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More than a decade ago, loan financier Matt Martorello was worried that the golden days for his high-interest lending venture were over.

In an email to his accountants, he detailed how attorneys general in multiple states were sending cease-and-desist letters to the online enterprise he operated with a Native American tribe based in Michigan. Major banks wanted nothing to do with the business, which offered small-dollar loans at exorbitant interest rates far above limits set by many states. Federal regulators were suing his competitors.

The pressure was getting to be too much. Martorello feared the federal government seeking “every $ I have” in restitution, he wrote in the December 2012 email.

He was expecting his firm, then based in the Virgin Islands, to be audited by the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and worried about the agency’s ability to put the tribal lending industry out of business. The federal agency was leaning hard on loan operations that formed alliances with tribes to claim sovereign immunity and bypass state laws that protect consumers.

“Bottom line is, this business will simply not exist in 2 to 3 years anything like it does right now,” Martorello wrote.

But none of that came to pass. In the 12 years since, the tribal loans kept flowing, fueling a multibillion-dollar industry built on punishing loan terms aimed at people who can least afford them.

How did the industry survive?

ProPublica found that tribal lending benefited from more than just sovereign immunity.

Powerful allies in the financial sector and payday loan industry, which encompasses all forms of short-term lending, have served as protectors at key junctures. Even as many states kicked out storefront payday and auto title lenders, online tribal lending flourished. Industry lobbyists helped beat back congressional plans for consumer protections, while payday industry lawyers dragged the CFPB to court and hindered the agency.

At the same time, differing approaches over three presidential administrations saw crackdowns on tribal lending excesses rise, then falter. Coming off a successful case that devastated one major tribal-affiliated operator, the Federal Trade Commission’s consumer protection bureau has been sidetracked by competing demands and a 2021 Supreme Court decision that constrained the agency’s ability to recover money from companies.

An FTC staff attorney who handled lending cases across a variety of industries told ProPublica that the agency monitors complaints but “can’t sue every bad actor.”

“We’re a small agency of limited resources. We have to pick and choose where we think we can make the greatest impact,” said Gregory Ashe, the attorney.

A wavering commitment at the federal level provided just enough leeway for the tribes to adapt and thrive. The consequences for consumers have been catastrophic.

Using a sample of personal bankruptcies nationwide over a three-year period, ProPublica found nearly 5% included unpaid high-interest loans linked to tribes. That translates to an estimated 19,000 cases on average per year.

“They gave me the money quick, but they also empty your pockets just as fast,” said Bobbie J. Williams, a sheet-metal worker from Rhode Island and father of four who needed an infusion of cash when he was sick with COVID-19. His 2022 bankruptcy petition included two tribal loans.

Since 2019, ProPublica found, on average more than 1,800 consumer complaints per year are routed to the FTC about these types of loans, which can carry annual percentage rates of over 600%. Complaints came from people in dire need, including single parents, people crushed under medical debt and others trying to stave off homelessness.

Consumer advocates do not expect that the second Trump administration will do anything to crack down on abusive lending practices linked to tribes or any other form of predatory lending. The billionaire Elon Musk, Donald Trump’s close adviser, posted “Delete CFPB” on X in November, signaling that the nation’s primary consumer watchdog could be on the chopping block in the new administration.

“We would like to see more enforcement action by both federal and state authorities,” said Lauren Saunders, associate director of the National Consumer Law Center, which has advocated for tougher measures on payday lenders.

Martorello, who lives in Texas, declined through an attorney to comment for this story, citing “ongoing and pending litigation.” In the email to his accountants, which was later revealed as part of a civil suit, Martorello stressed he was operating legally and acting on the advice of major law firms. “I don’t want you to think that we are doing anything wrong, we certainly are NOT,” he wrote.

With Martorello’s fears about regulation unrealized, the website affiliated with his tribal partners — Big Picture Loans — is still online offering short-term installment loans. The tribe, which split with Martorello, charges APRs between 160% and 699%, it told ProPublica.

“We’ve helped more than 400,000 people experience a smarter way to borrow!” the website boasts.

For more than a decade, U.S. Sen. Jeff Merkley has tried to protect consumers from outrageous lending rates.

Over and over again — seven times in 12 years — the Oregon Democrat has proposed a bill to force internet lenders, including Native American companies, to comply with state interest rate caps and to register with the CFPB. Year after year the effort fails.

On the Senate floor in 2016, he pressed his colleagues for their support, explaining the reality of high-interest online loans. “These payday loans pull families into a vortex of debt from which they cannot escape, and this vortex destroys them financially,” he said.

Merkley got only 13 co-sponsors that year: all Democrats and one independent, Vermont’s Bernie Sanders. The current version before the Senate has even fewer: 10.

His legislation has never even made it out of committee, a fate he attributes to the considerable influence of “the payday loan industry and big banks,” he told ProPublica in a prepared statement.

Payday lenders spent $4.9 million lobbying Congress in 2023, according to OpenSecrets, an organization that tracks money in politics. That includes $1.3 million laid out by the Online Lenders Alliance, a trade group that includes tribal lenders. “For Tribes involved in consumer lending, these enterprises have become a critical part of their economic development efforts as Tribes rely on business enterprises to provide essential government services to their members,” the Online Lenders Alliance told ProPublica in an email.

“This is a very entrenched industry with a lot of dollars at stake,” said University of New Mexico law professor Nathalie Martin, who has studied tribal lending.

Ellen Harnick, executive vice president of the Center for Responsible Lending, a nonprofit that works to end abusive financial practices, said the payday industry hires high-priced, experienced lobbyists who ingratiate themselves with state and federal lawmakers through campaign contributions, dinner invitations and casual meetings while roaming the halls of power. The access gives them opportunities to argue that high-cost loans are beneficial for people who find it hard to obtain credit.

The result, she said, is that even legislators who would never counsel anyone they love to take on such burdensome debt nonetheless decide, “I’m not going to shut it down.”

Reform measures have been opposed by the Native American Financial Services Association, which represents tribal lenders, and a larger industry group: the American Financial Services Association, which advocates for the consumer credit industry and does not include tribal lenders.

Congressional action is a direct threat to tribal lending because while tribes claim immunity from state laws, they must comply with federal lending laws. Merkley’s bill would have given the federal government a means to force tribes to abide by state interest rate caps. The Online Lenders Alliance is against such caps, arguing they block some consumers from getting smaller loans necessary to make ends meet.

Currently, there is no federal interest rate cap, with one notable exception: Payday lenders cannot charge active-duty service members and their families more than 36% annually.

In every congressional session since 2008, separate from Merkley’s efforts, lawmakers have unsuccessfully sought to extend that cap to all Americans.

Although banks and credit unions generally don’t charge over 36% for credit cards or other products, the larger financial industry has strongly opposed a cap. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce in 2021 also formally opposed the legislation, arguing that it would harm consumers by limiting access to credit. Proponents of the cap say that 36% is high enough to facilitate lending and that unconscionable rates lead to major debt traps.

At times the role of Native Americans in the industry has been used to beat back the 36% cap. At a 2021 hearing, U.S. Sen. Jon Tester, a Montana Democrat, acknowledged the need to protect consumers from “bad actors and unscrupulous practices.” But he said the Senate also had to consider “the sovereignty issue” of Native Americans and the “good-paying jobs” the tribal lending industry provided in his state.

He suggested that the committee “massage this bill” to make it better, fearing that the bill as written could have negative impacts on tribes. The legislation never passed.

The Scott Tucker case, with its tales of lavish spending and colorful deception, temporarily brought attention to some of the questionable practices and partnerships associated with tribal lending.

Tucker controlled AMG Services Inc., an online payday lender that grew into a billion-dollar business. Inside the call center in Overland Park, Kansas, employees were instructed to pretend they were on tribal lands somewhere else in the country. They were given out-of-state weather reports to help play up the ruse in their small talk with customers.

AMG’s success helped fuel Tucker’s splashy lifestyle that included a side venture: Level 5 Motorsports, a professional auto racing team.

But Tucker’s life in the fast lane — complete with luxury homes, a Lear jet, and a fleet of Ferraris and Porsches — came to a screeching halt. In early 2016, a federal grand jury indicted him on charges related to collecting unlawful debts and failing to truthfully disclose loan terms. It claimed he entered into “sham business relationships” with three tribes and “systematically exploited” more than 4.5 million borrowers.

Tucker and his lawyer were convicted of participating in a racketeering enterprise, wire fraud and other charges. A judge sentenced Tucker to 200 months in prison and his lawyer to 84 months.

Tucker’s spectacular downfall, the subject of an episode of TV’s “American Greed,” sent waves of fear around the industry. Federal prosecutors also indicted a Philadelphia-area tribal lender and his lawyer around the same time as Tucker, but then brought no major criminal cases against others in the industry in the years that followed.

“I’m not aware of additional cases, and wouldn’t be able to comment on any ongoing investigations that may or may not exist,” U.S. Department of Justice spokesperson Wyn Hornbuckle told ProPublica.

Earlier in the Obama administration, in an initiative dubbed Operation Choke Point, regulators sought to “choke off” fraud by pressuring bank executives and payment processors to scrutinize their relationships with industries deemed “high risk,” particularly payday lenders.

The effort briefly stalled tribal lending as the companies disabled lenders’ access to customers’ bank accounts, effectively incapacitating their operations.

But Republican lawmakers cried foul, seeing it as an attempt to stifle legal businesses. They hauled regulators into congressional hearings and chastised them. Faced with an uproar, regulators began to back off.

“I view it as tragic that it kind of blew up politically,” said Dru Stevenson, a professor at South Texas College of Law Houston who studied the firestorm around Operation Choke Point.

He believes that although the program’s image suffered from a few overly aggressive officials, if it had run its course, “tribal lending would be in a different place, where it would be less abusive and less exploitative.”

The fallout likely had a long-term effect on enforcement, he said. “There’s too many people at these agencies who lived through the backlash of Operation Choke Point and it’s not worth the risk of having that come up again.”

The Trump administration officially ended Operation Choke Point and set a new, friendlier tone across agencies.

Trump’s appointee to head the CFPB, Mick Mulvaney, wrote in the CFPB’s five-year strategic plan in 2018 that the bureau would refrain from “pushing the envelope,” so as not to trample on the liberties of citizens or interfere with the sovereignty or autonomy of Native American tribes. That year he killed a case against Golden Valley Lending, a tribal lender based in California.

The CFPB, under Trump, also repealed a rule requiring payday lenders to determine whether borrowers had the ability to repay.

Another tribal lending operation in California continued for about a decade before being shut down by the FTC in May 2020 for deceptive practices. By then it had issued 285,700 consumer loans, totaling nearly $60 million. With fees and interest, borrowers had repaid a whopping $175 million. By the time the FTC acted, most of the profits had been spent or transferred overseas by nontribal business partners. The government ultimately returned less than $1 million to borrowers.

Regulation never ramped up again under President Joe Biden. In part that’s because the CFPB was hamstrung by an unfavorable appellate court ruling in a case brought by the payday lending industry that challenged the agency’s constitutionality. In May, the U.S. Supreme Court handed CFPB a major victory, upholding its funding mechanism and, therefore, its existence.

Empowered once again, the CFPB vowed to pursue predatory lenders and restart a dozen or so cases that stalled during the court fight. No tribal lender, however, appeared on that list. The CFPB, via a spokesperson, declined to comment for this story.

Matt Martorello, the Texas man who in 2012 feared the U.S. government stomping out tribal lending, ended up in court, but not because of any federal action.

A Virginia law firm, Kelly Guzzo PLC, filed a class-action lawsuit on behalf of borrowers in 2017 against Martorello and council members of Michigan’s Lac Vieux Desert Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians. Also named in the suit was Big Picture Loans LLC, which is owned by the tribe. The suit challenged the legality of the loans, given Virginia’s longstanding policies capping interest rates, and was followed by additional civil suits across the country.

Big Picture Loans settled in 2020 for $8.7 million in restitution for customers and $100 million in debt relief. Martorello, however, refused to give in.

His company, Eventide Credit Acquisitions LLC, unsuccessfully sued Big Picture Loans and its parent company to prevent it from settling. “It was a massive waste of everyone’s time and money,” the tribe told ProPublica in an email.

The tribe said it has no current relationship with Martorello following the 2016 purchase of a Martorello company that had been servicing its loans.

A judge ruled against Martorello in 2023 and ordered him to pay tens of millions to Virginia borrowers. That same judge also found that Martorello had been the “de facto head” of the tribe’s lending business, a finding he has vigorously disputed.

Earlier this year, Martorello agreed to a $65 million settlement with borrowers across the nation. But he later filed for bankruptcy and couldn’t raise enough money to fund the settlement by an agreed-upon deadline, voiding the deal. His legal battle challenging the 2023 judgment now will continue in a federal appeals court.

Eventide, the company he founded, also has filed for bankruptcy.

As part of that case, it has argued that if online tribal lending was not appropriate and violated state lending laws, then “Congress, the CFPB, and other federal agencies would have shut it down a long time ago.”

To do the best, most comprehensive reporting on this opaque industry, we want to hear from more of the people who know it best. Do you work for a tribal lending operation, either on a reservation or for an outside business partner? Do you belong to a tribe that participates in this lending or one that has rejected the industry? Are you a regulator or lawyer dealing with these issues? Have you borrowed from a tribal lender? All perspectives matter to us. Please get in touch with Megan O’Matz at megan.omatz@propublica.org or 954-873-7576, or Joel Jacobs at joel.jacobs@propublica.org or 917-512-0297. Visit propublica.org/tips for information on secure communication channels.

Mariam Elba contributed research.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Joel Jacobs and Megan O’Matz.

October is National Domestic Violence Awareness and Prevention Month, and we look at how Black and Brown survivors of domestic abuse are further criminalized by police and prisons — and how activists have been organizing to win their freedom. In her first broadcast interview, we speak with Tracy McCarter, a nurse and grandmother who was jailed after her abusive husband, a white man, died of a stab wound when she defended herself during an altercation. McCarter, who is Black, describes being a criminalized survivor of both domestic violence and the criminal legal system. She was held at the notorious Rikers jail for nearly seven months and had her murder charges dropped in November after a campaign led by the grassroots abolitionist organization Survived and Punished. This comes as one-third of women imprisoned in New York for homicide were abused by the person they killed. “It became clear to me that I wasn’t going to be considered a person whose life was important enough to defend,” says McCarter, a registered nurse and graduate student at the time of her arrest, who shares her story and explains how racism affected her case. We also speak with Brooklyn Law School professor Jocelyn Simonson, a member of the “I Stand With Tracy” solidarity campaign and author of the new book, Radical Acts of Justice: How Ordinary People Are Dismantling Incarceration.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Hours after a man opened fire on Monday night at two locations at Michigan State University, killing at least three students and injuring at least five, a 21-year-old student at the school posted a TikTok video to share that this was not the first mass shooting she'd survived.

"Ten years and two months ago I survived the Sandy Hook shooting," said Jackie Matthews, describing crouching in a corner with her classmates while a gunman fatally shot 20 first-graders and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.

"I am 21 years old," Matthews said. "The fact that this is the second mass shooting that I have now lived through is incomprehensible."

Matthews described the physical manifestation of the trauma left by surviving the Sandy Hook massacre, one of the deadliest mass shootings in U.S. history.

"I now have a full-blown PTSD fracture [in my lower back] that flares up any time I am in a stressful situation," she said.

Timereported that a number of other students on campus were survivors of a 2021 shooting at Oxford High School in Oxford Township, Michigan. U.S. Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.), who visited the campus, told the magazine that she had seen a number of students wearing shirts that read, "Oxford Strong," which were given to them after the shooting.

"I'll forever be Sandy Hook Strong," said Matthews, "and I'll forever be Spartan Strong."

"We've let down generations of children by letting this continue."

The Michigan State shooting followed the recent release of a study by gun control advocacy group Everytown for Gun Safety about survivors of gun violence.

Fifty-nine percent of U.S. adults now report that they or someone they know have experienced gun violence in their lifetime. More than 40% of those who have had personal experiences with gun violence say they have trauma as a result.

"The impact of gun violence extends beyond those who are wounded or killed," said Everytown. "The families, communities, and anyone with a personal experience of gun violence in their lifetime are also survivors of gun violence."

Matthews expressed solidarity with the families and friends of the three people who were killed Monday night at the school.

"But we can no longer just provide love and prayers," she said. "There needs to be legislation. There needs to be action. It's not okay. We can no longer allow this to happen. We cannot longer be complacent."

The law did not include universal background checks, which have the support of more than 90% of Americans, or a ban on assault weapons.

"We've let down generations of children by letting this continue," said progressive advocacy group Indivisible Michigan in response to Matthews' video. "We must act NOW."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Julia Conley.

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Sarah Shenker.

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Sarah Shenker.

The media is all over the story that Governor DeSantis was notified that the danger threshold for evacuation was hit on Sunday, but he waited until Tuesday to order one (leaving a trail of dead bodies in his wake).

But there's another story out of Florida—a good news story—that's not getting anything close to the coverage it deserves.

Just 12 miles northeast of Fort Meyers—a community devastated by the hurricane with total loss of power, water, and massive loss of life—another community not only came through the hurricane just fine but never even lost power.

Today's crises in Florida and Puerto Rico should kick-start an entirely new generation of building codes and energy systems that can quickly go nationwide.

If you've been watching the coverage, you know by now that much of the loss of life in Florida was in Lee County. What you may not know is that the Babcock Ranch community—a small town, really, partly in Lee County—not only suffered only minimal damage but is now a refuge for people displaced by the storm.

When groundbreaking for Babcock Ranch—Florida's first 100% solar-powered community with over 700,000 panels providing more than enough electricity for all 2000 homes—happened in 2015, it wasn't a bunch of environmentally-minded old hippies putting the project together. In fact, the community—like the region around it—tends to vote solidly red.

It wasn't to save the world that they built an all-electric, all-solar community: it was to avoid exactly what happened to the surrounding area; electric and water outages and the collapse of infrastructure that typically accompanies a hurricane.

In 2010 it cost around $6/watt to install residential solar with batteries (just the solar panels themselves were around $2/watt), so a typical home's system cost between $40,000 and $60,000.

Today it's around $1.40/watt (the panels themselves are now around $.38/watt) and not only is the price typically below $20,000 but there are huge federal incentives to make the systems even cheaper.

Solar and wind are now the cheapest ways to produce electricity in the United States. This is why over a quarter-million Americans today earn their living installing and maintaining solar and wind systems.

Babcock Ranch designed their homes with a low wind profile and the houses were set far enough above the streets that the streets themselves are designed to flood (and run off) leaving the homes high and dry. Power and internet lines are buried and using native plants as landscaping helped to catch and slow runoff to minimize flood damage.

Which is why Babcock Ranch homes came through Hurricane Ian largely intact and its solar-powered school and community center is now full of refugees from nearby towns.

While Babcock Ranch is an upscale community with homes in the half-million to million-dollar (and up) range, that's because it's larger homes on big lots, rather than the result of the community's hurricane-proof design and super-resilient solar power system.

These resilience aspects should be a model for all of Florida—and the rest of the country that experiences floods, derechos, and hurricanes—starting right now. This isn't rocket science and it's about the same price as throwing up stick houses that'll simply explode or get washed away in the next storm: when you add in the reduced cost and increased reliability of electricity and other essential services, it's cheaper than typical construction over the life of the homes.

There are even innovative economic models already adopted by other countries we could use to rapidly propagate solar across the United States as part of an effort to harden our electric systems.

In September, 2009 I was invited to join German Member of Parliament Herman Scheer to give presentations at a conference (page 11) put on at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona in Spain. 

Almost a decade earlier, Scheer had shepherded his "100,000 Rooftops" program through the German Parliament and was eager to talk about how it worked and could work in Spain.

We talked at length about his program (his presentation was brilliant), which, in his original idea (which was only partially implemented; there were tons of compromises, most having to do with Russia) was elegantly simple.

By the 1990s, Germany was facing an energy crisis of sorts: people were freaked out about the nation's nuclear plants and wanted them shut down. For good reason, it turns out.  

Back in 1986 on my birthday, May 7th, I flew into Frankfurt to finalize my work visa to move my family to Germany for the following thirteen months (we moved in June).  It was a gray, rainy day when I walked out of the Hauptbahnhof (main train station) in downtown Frankfurt to walk a block or two to my favorite hotel.

I was shocked to see the city I'd visited so many times completely empty of pedestrians and nearly drained of cars.

At the hotel, the clerk was frantic to take my wet hat and raincoat and send them to the hotel's laundry.  "Chernobyl melted down two weeks ago," he told me, "and the cloud with the radiation is right above us now.  You must go take a shower immediately!" 

As I learned living in rural northwest West Germany for the rest of that year and most of 1987, all of Germany was as flipped out as the hotel clerk. 

I'd brought a hand-held Geiger counter with me when we moved, and walking through the rural supermarkets it'd occasionally click rapidly, particularly when I passed local mushrooms or meat. That would always draw a crowd (and dirty stares from the shopkeepers!).

And I wasn't the only one walking around with a Geiger counter: the German government had to change the acceptable standard for radiation in milk, and people were constantly finding "hot" radioactive particles from Chernobyl in the nearby forests.

Germans wanted to get rid of their nuclear power, but how?  They didn't want to revert to more coal or oil power; that's why they'd gone to nuclear in the first place.

So Scheer's original proposal, as he laid out the concept to me, was simple and elegant.  

Banks would loan people the money to put rooftop solar on their houses at a super-low interest rate, with defaults backstopped by the government.  No risks, in other words, to the banks.

Power utilities would buy surplus power from those homes at a "feed-in tariff" rate that was higher than the retail price of electricity until their bank loans were paid off (typically 5-10 years).

The tariffs were set so, for example, if the monthly payments on your loan for your rooftop solar system were $100, the local utility would be paying you (or reducing your normal electric bill) by around $100 a month as that "feed in tariff."

The tariff payments would last until your loan was paid off: in effect, you'd get the solar system, which will last for decades, for free.

What the utilities got out of it was immediate expansion of their power-generating sources at no expense to them whatsoever. They didn't have to build expensive new power plants: the nation's houses and office buildings would provide that.

As more and more homes came online, the power that was then being generated by nuclear plants would be replaced by electricity from the "100,000 rooftops" and the extra expense to the utilities for the feed-in tariffs would still cost less than building a new power plant, be it nuclear or fossil fuel-powered.  

Everybody wins economically, the government handles the risk by backstopping the banks and utilities (and it's a minor expense for a national government), and Germany gets off its growing nuclear power addiction.

Scheer got the feed-in tariffs passed in 1999 as part of his 100,000 Rooftops program, followed by the German Renewable Energy Act of 2000.  It wasn't implemented as simply and elegantly as I've described here and as he shared with me over lunch in Barcelona (politics intervened, of course, leading to imports of Russian natural gas), but it got a long way there.

Other countries around the world copied parts of his program, although some of Germany's for-profit and regional utilities were committed to sabotaging it and have had some successes in that effort since his untimely death at age 66 in 2010. 

And in most parts of the world—and most all of the USA—solar works even better than in Germany, which is the cloudiest country in Europe and at the same latitude as Calgary. The science proving this can work even better in the US is both solid and irrefutable.

Today, as a result of Scheer's visionary leadership two decades ago, over a million German homes have both solar panels and battery storage, and the country is upgrading their system to a "smart grid" to handle it all. There's an absolutely amazing collection of charts and graphs explaining it all here.

Additionally, they were shutting down their last nuke (it's on hold because of the Ukraine crisis), and beginning the process of phasing out coal (although slowdowns on renewables are causing them to have to default to natural gas in a few places). 

As the MIT Technology Review notes: "The country avoided pumping about 74 million metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in 2009. The German environment ministry also touts a side benefit: nearly 300,000 new jobs in clean power."

Milton Friedman, the godfather of "disaster capitalism," was fond of pointing out that most people and most countries would only consider significant changes to the way they do things in the face of a crisis.

We're there, now.

Today's crises in Florida and Puerto Rico should kick-start an entirely new generation of building codes and energy systems that can quickly go nationwide.

Much of the work has already been done by California, which mandated in 2018 that most new construction must have solar rooftops starting in 2020 and recently updated and tightened their standards for 2022.

Building a resilient and low-carbon America will save both money and lives. We need to start now.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Thom Hartmann.

Residents of Tabayin township told RFA Burmese after the attack that the helicopters fired on the school “for nearly an hour” before junta foot soldiers let loose with guns. They claimed the nearly 80 troops who raided the school belonged to Light Infantry Battalion 368, under the 10th Military Operations Command based in Kyi Kone village, in Sagaing’s Kale township.

Two weeks later, a schoolteacher who survived the raid told RFA Burmese reporter Nayrein Kyaw of the terrifying incident she witnessed that day. Now in hiding, her name has been withheld due to security concerns.

RFA: Can you describe the events that took place on Sept. 16?

Schoolteacher: It must have been about 12:50 p.m. Ko Aung Saw Htway, who helped us with the computer at our school, told me planes were coming our way, so I yelled out a warning to the young teachers at the primary classes and … herded the children to the ground floor of the [nearby] monastery to hide. The moment we got there, a teacher said [a boy] was hit in the leg. A young teacher then brought some children over to me and told me she had been hit by a bullet in the thigh. I saw her face was covered in blood. Just then, a child who was crouching near me was hit in the neck by shrapnel. All her hair was cut off.

The shooting went on for an hour or so. The place was hit by heavy weapons as well as machine gun fire. And then soldiers, with bamboo baskets on their backs, entered the compound and reached the place where we were hiding. Then they fired their weapons towards the small [stupa] in the compound. Some soldiers ordered us to come out and said we must come out with heads bowed. “If you look at us, you’re dead,” one of them said.

I glanced towards the primary classrooms and saw children coming out. It was heart wrenching to see small kids covered in blood, some with head wounds, others with leg wounds, some hit in the back, and one hit in the eye. I tried to look for my children. I have three attending this school. I saw my eldest [daughter] and youngest [son], but I couldn’t find my middle child. My daughter's clothes were completely soaked in blood, and I asked her if she was OK. She said her friend Win Win Khine was hit in the belly and all of her intestines were falling out. She said there were many dead in the classroom. And then my son, the middle child, ran to me crying. He was crying out his friend’s name, Maung Hpone. The boy was one of our neighbors.

The soldiers said, “If you don’t want these children to die, we want two people who can drive to come forward.” One of the volunteer teachers came forward and said he could drive. The soldiers also asked the head monk for some [big plastic] bags and I saw them putting the bodies and body parts of those killed into them. They also took the seriously wounded children with them. On the way out, they shot all the men they saw in the village in the heads.

RFA: What kind of aircraft were they using? Jet fighters or helicopters?

Schoolteacher: People said there were both. Two helicopters were dropping soldiers while the two fighters opened fire on the village.

RFA: So how many children and how many adults were killed in the attack?

Schoolteacher: Four students died instantly and another one died in the hospital, so altogether five students. And then two teenagers were killed outside the school which makes a total of seven students. Six [adult] villagers were killed too. So the death toll was 13.

RFA: How many were taken away by the soldiers?

Schoolteacher: Altogether 11 students and teachers were taken away. Two men who drove the cars and another four villagers were also abducted. 

RFA: Has anyone been released yet?

Schoolteacher: No, none of them have been released yet.

RFA: One of those killed as they left was your computer teacher, Aung Saw Htway, right?

Schoolteacher: Yes, that’s right.

RFA: The military has said they carried out a surprise attack because they received reports that PDFs [People’s Defense Force fighters] were transporting weapons and ammunition through the village. Did they find any?

Schoolteacher: Yes, I want to talk about that. If they receive this kind of report, they should investigate first. This is a small village. They have drones and things. Why didn’t they look? Why didn’t they see children playing in the school compound? There are no weapons here, not even needles. We had assigned night watchmen because we were scared. Some people said that before Aung Saw Htway was killed the soldiers placed some things they brought in front of him and took pictures. It was meant to put out fake stories.

What we need in our country is democracy. We are deprived of human rights. Children in other countries are pursuing their studies in peace while the children in our country are risking their lives just to go to school.

Translation by Khin Maung Nyane. Written in English by Joshua Lipes.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Nayrein Kyaw for RFA Burmese.

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Kateryna Iakovlenko.

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Anonymous.