Tag: myanmar

Burma’s Conscription Law: Destroying Education and Accelerating Brain Drain

The Burma (Myanmar) military junta activated its conscription law on February 10, 2024, requiring men aged 18 to 35 and women aged 18 to 27 to serve in the military. Professionals, including doctors, engineers, and technical specialists, can be conscripted up to age 45 for men and 35 for women.

Those conscripted are required to serve a minimum of three years. This includes educated adults with engineering, medical, and technical skills, further draining Burma’s already collapsing education and professional sectors.

Conscription means serving a junta that seized power in 2021 by overthrowing the elected government and arresting pro-democracy leaders. It also means being forced into a civil war in which as much as 80 percent of the population opposes military rule.

For ethnic minorities, who make up roughly 40 percent of the population, conscription is especially devastating. It means being ordered to participate in widespread atrocities, including murder, rape, and the burning of villages, directed against their own families and communities.

The International Labour Organization estimates hundreds of thousands have fled Burma to escape conscription since February 2024. Fear of being drafted drove so many young men to flee to Thailand in 2024 that they set a record for the highest annual number of undocumented Burma migrants to arrive in Thailand. The International Organization for Migration estimates over 4 million Burma migrants live in Thailand, about half of whom are undocumented. In addition to the personal hardship, they face as undocumented aliens in Thailand, separated from their families, the conscription law is decimating Burma’s education system.

At the beginning of the revolution, thousands of students walked away from junta-run universities and schools as part of the civil disobedience movement. Many shifted to alternative education options, including community-run higher education institutions in ethnic minority areas and online programs. The conscription law, however, made it unsafe for them to remain in Burma while completing these programs.

As a result, the Thailand Education Fair held in April 2024 saw overwhelming attendance, and the November 2024 fair was extended to two days as attendance doubled. Students whose families can afford it, or who secure scholarships, are fleeing to study at Thai universities. As Burma’s economy collapses, however, this option has become increasingly out of reach. Annual tuition of roughly $3,000 represents about two years’ salary for Burmese families fortunate enough to still have employment.

The law has exacerbated a brain drain that was already causing young people to leave Burma, impacting education and the labor market.

The United States Agency for International Development funding freeze suspended the Development and Inclusive Scholarship Program, affecting more than 400 Burma students pursuing degrees in the Philippines, Cambodia, Indonesia, and Thailand. Inside Burma, parents are pulling children out of school and sending them to neighboring countries to look for work, driven by fear of conscription. Both inside Burma and across the region, child labor violations involving children aged 12 to 16 have increased as youth fleeing the country or joining resistance forces have created labor shortages.

The crisis extends beyond students. Teachers and professors have either fled to the jungle to join the resistance or escaped the country altogether in search of work. As a result, educated adults and former professionals now find themselves in Thailand and other countries working as day laborers alongside young people who fled before finishing university, or in many cases, even high school.

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No Surprise: Burma Army Leads Stilted Elections

The first round of Burma (Myanmar)’s three-phase elections began on December 28, 2025, under a framework imposed by the military junta that seized power in January 2021. With major opposition parties barred, voting canceled in 65 of the country’s 330 townships due to ongoing fighting, and further cancellations expected, the military-aligned Union Solidarity and Development Party is leading, an outcome critics say was predetermined.

The results defy logic. If the people wanted to be ruled by generals, they would not have been fighting the military for the past eight decades in what is widely recognized as the world’s longest-running conflict.

Opposition groups argue the vote is neither free nor fair and serves to legitimize continued military rule through tightly controlled elections that exclude major parties and suppress dissent, prompting several groups to call for a boycott.

The military government said more than six million people voted in the Dec. 28 first phase, claiming a turnout of about 52 percent of eligible voters in participating areas and calling it a success. The Union Election Commission said the USDP won 38 seats in the 330-seat lower house, with results still pending.

Party leader Khin Yi, a former general and police chief closely aligned with junta leader Min Aung Hlaing, was declared the winner in his Naypyitaw constituency. Naypyitaw is the military-built administrative capital established after the coup.

According to a senior USDP official speaking anonymously, the party has secured 88 of the 102 seats contested in the first phase, including 29 constituencies where it ran unopposed. The Shan Nationalities Democratic Party and the Mon Unity Party each won one seat. The official also claimed the USDP captured about 85 percent of contested regional legislature seats, though full results will only be known after later phases.

Myanmar’s parliament consists of two houses with 664 total seats, and the party controlling a combined majority can select the president and form a government. Under the constitution, the military is guaranteed 25 percent of seats in each chamber, giving it decisive built-in power regardless of election outcomes. Only six parties are competing nationwide with any realistic chance of parliamentary influence, with the USDP far ahead of its rivals.

Voting is being held in three phases because of ongoing fighting across the country. The first round covered 102 townships, with additional voting scheduled for Jan. 11 and Jan. 25, while 65 townships are excluded entirely due to conflict. Although thousands of candidates from dozens of parties are nominally contesting seats, political competition remains tightly restricted.

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What Are the Burma Scam Centers, How Much Have They Stolen from Americans, How Do They Affect the Revolution, and What Is the US Doing About It?

The Myanmar military junta continues to run extensive criminal enterprises that finance its war and atrocities, with cyber scam compounds at the center of its revenue stream. These scam centers are massive penal-colony-style compounds where trafficked workers conduct global cyber fraud operations, primarily “pig butchering” schemes that build trust with victims before stealing their life savings.

Between 2020 and 2024, victims worldwide lost roughly $75 billion to Southeast Asian cyber scams, with hundreds of thousands of trafficked individuals from multiple nationalities forced to work in compounds across Cambodia, Burma (Myanmar), and Laos.

These networks rely on U.S.-based social media, websites, and hosting services to lure Americans into cryptocurrency schemes before redirecting the funds into fake platforms and laundering the money overseas. Authorities noted that in some countries the scam industry is so large it accounts for nearly half of the national GDP, with Americans losing an estimated ten billion dollars per year.

Since the coup in 2021, Burma has become the regional epicenter of cyber scams, with more than thirty scam enclaves along the Thai border and nearly one hundred along the Chinese border. These operations are driven largely by Chinese transnational criminal networks that use front companies such as Trans Asia and Troth Star to finance, expand, and manage the compounds. Some of these same companies partnered with junta-aligned Border Guard Forces on major scam hubs such as Huanya and KK Park, both of which have repeatedly targeted American victims.

Scam centers operate openly because the Myanmar military and its Border Guard Forces protect and profit from them, allowing the compounds to avoid the airstrikes routinely inflicted on civilian and resistance areas. Multiple investigations confirm the junta’s central role in this transnational criminal ecosystem.

Phone geolocation data from 2024 shows frequent movement between Myawaddy scam compounds and government buildings in Naypyidaw, indicating a direct operational relationship between organized crime and the military regime. Junta-aligned armed groups are permitted to impose informal taxation on the scam industry in exchange for land, security, transportation, and logistical support.

Several of the most active scam sites are in Karen State, including the Tai Chang compound near Myawaddy, which sits on territory controlled by the Democratic Karen Benevolent Army. Another powerful Karen militia, the Democratic Karen Buddhist Army, plays a central role in sustaining the criminal economy. The DKBA provides security for multiple compounds and has been directly involved in abusing trafficked workers forced to run the scams.

Victims report beatings, electric shocks, being hung by their arms, and other violent treatment. Scam revenue funds DKBA activities, and the group collaborates with Chinese organized crime in drug trafficking, human trafficking, arms trafficking, wildlife trafficking, and money laundering.

The flow of scam revenue strengthens the junta’s allies and prolongs the war in Burma. The United Nations estimates that at least 120,000 people are trapped inside these compounds, facing forced labor, torture, and killings for failing to meet scamming quotas. Even as resistance organizations unite against the regime, the scam industry continues to thrive because it remains one of the junta’s most lucrative and protected sources of income.

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Update from the War in Burma – Displacement Crisis Intensifies, The UN Has Done Nothing to Help

The story in brief: The war in Burma (Myanmar) has displaced 3.5 million people, now living in IDP camps that receive little or no international support and remain targets of government airstrikes. The UN is fully aware of the crisis but, apart from issuing reports, has done nothing to help.

U.S. aid cuts had little impact on these people, since almost no international or government assistance was reaching them in the first place. Now it appears the international community will tolerate, and even legitimize, the junta’s planned election, which has barred pro-democracy and opposition parties. Donald Trump was right to criticize the UN as ineffective and to cut U.S. aid. However, targeted U.S. aid should be restarted, and a UN peacekeeping mission launched, to save lives.

On August 11, six families arrived at the Catholic church in Mese, Karenni State, Burma seeking food and assistance. They had endured a three-week ordeal through the jungle to escape fighting near their home village in Pekhon, where government forces and the allied Pa-O National Army (PNO) were killing civilians, seizing rice fields, and burning entire villages. This was part of an intensified government campaign to retake territory held by ethnic resistance forces ahead of a sham election the junta hopes to legitimize by claiming that a greater share of the population and the country’s territory are represented.

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