The daily life of a hired junta informant in Yangon

Zaw is often left feeling exhausted at daybreak by the unusual requirements of his job, which include patrolling the streets of Yangon from dusk to dawn, helping junta soldiers conduct surprise inspections at the homes of fellow city residents. Despite these duties, Zaw is not a member of the armed forces, the police, or a ward administration team. He is an informant for the junta who is paid for information he collects on members of the public. Zaw, 30, was serving time in Insein Prison when the military seized power in Myanmar in 2021. Released after the coup, he was unemployed and uncertain of his future at a time when the Myanmar military regime was preoccupied with finding and arresting anti-coup activists among the civilian population. The junta’s determination to target its opponents gave rise to a rare career opportunity for ex-convicts like Zaw. Even without the credentials, certificates, or background normally required to apply for employment, they found that junta officials were eager to hire them to gather and relay information on their political opponents. “They said that basic police training normally takes six months but that we could complete ours in two,” Zaw said. A military truck patrols in Yangon in February 2021 (EPA) “And we could still earn higher pay than police privates,” he added, but did not say exactly how much he had been earning from his work. These jobs for informants are generally given to people with connections to the military or the Union Solidarity and Development Party, the military’s proxy political party. New employees receive basic military training and are taught to shoot. These job skills come easily to an ex-convict like Zaw, who was used to a rough lifestyle even before his imprisonment. The informants’ job responsibilities include reporting to township-level junta administrators when they see strangers in a neighbourhood they know well, accompanying soldiers on overnight guest registration inspections, and doing nighttime guard duty at security checkpoints. Zaw said he and his fellow recruits also receive bonuses for telling their employers about people they suspect of involvement in anti-regime activities. “We get paid extra when we give them information about politically active people. It can be either 10,000 kyat or 100,000 kyat, depending on the accuracy,” Zaw said. Zaw is a member of the “Eagle” group of informants, which is based in the city’s Dagon Myo Thit Township and has four separate teams of around 50 members each. The groups operate under the supervision of the commanding officers for battalions stationed in Yangon Region, he said. The military council issues an identification card to each informant with his name, photo, blood type, fingerprint, and a description of any distinguishing marks or scars, according to Zaw. The process to get the card takes nearly a month, he said, and requires informants to report, step by step, to each administrative tier up to the township level. Members of the Eagle group are afforded special privileges, such as permission to ride motorcycles outside of municipal boundaries in Yangon Region, which is off limits to most civilians. According to Zaw, Eagle group members never had trouble accessing petrol during an acute fuel shortage last year when most people were desperate for it. A night in the life of an informant Zaw spoke to Myanmar Now on an evening when he was preparing to accompany soldiers or other personnel on a nighttime guest list check—that is, an inspection to check whether city residents have flouted the junta’s requirements by failing to register guests staying in their homes overnight. He said he hoped he would be working with lower-ranked soldiers such as privates or non-commissioned officers, because higher-ranked officers in his experience were overbearing and hard to please. In general, privates and sergeants would knock normally and conduct the guest list checks with a minimum of fuss, according to Zaw, but commissioned officers often banged on the doors with rifle butts and made the process as noisy, disorderly, and intimidating as possible. Whereas rank-and-file soldiers usually only speak to the head of household, Zaw added, higher-ranking officers tend to wake everyone in the house. “Junior officers are mostly rotten to the core,” Zaw said, referring to soldiers who rank higher than sergeant. “They lack sympathy, have big egos, and throw their weight around.” The informants’ superiors hold them to a quota, requiring them to find at least seven people in each township who have failed to comply with guest registration laws. “We can only wrap up for the night after we’ve detained seven people. If we could only find one person to arrest in a ward, we’d have to go into other wards to find more,” Zaw explained. “But some nights we would manage to arrest eight people from one house. On those nights we could go home early.” “If we catch more than seven people, we usually let the extra people go if they can pay bail,” he added. Zaw recounted these experiences while he and his companions—a soldier, a few junta ward administrators, and several members of the Eagle group—turned down a street in North Dagon Township where it was almost too dark to see because the power was out. The group was able to go home before midnight that night, as it happened, after managing to find seven people who had broken guest registration rules relatively early. “Everything has calmed down a bit now,” Zaw remarked. “We used to have to investigate and look for a bomber every time there was a bomb attack in the early days. It’s not like that anymore. We just have to arrest seven people, and that’s all.” As Zaw described his work as an informant, his disillusionment with the military council became increasingly clear. While it had been a relatively easy way to make money, he no longer liked his job and had realised that working as a military informant hinders ex-convicts like him from reintegrating fully into lawful civilian society. He also said he was conscious of being on the wrong side of history. “It’s embarrassing, really,” he said of his job. One of Zaw’s other duties is to join junta soldiers in manning military security checkpoints at night. The soldiers had come to depend on informants for this work, he said, because they would never dare spend the night at a checkpoint alone for fear of attacks by resistance forces or ethnic armed groups, which occasionally happen in urban settings. “We have to stand guard out at the front of the checkpoint, while they get to stay the middle. My work peers told me that it’s only going to get worse,” Zaw said. The military’s manpower problem In the early days following the 2021 coup, three convoys with five to six soldiers each would patrol each township in Yangon on motorcycles and in cars. The number of soldiers per patrol route dropped to three starting late last year, and down to one this year. “They are losing manpower because they have to send them out to the frontlines,” Zaw said. “Only elderly soldiers are still here now.” The military has been resorting to exceptional—usually forcible—measures to recruit more troops. Regime spokespersons announced in the second week of February that they would start implementing a decade-old conscription law by April. Authorities have also been compelling people to serve in junta-trained militias—using a lottery system for selection—in Ayeyarwady, Yangon, and Bago regions. They have also started forcing one civilian from each household to do guard duty in the rural periphery of Yangon Region. The military council has not released any public statements acknowledging the Eagle group. Junta soldiers seen on guard duty on February 1, 2024 (AFP) The military also routinely detains people for curfew violations, but the soldiers making these arrests are not connected to the Eagle group, according to Zaw. “People lost contact with some of their friends and relatives who were arrested. I even asked about some of them at our stations and they were nowhere to be found, not even in other townships,” Zaw said. “I’m only still doing this because it pays well,” he added. “I’m aware I should be worried about people reporting back about us to the other team. I don’t like this system, I truly don’t. But I need to make a living no matter how much I hate it.”

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