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Report says soldiers shot three dead at Myanmar factory making US cowboy boots
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Date: None

When a small group of employees gathered outside the Xing Jia shoe factory on Monday 15 March, it had been shut for a week and they’d been told it would stay that way for three months. In the chaos of civil unrest following the military coup six weeks earlier, supply chains had been disrupted. Strikes had closed banks and ports.

By the end of the day, according to media reports that followed shortly after, several people were dead – shot by soldiers. But the US company that sells cowboy boots made in the factory denied these accounts, preferring the word of a newspaper aligned with the Chinese Communist Party.

Now labour rights campaigners in Myanmar have produced a report examining the events of that day. As with almost every workers’ rights organisation in Myanmar, the group behind the report, Action Labor Rights (ALR), has been declared illegal by the military and its staff are currently in hiding. Due to the ongoing turmoil in Myanmar, openDemocracy has not been able to independently verify all the details of the report.

Some facts have more support, however. It is well known that in Yangon, Myanmar’s largest city, the impoverished Hlaing Tharyar industrial zone – where Xing Jia is located – had become a site of angry resistance. Military violence there was extreme and factories were being set alight amid martial law.

On 15 March, local reports and international news outlets agree that workers gathered outside the factory and were joined by local people. Soldiers then shot at the crowd, killing several people.

The new report from ALR states that the Xing Jia workers were not there to attack the factory or to protest against the coup. They simply wanted to be paid.

It specifies that they had come to ask for 15 days’ wages plus four hours of overtime pay. Once they had received their money, many of them intended to return to their home towns to escape the violence of the industrial zone and wait for the factory to reopen. The small delegation was accompanied by supportive family members.

ALR’s report states that not long after the workers assembled, a military truck arrived and soldiers started shooting, without any dialogue or questions asked. When the shooting began, local people gathered to support the workers.

The report mentions that it is possible that the military opened fire because they thought the workers were there to set fire to the factory, as had happened recently with other factories that, like Xing Jia, had Chinese owners.

According to the report, the military used live ammunition and four men were shot, three of whom died. An estimated 17 people were then arrested, including women workers from the factory and their family members. The bodies of the dead were taken away by the military; the injured man was taken to hospital.

[1] Url: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/oureconomy/report-says-soldiers-shot-three-dead-myanmar-factory-making-us-cowboy-boots/