Myanmar’s military junta began to collect citizens’ personal data on Monday, local sources said, choosing not to postpone a scheduled survey despite the emergency conditions prevailing in the country after weeks of catastrophic flooding.
The census is a necessary preliminary step in the regime’s plans to hold elections throughout Myanmar in 2025, a move that pro-democracy advocates, resistance groups, and opponents of the military’s rule have condemned as illegitimate.
The Myanmar military seized power in a coup in 2021, accusing the ousted, elected civilian government of vote fraud in the previous November 2020 election and declaring a state of emergency that has since been extended six times.
The coup regime’s planned 2025 polls are intended to confer a veneer of legitimacy on a government chosen through a military-controlled process, according to the regime’s critics.
The junta, which cited voter registration errors among its reasons for refusing to accept the 2020 election results, has said that the present census “will help ensure accurate voter lists for elections.”
Although the junta previously announced that the census would be conducted from October 1 to 15, regime officials had already begun collecting information from citizens in some townships as of Monday, September 30, the townships’ residents said.
Most of the local people who said they had been surveyed were residents of Mandalay—Myanmar’s second-largest city—or Pyin Oo Lwin, Mandalay Region, a city housing the military’s premier officer training academies. The Mandalay and Pyin Oo Lwin residents asked that further details be withheld out of concern for their safety.
According to Pyin Oo Lwin residents, field collection teams came to the neighbourhoods where they lived or worked in private, civilian vehicles starting on Monday morning.
The teams were made up of soldiers as well as staff from the junta’s immigration department, police force, and ward or village administration teams, they said, and went into hospitals, clinics, hotels, and guesthouses to collect survey data.
The teams’ survey procedures resembled a military operation, according to a source in Pyin Oo Lwin who was asked to give them information.
“They closed off a boarding house where I was staying and called on people from each room, one by one, to collect their information. Two soldiers were guarding the door, with their weapons at the ready, to prevent anyone from escaping,” he said.
“There were two police officers there with two-star rank,” the man continued, referring to a junior commissioned rank in the Myanmar police force. “The soldiers were just guards. The rest were women from immigration and a hundred-household administrator who called on people one by one to interview them.”
The census-takers asked for the subjects’ names, ages, residential addresses, and whether they held the National Registration Card (‘pink card’), according to the Pyin Oo Lwin man, who also noted that they made a priority of asking about occupations. They asked additional questions about jobs performed within the past week, he said.
“I felt very uncomfortable,” he added. “Although only one person was asking questions, about ten people were watching. And there were soldiers with weapons at the ready, standing guard.”
Another man told Myanmar Now that the census-takers asked for his information when he accompanied a patient to a hospital in Pyin Oo Lwin.
“There were many of them. If you didn’t know about the census collection, it looked like they were coming to arrest criminals even at the clinic,” he said.
“They asked about age and occupation. Then they asked what other languages you were proficient in, and if you held a pink National Registration Card. During the questioning, the police even took photos with their phones,” he added.
The man, who was at the clinic around 2pm on Monday, said he saw the census-takers interviewing doctors, nurses, patients, and patients’ attendants inside the hospital complex.
“Today, they mostly collected data from hotels, motels, guesthouses, and hospitals in Pyin Oo Lwin. I heard they’ve also started collecting people’s information in some villages,” he added.
Survey announced, but not started, in Yangon and Naypyitaw
According to a resident of Yangon’s Yankin Township, the local ward administration office had sent out advance notice of the day they should expect the census-takers to arrive at their homes.
Similarly, a resident of Naypyitaw’s Pyinmana Township said administrators had delivered a notification letter to local people’s houses.
“The notice says they will come to collect census data and instructs people to be at home. But there’s a blank space on the letter for the date and time when the census-takers will come, and it’s not filled in,” he said.
An education administrator who plans to serve as a census-taker in Naypyitaw said that the census-takers had been provided with mobile tablets to collect their survey subjects’ information, and received instructions to start the survey on Tuesday, October 1.
Junta-controlled newspapers claimed that the survey was scheduled to be conducted between October 1 and 15, but that the census-taking period would be extended as needed.
Myanmar’s military council has claimed that a census is necessary to gather the information the state needs about its citizens, and that there are protections in place to prevent the misuse of people’s private information. Nonetheless, the launch of the census has made some opponents of the regime fear for their safety.
The Chin Brothers Alliance, which comprises six Chin anti-junta armed groups, issued a statement on Monday prohibiting census-taking for the military regime in areas under their control, vowing to take necessary action against junta collaborators.
Population data collected by the junta could be used for recruiting new soldiers or prolonging the dictatorship, the Chin Brothers’ statement said.
The military regime is prioritising the census at a time of widespread conflict across the country as well as floods that have destroyed thousands of homes and impacted hundreds of thousands of lives since last month.
The regime’s aggressive pursuit of a self-interested aim and apparent insensitivity to the people’s plight has invited comparisons to the previous military regime’s decision not to postpone a constitutional referendum in 2008, less than a week after Cyclone Nargis killed nearly 140,000 and displaced at least 1.5 million people in Myanmar.
Critics of the dictatorship have called the military-drafted 2008 constitution, which was approved in the referendum and remains in effect to this day, the “Nargis constitution.”
The last countrywide census in Myanmar was conducted in 2014 with assistance from the United Nations. Previous censuses were completed in 1983 and 1973.
