Myanmar junta administrators preparing lists of women for conscription

The military council’s administrators have begun to collect information on women eligible for compulsory military service in Tanintharyi and Bago regions, according to local civilians. A resident of Myeik, Tanintharyi Region claimed junta-appointed administrators were drawing up lists of local women during their nightly “guest registration checks” in Myeik and Kawthaung townships. “They are only collecting names, but young people have already fled their home villages and towns,” the Myeik resident said, also noting that a large portion of Myeik’s population has already fled to Thailand. A villager in Yedashe Township, Bago Region with connections to the local junta administration said that township-level officials had ordered them to list the names of women eligible for conscription after the eligible men in his village fled to evade recruitment. He requested that Myanmar Now withhold the name of his village for the sake of the residents’ security. “The administrators come for young conscripts and do guest registration checks at night so we haven’t even been able to get enough sleep. Now all the young people have either fled to the cities or gone abroad to work,” the Yedashe Township resident said. Another source close to administrators in Naypyitaw, the junta’s union-level capital, said that after men eligible for conscription had left the city en masse, administrators had also started to collect the names of eligible women due to pressure from higher-ups. “10 out of 10 people on those lists are no longer in the neighbourhood. Some have gone abroad for work, and many have fled wherever they could go. The administrators themselves are under extreme pressure,” the source in Naypyitaw said. When Myanmar Now reached the junta’s central recruitment committee—known as the Central Body for Summoning People’s Military Servants—and the Summoning Team for People’s Military Servants in Ayeyarwady Region to ask for comment, both denied that there had been orders to collect information on women for conscription purposes. “We still do not known when they will actually be conscripted, and we haven’t received any order to collect lists of names,” said the staff member who answered the central body’s phone. The conscription law in its current form was enacted in 2010, via amendments to an existing military service law, only months before Sen.-Gen. Than Shwe stepped down as the leader of Myanmar’s previous military dictatorship. The governments led by Thein Sein and Aung San Suu Kyi did not enforce it. Three years after the military seized power again in 2021, however, coup leader and incumbent junta chief Sen.-Gen. Min Aung Hlaing reactivated the law earlier this year, leading to the forcible recruitment and training of young men throughout Myanmar. Under the law, men between 18 and 35 years old and women between 18 and 27 years old are eligible for conscription, as are men with certain professional credentials between 18 and 45 and credentialed women between 19 and 35. The military’s conscription drive began in April and the first two batches of new recruits, totalling 10,000 young men, have already started military training. The regime plans to summon the third batch of 5,000 conscripts to training centres in the coming weeks. The Myanmar military initiated conscription to address its shortage of manpower as it fought to hold off coordinated offensive operations by anti-junta armed groups on multiple fronts. Before conscription, the military tried to compensate for its insufficient strength by training and arming volunteer militias known as Pyu Saw Htee in various parts of the country.

Myanmar junta administrators preparing lists of women for conscription

Locals and sources close to regime-appointed administrators said they have begun to collect women’s information for recruitment purposes, despite junta officials’ denials that there were any orders to do so

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