Regime administrators ask civilians to chip in for new army enlistees

Junta officials have been collecting money from civilian communities in Yangon, Mandalay, and Naypyitaw, according to those cities’ residents, telling locals that it will be used to support troops recruited for military service. In need of more manpower, the junta announced on February 10 that it would reactivate a decade-old conscription law requiring eligible adults to serve in the military for up to five years, and soon set up recruitment committees and training centres to implement the conscription policy throughout the country. Since the first week of March, regime administrators have been conducting community surveys, collecting the names of people eligible for service, and summoning those eligible to their local ward administrative offices for selection. In some townships, they have begun to collect money from civilians openly, residents said. In one of the wards of Patheingyi Township, Mandalay Region last Wednesday, the ward administration office announced through a loudspeaker that it would begin charging a payments of 5,000 kyat (US $2.40) per household, according to a man living in Mandalay. That morning, after convening residents of the ward to select eligible recruits for the army, the administrators said that they accepted two volunteers for service in the army and would need the community to provide financial support for the two new recruits. "They convened in the morning, and they announced that same evening that they had found two volunteers. To me it was strange,” the Mandalay resident said. “Now residents of the ward have to pay them 5,000 kyat per house.” He added that the administrators had originally selected recruits by random lottery, but now they said they had found volunteers to serve in the army so they would be collecting funds to support the volunteers instead of drawing names randomly. “There really may be two volunteers or there may not be,” the Mandalay resident said. “I always assumed that they had only made people convene at the administrative office to raise money anyway.” The military council has ordered local administrative officials to collect the names of everyone in the eligible age range for service—between 18 and 35 years old—and has claimed that a total of 14 million people throughout the country are eligible. Regime-appointed administrators have already been killed in the process of implementing the unpopular conscription policy. On March 18, a village administrator named Myint Htoo was shot dead in Salin Township, Magway Region, while speaking about the conscription through a loudspeaker. The next day, another administrator was fatally shot in Wundwin Township, Mandalay Region. The Wundwin Township Revolution Force, which claimed responsibility for the killing, said he had been assisting the army in forcible recruitment. A 100-household administrator from Dawa, a village in Thandwe’s Shwe Hlaw village tract, was shot dead last Thursday by unknown assailants, according to local news outlets. No group has yet claimed responsibility for the shooting. In the past few days, a video recording has circulated showing local administrators telling civilians that people volunteering to serve in the military will be paid 300,000 kyat (US $143) per month. “The allowance they said they would give volunteers turned out to be something taken from people in the ward,” the Mandalay resident said. “They won't pay out of their own pockets, but with the people’s money.” Residents of Naypyitaw, the junta’s administrative capital, said local administrators had informed them that there were similar plans in place there. A woman living in Naypyitaw’s Zabuthiri Township said that administrators in some villages and wards of Zabuthiri, Lewe, and Pyinmana townships told them that they would charge 3,000 to 10,000 kyat per household to cover the volunteers’ travel expenses and provide support for their families. The amounts collected reportedly vary according to the population of each ward or village. "People who are relatively rich in the ward support those who are drafted because they feel pity for them,” said the Zabuthiri Township resident. “As for her ward, the administrator said that 5,000 kyat per household was needed for those attending military training, and 3,000 kyat per month was needed to support the families of those serving in the military.” According to a woman working as a manual laborer in Pyinmana Township, people with low incomes also plan to make payments to avoid offending junta authorities. "We earn just 5,000 kyat a day, and it's not a regular, daily job, so it's not easy to pay but we have to contribute,” she said. “I don't like that the people have to pay.” An administrator from Naypyitaw said that the plan to collect money was not ordered by superiors, and they simply planned to help out of sympathy for the enlistees. In a village in Twantay township, Yangon Region, a local administrator told the villagers on March 18 that instead of organising a lottery, he would look for people to enlist in the army voluntarily and collect 5,000 kyat per household to support the volunteers. "The villagers agreed, and the next day, the ten-household administrator went door-to-door to collect 5,000 kyat per household," a Twantay resident said, citing the villagers’ accounts. "The next day, they said the army did not accept volunteers, so the village administrator arranged the lottery and selected five people to conscript into the army,” the Twantay Township resident said. “The villagers said that they still haven't received the 5,000 kyat back.” According to the central recruitment committee—the national-level body formed in February to implement the junta’s draft policy—if an eligible person called up for service for service is not at home to answer the summons, his family is obligated to give a valid reason. If authorities deem the reason invalid, the absentee will be considered a fugitive. Whether there will be consequences for the absentee’s family has yet to be decided and will be addressed in forthcoming rules on enforcing the conscription law, according to a committee spokesperson. The central committee’s spokesperson added that, after completing military training, conscripts will receive pay equal to that of other full-time soldiers. People remain reluctant to serve in the army due to its reputation for killing noncombatants, burning villages, and indiscriminate airstrikes and artillery attacks on civilian targets. Young people with the necessary means and connections have left or prepared to flee the country in response to the conscription policy, while others have chosen to join the anti-junta resistance forces. The junta has been in power since February 2021 after overthrowing the incumbent civilian government in a coup on the pretext of electoral fraud in Myanmar’s 2020 general election, based on accusations widely accepted as fabrications. The military regime responded to widespread popular demonstrations against its rule by shooting peaceful protesters, provoking the coup’s opponents to form armed resistance groups and seek military training from ethnic armed organisations (EAOs) in Myanmar’s border regions. Having faced a string of battlefield losses against the EAOs and resistance groups since late 2023, the junta reactivated the conscription law due to its increasingly desperate need for manpower.

Regime administrators ask civilians to chip in for new army enlistees

Local officials have dubiously claimed that the payments they are soliciting will be used to support new volunteers in the army, sometimes presenting voluntary enlistment as an alternative to selecting conscripts by random lottery

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