped through the window and hid in a nearby apartment complex for hours. Some were so terrified that they never returned home.
“I cry every day from that day,” the medical student says. “I cannot sleep. I cannot eat well.” “That was a terrible day.”
AP
