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Regime authorities appear to be increasingly abducting young men on the street or during household inspections to boost the number of military conscripts, while families and activists say bribes are no longer enough to free them.
By FRONTIER
Daw San Nwe’s son went to stay overnight at her house in Yangon in early November. It was the last evening they would spend together, before he was taken from her doorstep by local authorities and forcibly recruited into the military.
The son, aged 22, then worked at a stainless steel factory in the city’s South Dagon Township and lived at a hostel on the premises. Hours after he arrived at his parents’ house in East Hlaing Tharyar Township, staff from the local administration office conducted an inspection in the ward for any unregistered guests. This has been a common practice since the 2021 coup, when the junta reinstated a legal requirement for households to report overnight guests to the authorities. The measure has helped the regime to hunt down dissidents, and more recently to force young men into the depleted ranks of the military.
“When the inspection takes place, everyone must step outside and the inspection team calls out names from their list” of registered residents and guests, said San Nwe, who requested the use of a pseudonym for security reasons. “My son hadn’t been registered as a guest, so he stayed in his room, but they found him. He ran but was caught, and the inspection team put him in a military vehicle and left.”
San Nwe went to the ward administration office the next day and was told her son had been sent to an interrogation centre in Yangon’s Hlaing Township. When she went there, she was refused entry and barred from asking any questions. She knew nothing about her son’s whereabouts until a month later, when he gave her a surprise call from more than 600 kilometres away in southern Shan State.
“He said he had arrived at a military training school in Hopong Township and was using his superior officer’s phone. He had been conscripted into the army and was undergoing training,” San Nwe told Frontier. “I haven’t been able to contact my son again since then. I don’t know where he is now. I’ve been calling his superior’s phone but haven’t been able to reach him.”
Similar reports of abductions have proliferated as the military undergoes a protracted manpower crisis. This crisis has worsened amid historic defeats for the military in northern Shan, Kachin and Rakhine states, and grinding conflict elsewhere in the country. The regime’s losses prompted it to announce in February last year that it would start implementing the People’s Military Service Law, enacted by the previous junta in 2010 but kept quietly on the books in the years that followed.
The law says every Myanmar man aged 18-35 and woman aged 18-27 may be called to serve in the military for two years, and potentially up to five years during a national emergency, which the military declared on the day of the coup. There are roughly 14 million potential recruits, although the regime has said that women would be exempt for the time being.
Military officers had previously pulled young men off the street at random and forced them to work as porters or soldiers. The law, however, authorises a more systematic process overseen by a Central Committee for Summoning People’s Military Servants and its local subcommittees, which collate the names of eligible people before picking recruits and sending them a formal summons. The junta’s defence ministry only finalised the accompanying rules for the law on January 23, with chapters specifying the powers of the committees, medical exemption criteria and the “rights” of conscripts, among other things, state media reported without disclosing the actual contents of these chapters.
However, the formal system with its various committees has been operating for more than a year, even in the absence of the accompanying rules. Yet, the abduction of San Nwe’s son and other reported cases followed no such procedure or any apparent legal process. This suggests the junta and its subordinates are turning to illegal measures to top up the recruitment numbers and meet ambitious targets.
The regime is now recruiting the ninth batch of conscripts. Research organisation Burma Affairs and Conflict Studies reported in October that the junta reached close to the target of 5,000 recruits in the first batch early last year, but numbers dropped to around 4,000 in each of the four subsequent batches. Frontier could not find any more recent estimates.
Very few young men are keen to serve in the widely despised military, and many have fled to foreign countries such Thailand, or to areas controlled by armed resistance groups, particularly in Myanmar’s central Dry Zone. Some of them have also chosen to join these armed groups, feeling that the junta’s conscription drive was forcing them to pick a side.
“We have accepted approximately 100 people from different regions and are still training new recruits,” Zwe Wai Yan Soe, a battalion commander in the Ye-U People’s Defence Force in Sagaing Region’s Ye-U Township, told Frontier.
But not everyone can flee.
A woman in Yangon’s South Dagon Township said joining resistance groups or travelling to their territories was “not an option” for her 20-year-old son or anyone else in her family because they lacked the money and resources. “We need to earn a living,” she told Frontier. “So, we just have to stay here and try to avoid trouble.”
Avoiding trouble means people of recruitment age taking precautions in their everyday lives that few besides political dissidents would have taken beforehand.
“Now, most young people don’t dare to sleep at home at night,” a woman in Mandalay’s Chan Aye Thar Zan Township told Frontier. “They are scared and try to get away whenever they see a police vehicle on the road at night. People don’t go out after 8pm.”
This caution is warranted in Mandalay, where the junta exerts a tight grip. Activist group Mandalay Strike Committee has claimed that the junta abducted 391 young people for conscription in the city in December.
Yangon and its rural hinterland appear to be no safer for young people. A woman in Taung Chaung village in outlying Kawhmu Township said her youngest son visited the village to give some money to the family on October 8 and left around 9am the next day, only to vanish soon after.
The son, aged 22, worked at a garment factory in East Hlaing Tharyar and lived in a hostel near the factory. “His friends at the hostel later told me he hadn’t returned, and that was when I realised he had disappeared,” the woman told Frontier.
He called her six days later, and explained that he had first been taken to an army base in Yangon’s Mingaladon Township, then to the Infantry Battalion 88 base in Magway Region’s Minbu Township, more than 500km away in the Dry Zone.
“I get to speak with my son once a week and sometimes every three days,” she said on January 15, adding that he had since been moved to a military training centre in southern Shan’s Pinlaung Township, and then to Nansang Township farther east. “Last week he told me that he would have to go to the front line soon. He also mentioned that he hadn’t received any salary.”
“I have told my son that I can’t do anything for him. All I can do is pray for his safety, because I can’t afford to pay for his release. My son also told me that he doesn’t want to accept any money for himself, but instead asked me to pray for him,” she said.
Earlier in the conscription drive, the families of newly conscripted men could often bribe authorities to free them. Some ward administrators also devised schemes whereby families who didn’t want to send their youth to the military could jointly pay a local volunteer to be recruited instead. However, such bribes and payment schemes have been less effective in recent months, suggesting that authorities are under greater pressure to meet recruitment targets.
“It was still possible to pay money in Mandalay until October if someone was forcibly abducted. But that changed around November; it could no longer be done with money. Even if money was offered, they said they needed people, not money,” a Mandalay Strike Force spokesperson told Frontier.
A man in Mandalay’s Amarapura Township said a large bribe had failed to secure the release of his 29-year-old nephew, who was abducted on December 22 and sent to serve in the army.
“He was taken when he was going out at night. His immediate family inquired about him right away and paid money to get him released, but it didn’t work,” the man said. “They spent K3 million but I don’t know exactly who the money was given to. I heard that he was taken to Shan State and then to Magway Region, but we have not been able to contact him, so we still don’t know anything for sure. We’re only certain that he was forcibly conscripted.”
Daw Su Su Nway, an activist and former political prisoner living in Kawhmu on the outskirts of Yangon, said although the junta’s central conscription committee had pledged to address irregularities in the conscription drive and welcomed complaints, “it has not taken any action in practice”.
Besides abductions, she said irregularities included the conscription of underage youth and others who are supposed to be exempt, such as the husbands of pregnant women and the sole caregivers of ailing parents.
She mentioned the case of a young man who was abducted in East Hlaing Tharyar on October 9 by a group of men armed with swords and sticks, who then sold him to the authorities for conscription.
“We submitted appeals from township level up to the regional military commands and the central conscription committee, but they refused to tell us whether he will be released,” she told Frontier, adding that the young man had just finished his military training in Pinlaung, southern Shan, meaning he could be sent to the front line at any time.