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There is growing evidence that the cash-strapped junta is refusing to pay the pensions and compensation that soldiers’ families are entitled to when their husbands or sons die on duty.
By FRONTIER
Every day is full of anxiety for Ma Cho Mar. It’s been like that since September when she was told that her husband had gone missing in action on the battle front in Rakhine State.
The 35-year-old sergeant served in an infantry battalion under South Western Command, based in the Ayeyarwady Region capital of Pathein. He was among 40 soldiers in the battalion sent to the front lines in northern Rakhine in April.
On the days when he didn’t call, Cho Mar, 34, would be full of dread for herself and their two sons, aged 10 and six years. When he did call, she would be flooded with relief.
In September, his mobile phone number went dead. Initially, Cho Mar thought her husband’s unit was moving through an area where there was no cell signal, but after a week of no contact she was numb with worry.
Her worst fears were realised when the commander of her husband’s unit called the garrison where they lived in Ayeyarwady with the news that her husband had gone missing during a clash with the Arakan Army. “Your husband is believed to be dead, but we were unable to recover his body,” a grief-stricken Cho Mar was told.
As she mourned her husband, another worry crept into her mind. If the battalion had registered her husband as missing rather than dead, she would not be eligible to receive a pension as a soldier’s widow or the lump-sum compensation payment for the beneficiaries of those killed in combat.
Cho Mar, who asked that she be identified using a pseudonym for safety reasons, knew of four other military families this had happened to. Now, it was happening to her.
“The battalion chief said he had to list my husband as missing because the field commander on the front line couldn’t produce his body. Only when there’s a body can soldiers be listed as being killed, and their family members can receive all the entitlements allowed by the military,” Cho Mar told Frontier.
Cho Mar felt strongly that she had been unfairly treated by the military, for which her husband had sacrificed his life. Many soldiers die on the front line, she said, but it’s not always possible for their bodies to be recovered and for their deaths to be registered.
“Soldiers who go missing while fighting the enemy shouldn’t be listed as missing. Only those who go missing without fighting should be on that list. If a unit can’t produce the body of someone killed in action and they go on the missing list, it hurts us twice,” Cho Mar said.
The injustice of the situation was made more difficult because Cho Mar knew she couldn’t complain. She didn’t dare even to share her distress with other families in the battalion.
“The walls have ears. If the chief and his wife find out we aren’t happy about what’s happened, they could make life uncomfortable for my children and me. When the families of low-ranking soldiers move into military compounds, we soon learn that we have to swallow all our resentment,” Cho Mar said.
When her husband was alive, the family lived on his monthly salary of about K300,000, which included a hardship allowance of K100,000. The family could survive on this modest income because the military provided accommodation and some food supplies.
After her husband’s death, Cho Mar moved out of the garrison and returned with her two children to her parents’ village in Ayeyarwady’s Danubyu Township. Now, she struggles to support her family of three in the village, because her parents don’t have enough money to feed them all. Her hardship would be relieved by a pension and the compensation payment she feels entitled to.
“The pension is about K50,000 a month, and I heard that the lump-sum compensation when a sergeant is killed is about K5 million. If I’d received that money, I would have started a business like a grocery shop,” she said.
But with no capital and only her labour for hire, Cho Mar is planting vegetables for K7,000 a day on someone else’s land. Her income is not enough to cover the cost of food, and she worries about not being able to give her children a better future because she can’t afford to send them to school. While Myanmar state schools provide nominally free education, they come with hidden costs that are causing many children to drop out amid rising poverty.
‘They resort to dirty methods’
Army defector Captain Zin Yaw said that before the 2021 coup, he never heard about the military refusing to pay compensation to families when soldiers were killed in action.
He explained to Frontier that although there were sometimes delays, “When the battalion commander confirmed that a soldier had died in a battle, the military usually awarded compensation and a pension immediately. There was no reason to show the body. But there were not as many dead soldiers back then as there are now.”
He added that if the military had to compensate the families of every soldier killed in conflict since the coup, it would be paying out billions of kyat. “They can’t afford to spend that much, so they resort to dirty methods to avoid it, like insisting that there be a body,” he said.
Daw Phyu Pyar is the widow of a sergeant killed in fighting in northern Mandalay Region in August. She has begun receiving a monthly pension but four months later is still waiting for a compensation payment.
“When I asked the commander of our battalion, he told me that he had submitted the form to the Ministry of Defence with his signature. He said he will tell me when it is approved,” Phyu Pyar told Frontier, using an alias to protect her identity. She said she’s heard that the widows of soldiers of a higher rank than her husband have promptly received compensation payments.
Phyu Pyar moved back to Yangon from the garrison where she lived in Mandalay city three months ago. She’s still waiting for the call from the battalion but the phone never rings. She wonders whether the ministry has approved her payment but the money is being kept by the battalion commander.
“I suspect the commander has misappropriated the money. But I don’t know which department to approach to request an investigation, and I don’t dare accuse him directly,” she said.
The parents of a 39-year-old lieutenant-colonel who fought in Rakhine told Frontier that their son was killed in June and they received a compensation payment within a month. The family was also permitted to attend their son’s funeral at the military cemetery in Yangon’s Mingaladon Township.
But there was a catch. The K1.25 million they received was the amount allotted for a fallen captain, and therefore lower than the sum for a fallen lieutenant-colonel, which is a higher rank.
The bereaved mother said she’d learned from her son’s friends from officers’ training school that this wasn’t just a cost-saving trick. “They told me the military paid compensation for a captain because it doesn’t want the news spreading that senior officers are being killed. So, when they die, they will be listed as captains,” she said.
The woman added the family has not received a life insurance payment, even though every member of the military, regardless of rank, is required to buy life coverage, with premiums deducted from their monthly salary.
Since 2015, soldiers have been required to buy life insurance from the Aung Myint Moh Min Insurance Co, which according to multiple reports is owned by Ko Aung Pyae Sone, the son of junta chief Senior General Min Aung Hlaing.
None of the five military families interviewed by Frontier for this report said they had received a life insurance payment after their husbands or sons died on duty.
“We accept whatever the military pays,” said the lieutenant-colonel’s mother. “We don’t know how to get the life insurance payments. The company has not contacted us.”
Conscript families fare worse
The families of soldiers recruited under the junta’s nationwide conscription drive, which began in February last year, appear to face even greater challenges receiving a pension and compensation than those of career soldiers.
The drive is being conducted under the Military Service Law, under which any man aged 18-35 and woman aged 18-27 can be called up to serve in the armed forces for two years. Reportedly tens of thousands of men have so far been recruited in a succession of batches.
Ma Nadi, who lives in Yangon and spoke to Frontier using a pseudonym, said her husband was conscripted into the first training batch in April after being selected through a lottery. After three months of training, he was soon sent to Rakhine.
“He said he was being sent on a two-week operation and would contact me after it ended. Instead, I received a call from his commander to say my husband had been killed in battle,” Ma Nadi said.
The administrator of the ward where Ma Nadi lived said before her husband began military training that he would receive a basic salary of K150,000 plus a hardship fee of K100,000.
“It was all lies,” said Ma Nadi, 29, who is raising a three-year-old daughter. “My husband didn’t get any money while he was being trained,” she said, adding that he managed to send K50,000 of the K100,000 he received the first month after the training, but there has been no financial support since he died.
“In the second month, I received the bad news that he had been killed and since then I have not received anything from the military,” she said.
Ma Nadi said she gave her husband to the military so he could “do his duty for his country”, but the military has not given her anything in return.
Her story conflicts with Min Aung Hlaing’s regular boasts that the armed forces take good care of the families of fallen soldiers. At a regime meeting in the capital Nay Pyi Taw on November 27, he said the regime would provide for the education or vocational training of the children of soldiers killed in action.
Zin Yaw said the promises made by senior officers about caring for bereaved families were a long-running joke in the military. “It’s a form of propaganda,” he said.
Cho Mar said such promises are worthless.
“They say they’ll take responsibility for our children’s education and livelihoods, but they can’t even pay the pensions and compensation for those who gave their lives in battle,” she said.
“They always speak big words that don’t even fit in their mouths.”