Forty years ago, Myanmar barmaid Dar San Ye (pic) stood in a river running through Yangon, squaring up to a North Korean agent gripping a live grenade.
Hours earlier on Oct 9, 1983, a huge explosion had shattered the peace of the capital city as a Pyongyang hit team detonated bombs to try to assassinate visiting South Korean president Chun Doo-Hwan.
Seventeen Korean officials, including the foreign minister and four Burmese nationals died when the blast ripped through a mausoleum housing the remains of Myanmar’s founding father and independence hero Aung San.President Chun himself was not there, however, having been delayed at a previous engagement.
The bombers fled the scene, with Yangon plunged into chaos.
Now 87 years old, San Ye recalled her role in the drama as she puffed on a cigar in her home on the outskirts of the city. “I heard the Martyrs’ Mausoleum had been blown up by some foreigners,” she said, as customers in her bar on the banks of the Pazundaung River could talk of little else.“I asked people if they (the attackers) had been captured. They said no,” she recalled. “I told them the bombers will be captured later because we are Buddhist Myanmar and our good spirits will guard us.”
Little did she know she would be the one to do it.
San Ye finished her shift and returned home as evening began to fall, with the city still on edge and a hunt for the perpetrators under way. Suddenly, she heard shouts that there was a thief in the river. She rushed out and saw a crowd of around a hundred people gathered on the bank.
Pausing only to hitch up her nightdress, she waded in, not quite sure who the man in the water was.
“The guy was standing waist-deep in water,” she said. “I called him, ‘Come here! Come here!’
“He just stared at me. I realised he wouldn’t understand Burmese but remembered an English phrase that I used to use to make fun of English people, so I asked him, ‘Are you my friend?’”
Desperate for sympathy as he found himself surrounded, he replied, “Yes, yes! Are you Chinese?”San Ye recalled that he then reached out to try to shake her hand. But when three men from the crowd joined in to help her, he began to fight back, pushing her and the others away and running to the end of a pier.
There, he took out a grenade and pulled the pin, but it failed to fully detonate.
“His left hand was blown off. On his right hand, four fingers were blown off and only the thumb remained,” she said.
“After that, he jumped into the water again and I also jumped in. When he reappeared above the water, I punched him in the neck,” San Ye said.
The agent, Kim Jin-su, was one of the three-man hit team.
Thanks to San Ye, he was captured by authorities. He refused to cooperate with interrogators and was hanged after a trial.
Shortly after the bombing, San Ye and the three men who helped her were feted at a government ceremony and given clothes and money in compensation.
“Since then, they have never come to see me,” she said, with a copy of a faded and creased “Record of Honour” certificate all that she has left to link her to the day. Despite that, she has no regrets about the risk she took in the river that day. — AFP
