Telecoms blackouts aggravate Myanmar civilians’ suffering in horrific war

Names and identifying details in this article have been changed to protect our sources’ security. For more than a week and a half, Maung Lu, a 28-year-old office employee in Yangon, has been unable to reach his girlfriend who lives and works in the northern jade mining town of Hpakant, Kachin State. “The last time I spoke with her on the phone was July 21, around 9am,” he said. “When I tried to call her again at lunchtime, I couldn’t get through anymore. It’s been eleven days now,” he told Myanmar Now on the last day of July. Maung Lu is one of the thousands of people in Myanmar who have lost contact with loved ones and friends due to frequent telecommunications outages affecting wide swaths of the country since the 2021 coup, especially near battlefields far from major cities. According to data collected by the research and free speech advocacy organisation Athan, in the three years after the coup there were 335 telecommunications blackout events in 169 of Myanmar’s 330 townships. All areas of Kachin State—the site of clashes between the military and the powerful ethnic armed organisation Kachin Independence Army—lost telephone and internet service connections on July 21 for unconfirmed reasons. While the military or junta-appointed administrators may have chosen to cut off phone and internet communications deliberately, it may also have been an accidental interruption of service caused by damage from the fighting in the state. According to Vicky Bowman, the Director of Myanmar Centre for Responsible Business, telecommunications companies in Myanmar have often lost the capacity to provide service when telecommunications towers or other equipment and infrastructure sustain damage amid violent clashes. “Inability to access the internet makes people more economically and physically vulnerable when Myanmar is already experiencing a significant humanitarian crisis,” Bowman added. A telecommunications tower in Myanmar built by the Norwegian-owned company Telenor before the country exited the country in 2022 in response to the coup the year before (Credit: Telenor) Maung Lu and his partner, 34, are both from the Sagaing Region in Myanmar’s north. They have been in a committed relationship for over a year and a half. With no information from Kachin State, Maung Lu says he was sick with worry about her. Most of the state is still cut off from communication by mobile phone or internet. “I couldn’t sleep well for the first few days. I was woken up by nightmares about her,” said Maung Lu. “I was so worried I was thinking of how I could travel to her,” he said. On July 29, the ninth day without word from his partner, Maung Lu finally received a letter from her. “As I read the letter, I was shedding tears of joy,” he said. “I’d been missing her so much.” “These days, I fall asleep by reading her letter,” he continued, again adding that “it’s been 11 days” since they could reach each other by phone. Going back in time Before the mid-2010s, many areas of Myanmar outside of major cities like Yangon, Mandalay, and Naypyitaw were living under practically pre-industrial conditions, with only limited access to electricity and telephone service, as well as meagre resources for education and poorly maintained infrastructure. The conflict raging in Myanmar’s hinterlands since Myanmar won its independence from the British Empire in 1948, as well as the iron-fisted rule by military dictators over most of those decades, had the effect of isolating the country and cutting off access to goods and technology from the wider world. The 2021 military coup interrupted a brief but momentous experiment with democracy, openness, and integration into the global community under the government of Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) party, which revolutionised how people in Myanmar communicated with each other and with other countries. Technological advances further broadened access to faster, more efficient means of communication, enabling the country’s younger generations to count on a better future and take advantage of new opportunities while remaining in regular contact with loved ones in more remote areas. Under the pre-coup, civilian government of the NLD, Myanmar allocated funds totalling US $61.6 million to developing communications infrastructure with plans for further increases in funding. They set a five-year target of giving 99 percent of the country’s people access to telecoms services, according to a 2018 report from the country’s transport and communications ministry. However, conditions in Myanmar since the coup put the brakes on and in some cases reversed these improvements, depriving people of the means of easy communication they had become accustomed to. “Despite our love and commitment, we are in a situation where we cannot even reach each other. It makes me really sad. I feel for everyone who’s in a long-distance relationship,” Maung Lu said. Rakhine State: Communications cut off by violence In western Myanmar, following attacks by the Arakan Army (AA) on the junta positions since mid-July, the famous beach town of Ngapali in southern Rakhine State’s Thandwe Township has been almost entirely incommunicado. In addition to cutting off phone and internet services amid the fighting, the junta has blocked roads and banned boat travel in much of Rakhine State, even stopping the transport of food into war zones and leaving the civilian population in desperate need. Since the AA overran Thandwe’s airport on June 24, the junta has shelled and bombed the urban areas of the township relentlessly, forcing most residents to flee. Since July 13—the day the AA took over a prison in the township and released the inmates amid ongoing air and artillery strikes—Kyi Pyar, a 23-year-old mother of two who now lives in Yangon, has lost contact with her parents. “It was around 11:30 on July 13 when I was talking to my mother. She suddenly said she needed to end the call, saying the prison had been seized,” said Kyi Pyar. “She told me she would call back, but I haven’t gotten a call from her since,” Kyi Pyar said, adding, “I’ve been calling my friends, relatives, and acquaintances, but no one is answering. All their numbers say ‘out of service’.” “During the last phone call, my mom told me there was constant gunfire and warplanes bombing nearby,” Kyi Pyar told Myanmar Now. Two Rakhine women ride a motorcycle past a telecommunications advertisement in Sittwe, Rakhine State in June 2019, soon after a temporary suspension of internet data services was announced for some areas due to fighting between the military and Arakan Army in the state. The clashes forced some 40,000 residents to flee from their homes to temporary camps in Ponnagyun, Buthidaung, Rathedaung, Mrauk-U, Minbya, Sittwe, and Kyauktaw townships. Such suspensions and outages have occurred more frequently since the 2021 coup (Photo: EPA/Nyunt Win) While most of the town’s civilian residents have fled, some lacked the means to leave and remain trapped there, including Kyi Pyar’s parents and other relatives. Both of her parents are in their 60s and live by themselves. Their sons who work abroad used to remit part of their earnings back home, but have been unable to do so for more than three months, according to Kyi Pyar. “Money transfers weren’t possible anymore. The price of goods was skyrocketing. It was already very difficult for most people,” Kyi Pyar said, citing her mother. “My parents are old and weak. I am very worried they won’t even have full meals or safe shelter,” she added. “I don’t know what has happened to them, or even whether they are still alive and just hiding out somewhere.” Married to a man based in Yangon, Kyi Pyar said she has not been able to see her parents for two years, due to deteriorating economic conditions, the war perpetrated by the military, and flooding in early July. The telecommunications outages have only added to the difficulty, she added. “It would be a great relief just to know they’re alright. Even if we have to communicate by sending letters,” Kyi Pyar said of her parents. “But I never thought I would lose contact with them so suddenly, and now I have no idea how to send the letter where it will reach them.” According to local media reports from Thandwe, residents have no access to buses or other forms of public transportation, and have had to make their way from Rakhine State to the more peaceful areas of the neighbouring Ayeyarwady Region or Yangon on foot. Northern Shan State: Displaced families lose contact amid horrors of war, Since late July, images and video footage emerging from Lashio, northern Shan State have shown the grisly aftermath of recent clashes there, with bodies piled up in the streets and few signs of life or activity other than stray dogs wandering among burnt houses damaged by bombs. Northern Shan State has become a hotbed of fighting in the last two months, with clashes concentrated in and around its largest city and administrative capital, Lashio, since a powerful ethnic armed group besieged and took over the town at the end of last month. With assistance from allies, the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army (MNDAA)—also known widely as the Kokang army—finally succeeded in overrunning the town, capturing the military’s Northeastern Regional Military Command headquarters in late July after several weeks of fighting. A garrison town housing many Burmese military families as well as Shan and Chinese ethnic communities, Lashio had remained relatively untouched by fighting before July, even as the MNDAA and other anti-junta fighters in the Brotherhood Alliance of ethnic armed groups fought for control of the rest of northern Shan State. Most civilian residents of Lashio with the means to flee had left by the time the MNDAA and its allies captured the city, seeking shelter in southern Shan State, Mandalay Region, or wherever they could find it. However, a portion of Lashio’s large civilian population stayed to safeguard their homes and property. According to locally based emergency response workers, recent clashes and shelling has caused many civilian deaths and casualties and deaths since last month, and survivors are now trapped by road blockades and cut off from communication by phone or internet due to outages. Lashio resident Wai Mar, 26, lost contact with her father and brother after they went to an outlying village in Lashio Township for a job. The fighting in Lashio was so intense in the days before the MNDAA takeover that it became impossible to leave the city, Wai Mar said. She waited for her father and brother’s return until July 27, but said she and her mother were forced to flee the city at the first opportunity for their own safety. “We left the shelter around 5am on July 27,” she said, referring to a shelter for civilians where she and her mother had stayed after fleeing their home. Many Lashio residents died in the shelling, she said, with their families forced to leave their bodies behind. “Most of the town was already a ruin, with bodies lying around in the streets,” she said. She recalled seeing the abandoned body of a severely injured infant on the road to Mandalay and Meiktila while she fled with other civilians displaced from Lashio. “I think a family must have been unable to carry the child's body and had to leave it on the road,” Wai Mar said. Wai Mar says the distress of not knowing her father and brother’s whereabouts adds to the horror she is still living with from the violence she witnessed. “I not only had to worry for my own safety and property but also for my father and brother, having no idea what was happening to them,” she told Myanmar Now. Wai Mar last heard from her father, 50, and brother, 16, on July 5. They said junta troops were holding them in the village where they went for work, and not allowing them to leave. “He told me they were still in good health, but were not getting regular meals,” Wai Mar said, referring to her father. “I’m very worried for them.” Although she had met an acquaintance of her father’s who told her they had been on the way to Mandalay since July 10, most mobile phone operators had stopped providing service since July 20 in the area and she was unable to reach them directly, she said. “I was told that they hitchhiked to Mandalay,” she said. “But I haven’t heard anything about them since. We want to hope for the best—that they’re still alive and well—but we have to be prepared for the worst, too.” “To anyone who may meet them, I ask that you please give them shelter and pass on the information that we are in Meiktila,” Wai Mar added, giving her father’s first name as “Naing” and her brother’s first name as “Hein.” Myanmar Now tried to contact the transport and communications ministry, now controlled by the military council, with enquiries about the status of telecommunications in war-torn areas but did not receive a response. In Yangon, Maung Lu cited the letter his partner sent from Hpakant, Kachin State, saying that people living there now have to go to internet cafes that charge 30,000 kyat (US $9) an hour for web access. He said people became used to being able to communicate at long distances with a simple phone call or text message, and blamed political circumstances for the reversion to living conditions that were in place more than a decade ago. “I never thought that we would have to communicate with letters like in the old days,” Maung Lu said. “These days, not hearing from her is very painful, I’m just not able to function as usual because I miss her so much,” he added. “The economic and political trajectory in the country has been devastating for us. I just want a future where everyone can live in peace.”

Telecoms blackouts aggravate Myanmar civilians’ suffering in horrific war

In parts of Myanmar impacted by conflict, civilians feel forced back to an earlier era without mobile phones or internet, with letters as the only remaining means of reaching loved ones in conflict zones, and some areas cut off from all forms of communication

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