Myanmar regime opens training centres as recruitment committee moves to implement conscription

The committee overseeing Myanmar’s nationwide conscription drive said on Monday that it will soon establish training facilities throughout the country that will allow them to initiate forced military recruitment in earnest. The junta’s defence minister Tin Aung San said at a meeting in Naypyitaw that the central recruitment committee has already opened a few training centres and is working with the junta-controlled ministry of legal affairs to standardise its operating procedures. The regime has also distributed over a hundred thousand pamphlets to inform the public about the requirement to register and report for conscription, and has been working with telecommunications firms since February 21 to send out text messages to citizens with similar information, he said. According to a regime-run newspaper, the committee formed an information technology unit to manage and record data last month, along with eight operational sub-teams that would be responsible for processing the first batch of 5,000 recruits that the junta plans to enlist by April of this year. The military regime formed the central recruitment committee on February 21, 10 days after announcing its plans to start conscripting civilians for military service in accordance with a 14-year-old law. The conscription law—originally enacted in 2010 as the National Service Act—requires up to two years of military service from all eligible men between the ages of 18 and 35 and all eligible women between the ages of 18 and 27. For professional specialists (or ‘experts’), the range extends to age 45 for men and age 35 for women, with a term of service of up to three years. People may even be required to serve up to five years in the event of a ‘national emergency’, according to the law. Regime officials have said that 6.3 million men and 7.3 million women in Myanmar will be eligible for the military service, but at present the junta has announced that it intends to conscript 60,000 new recruits per year including the 5,000 in the first planned batch. Women will not be called up in the initial phase of the recruitment process, regime spokesperson Maj-Gen Zaw Min Tun said in a statement. Failing to report to authorities after being summoned for service is punishable by up to three years in prison, and evading conscription by feigning or deliberately incurring or prolonging an illness or disability is punishable by a sentence of up to five years. In the weeks since the regime announced its plans to enforce the conscription law, young people throughout Myanmar have reacted with shock. With demand for new passports skyrocketing following the announcement, some of those unable to flee the country are weighing the option of joining the anti-junta armed resistance.

Myanmar regime opens training centres as recruitment committee moves to implement conscription

The enforcement of compulsory service is proceeding on schedule, compelling young people unwilling to join the military to choose between prison, fleeing the country, or joining the armed resistance

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