Myanmar migrant workers repatriated from an immigration detention centre in the southern Thai town of Ranong are being forced to join the military, according to local sources.
The workers, detained in Thailand for illegal entry or other offences, are handed over to the military immediately after their return to Myanmar, the sources said.
“The first two batches of conscripts were mostly local people, but batches three to five have included many repatriated workers,” a man living in Kawthaung, located opposite Ranong in southern Tanintharyi Region, told Myanmar Now.
According to the man, Light Infantry Battalion 342 and Infantry Battalion 262, both based in Kawthaung, process the workers to determine whether they are eligible for military service. If they are, they are immediately sent away for training, he said.
In late September, the military reportedly sent around 120 repatriated migrant workers to training centres in Tanintharyi’s Palaw and Palauk townships under the junta’s conscription law, which went into force for the first time earlier this year.
According to Thar Kyaw, chair of the Ranong-based Meikta Thahaya Self-Administered Funeral Welfare Association, junta authorities regularly visit the town’s immigration detention centre to see how many potential recruits they can expect to receive.
“Since they started applying the law, the junta has been checking two or three times a month to see how many detainees there are. [The Thai authorities] usually send around 100 at a time,” he said.
He added that there are around 500 migrant workers in the detention centre at any given time, or nearly double its capacity, meaning that there is constant pressure to deport detainees.
Last month, a group of 29 deportees who were forced to join the military managed to escape after overpowering their guards while being transported to a training centre in Palaw Township. Most ended up in territory controlled by the Karen National Union’s Brigade 4, where they vowed to join the fight against the regime.
Kyaw Ni, the labour minister for Myanmar’s publicly mandated National Unity Government (NUG), said the regime’s practice of forcibly recruiting repatriated migrants has raised fears among undocumented Myanmar nationals living in Thailand.
He said the NUG would appeal to the Thai government to refrain from handing deported workers over to regime authorities. “In this situation, sending people back like this is like sending them into a death trap,” he said.
Meanwhile, the junta is also stepping up its efforts to prevent conscription-age men from leaving Myanmar illegally. According to Kyaw Ni, the regime arrested a number of men in Tanintharyi Region earlier this month for attempting to enter Thailand without authorisation, subsequently forcing them into military service.
Since imposing the conscription law, the regime has banned men aged 18 to 35 from leaving Myanmar for employment purposes. In addition to making it more difficult to avoid the draft, the measure has added to the hardships of ordinary people already struggling to survive in the country’s post-coup economy.
