Burma is home to the longest-running civil war on the planet, its people oppressed by a brutal, crushing regime… in my mind, the importance of these execution photographs has never been their ability to shock; rather, it is that they are perfectly illustrative of the cycles of violence that develop in areas suffering decades of non-stop conflict…
These images are not only about the victims, but about the person who carried out the executions, and the tragic circumstances of his brief life… in the frontal photograph of this young man, 18 years of age, holding a bloody knife after taking the lives of two people, you will notice (aside from the aforementioned knife and the “Give Me Liberty or Death” t-shirt) that he is missing his right eye… when he was 12 years old, Burmese government troops came into his village and killed his mother and father right in front of him… they then bashed him in the head with a rifle butt and left him for dead… the boy survived this ordeal, but suffered the loss of his right eye – and the loss of his childhood… he immediately fled his village and joined a guerrilla army that was waging war against the government… by the time I photographed the executions, he was 18 and a member of a special commando unit… his superior officer told me that the young man often had to be restrained after an engagement with government troops, to keep him from sneaking back to the corpses and eating body parts… when he carried out the executions, it was unimaginably savage and shocking – much of the worst of it I did not capture on film… he was oblivious to the horror, lost in a haze of hate and revenge… each stab of the blade was a way to get back for the loss of his parents, his eye, his childhood… A few months later, this same young man – who had both endured and caused so much suffering, was dead at 18, killed in a clash with government troops…