Young men live in fear of being snatched off the streets and sold to Myanmar's army

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Young men live in fear of being snatched off the streets and sold to Myanmar's army
- Published
You do not stay out after dark if you're young and able-bodied in Hpa-An, the capital of Myanmar's southern Karen state. In recent months this has become conventional wisdom.
But Zaw Min has no choice.
"I worry, but I have to go out to work," says the 26-year-old tuk tuk driver, who asked that his real name be omitted out of fear for his safety. "My family call me all the time and remind me not to drive passengers too far; to be careful who I take as a passenger... I have to be vigilant all the time.
"People are panicked and frightened," he explains. "Some people I know have been taken."
Locals say plain-clothed members and supporters of the Myanmar junta have been roaming the streets of Hpa-An, arbitrarily arresting people in their teens, 20s and 30s and forcing them into military service.
According to leaked documents seen by BBC Burmese, authorities have been ordered to aggressively fulfil the military's recruitment quotas across jurisdictions, bolstering the junta's ranks as it endures a war of attrition against ethnic militias, pro-democracy groups and civilian-led resistance movements.
Zaw Min is the only one among his siblings who is at the age of recruitment. Many other "kids" his age have fled, he says – to Thailand, or the homes of relatives further afield. Those who remain are often under strict instructions from their parents: be home before dusk.
Myanmar has been locked in a bloody civil war since February 2021, when its own military launched a coup d'etat and ousted democratically elected leader Aung San Suu Kyi.
Three years later, following a string of humiliating losses, plummeting morale and soaring rates of desertion, the junta enacted a mandatory conscription law that required all men aged 18 to 35 and women aged 18 to 27 to serve at least two years under military command. Those who refuse face up to five years in prison.
The enactment of the law "represents one of the most severe and impactful actions taken against the entire civilian population since the military coup", according to Maj Naung Yoe, military affairs official at the Myanmar Defense and Security Institute (MDSI) and a former military officer who defected and joined the anti-coup Civil Disobedience Movement.
Hpa-An is the latest to be caught in a dragnet that's already ensnared an estimated 100,000 young recruits over the past two-and-a-half years – many of them via coercion, extortion and abductions.
"Security forces track young people's movements to arrest them, force them into service under the pretext of statutory military eligibility, extort money through threats of detention, and arrest individuals during guest-list inspections," Naung Yoe says.
The BBC contacted the Myanmar government's Central Body for Summoning People's Military Servants regarding incidents mentioned in this story, including the forced recruitment of conscripts and reports of abductions allegedly carried out in recent months.
They said they had no comment on the matter.
With the mandatory conscription law, the junta has established a human supply chain to sustain its armed forces. And it appears to have worked. Observers note that reinforcements have played a critical role in helping the regime claw back more territory. In many parts of Myanmar, the resistance is now on the back foot.
The war, though, is far from over. And as more youths evade conscription – either to join the resistance or simply avoid armed conflict against their fellow countrymen – the junta's recruitment methods have become ever more extreme.
International rights groups such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Fortify Rights say Myanmar's military is abducting civilians and forcing them into military service.
In July, open-source research organisation Myanmar Witness revealed that they had analysed hundreds of missing-person advertisements collected from Facebook between 2021 and 2025.
Researchers found that missing person notices for January rose from four in 2021, pre-coup, to 82 in 2025, post-conscription law.
"In practice, much of [the Myanmar military's] recruitment appears to be carried out through detention, coercion, and disappearance rather than formal call-up, and often without notice to families," they concluded.
Men and boys constituted the majority of reported missing persons.
"They are spreading rumours all over the neighbourhood that I sold my husband."
Ma Moe San Pan sobs the words through gulps of air. She is sitting in her kitchen, at home in Yangon, where on the morning of 8 May 2025 she saw her 33-year-old husband Phyo Wai for the last time.
"We had an argument, and afterwards he left home," she recalls."I was upset and told my cousin about what had happened."
Ma Moe San Pan's cousin worked at the local ward administration office, and she asked him to bring her husband back. It was two days later that Phyo Wai called her, from a military recruitment centre on the other side of the city.
The cousin had taken him to the ward office which had sold him on to another ward for 4 million kyats ($900; £680) to fill that ward's recruitment quota, Ma Moe San Pan says. The BBC was unable to reach Ma Moe San Pan's cousin.
In a desperate attempt to bring him back, Ma Moe San Pan was then scammed out of 4.5 million kyats by strangers who falsely promised his release.
U Maung Maung Lwin, the administrator of the ward to which Phyo Wai was taken, later admitted to the BBC that he had played a role in sending him to the military recruitment authorities.
When asked about allegations that individuals were being conscripted outside their home township, he said transfers from other townships do occur when local quotas cannot be met.
But he denied that any money was involved in such cases, or in Phyo Wai's forced conscription.
"[Phyo Wai] told me they said they would help him and made him sign documents," Ma Moe San Pan recalls.
"If my husband had been legally selected for conscription through the normal process, I could have accepted that. What I cannot accept is that our own ward administration office allegedly sold him to another ward.
"I also regret placing my trust in my cousin."
In the time since Phyo Wai was taken, Ma Moe San Pan has filed police complaints relating to two matters: the sale of her husband into military service, and the 4.5 million kyats she lost to scammers.
The police accepted her complaint, she says, but refused her request to include human trafficking charges, claiming a human trafficking case could only be registered if a person had been sold abroad.
She does not know where her husband is now.
Ma Moe San Pan's case highlights a grim mutation of the junta's mandatory conscription laws: mounting pressure from the higher levels of the regime has created perverse incentives further down the chain of command.
Surging demand and dwindling supply have fuelled an illicit market for eligible recruits. And with money on the table, security officials have taken to arresting youth at road checkpoints, tracking and ambushing workers during their daily commutes, setting traps via fake job advertisements, and forcibly entering people's homes, Naung Yoe says.
"Under the guise of the conscription law, these coercive arrests and recruitment drives have effectively transformed into a modern-day slavery and human trafficking enterprise."
In late August, police in Yangon arrested a member of the Fire Services Department – a branch of the home affairs ministry – and his son-in-law for abducting four young men with the intention of selling them for military conscription.
The reserve fire brigade unit commander allegedly deceived the men with promises of employment opportunities, luring them to his house and trapping them in a series of purpose-built detention rooms. Police officers raided the residence and arrested him on 25 August. He has since been charged with kidnapping or abducting in order to wrongfully confine a person, and faces up to 7 years in prison.
BBC Burmese made several attempts to contact the police station where he is being held, but was unsuccessful.
"Lower-level administrative bodies, military personnel and local criminal gangs employ diverse tactics to press-gang and arrest young people," Naung Yoe says.
"They sell these individuals to military units and regional commands facing manpower shortages, or traffic substitute recruits on behalf of wealthier individuals seeking to buy their way out of service."
While conscription orders are indiscriminate on paper – demanding a quota of recruits from each village, ward, or township proportional to its population – wealthier conscripts can simply pay to dodge the draft and be replaced by someone more financially vulnerable.
So it is the poor who disproportionately bear the burden.
Naung Yoe, meanwhile, told the BBC that "these practices are escalating due to increasing difficulties in meeting monthly recruitment quotas and the lucrative financial profits made from recruit trading at the ground level".
But the hardening fist of forced conscription also reveals the junta's empty hand, and its desperation for manpower.
It "seems to be another step in the junta's efforts to enlist unwilling youth in a conflict that underscores its embattled position in the civil war" says Dr Sandeep Singh, a research fellow who teaches military studies at the National University of Singapore.
The climate surrounding routine abductions, he adds, has "generated further difficulties on the youth of Myanmar, already affected by years of civil war, and their families".
In addition to the daily anxiety of life in Myanmar, many would-be recruits now fear being forced to fight in a deadly conflict that they not only don't believe in, but actively oppose. This constant threat has fuelled massive internal displacement and severe labour shortages in an already flailing economy, and sent people fleeing to neighbouring countries.
Having spent more than half a decade waging war against its own population, the junta is now wielding the conscription law as yet another tool of subjugation, observers say.
As the MDSI put it in a statement published in June: "The generals have benefited by using military law to make the citizens fight against each other."
  - Published14 January
  - Published20 December 2024

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