In September 2014, a freelance journalist and erstwhile political activist, 49‐year‐old Ko Par Gyi travelled to the eastern frontier of Myanmar, or Burma, to document and report on recent fighting between government troops and a splinter unit from an anti‐government armed group active in the region. He was last seen being loaded onto an army vehicle in the town of Kyaikmayaw, in Mon State. It took over 3 weeks for his wife, Ma Thandar, to learn he was dead: shot, the defence ministry said, while trying to escape from an encampment on the outskirts of a rural village.
Ma Thandar, a former political prisoner and experienced advocate for civil rights, was not going to settle for the army's story. After initiating a campaign that drew a response from the country's president and attracted international interest, she succeeded in getting officials to dig up her husband's body from the shallow unmarked grave where soldiers had hastily buried him. But the recovery of a body does not mark the end of the struggle against impunity. It merely demarcates the moment at which a single fact—the victim's death in custody—is rendered undeniable. With this fact established, the struggle against impunity begins in earnest.
