On jungle hills about a mile from the front lines in eastern Myanmar, a former banquet coordinator at a hotel slid his index finger over the trigger of an assault rifle. A dentist recalled removing maggots from the infected wound of a young combatant. A marketing manager described the retrofitted commercial drones she flies to avoid the enemy.
More than a year after Myanmar’s military took full control in a coup — capturing the country’s elected leadership, killing more than 1,700 civilians and arresting at least 13,000 more — the country is at war, with some unlikely fighters in conflict.
On the one hand, there is a military junta that, except for a brief interlude of semi-democratic rule, has ruled with brutal force for half a century. On the other are tens of thousands of young city dwellers who have taken up arms, trading college courses, video games and fingernails for life and death in the wild.
Journalists from the New York Times recently visited a rainforest camp in eastern Myanmar, where about 3,000 members of a newly created militia subsist in bamboo or canvas shelters and engage in battles almost every day.
Their numbers are a fraction of one of Southeast Asia’s largest armies, but these Gen Z warriors have unbalanced a military force that has long made war crimes its calling card. And the conflict is growing, while the world’s attention has shifted to other moral absurdities like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Today, far from consolidating its power in the country, the Myanmar army, known as the Tatmadaw, is forced to fight on dozens of fronts, from the borders of India, China and Thailand to the villages and cities in the countryside. There are skirmishes almost every day – and deaths too.
“I’m fighting because I don’t accept the military coup and I don’t accept that they want to take democracy away from us,” said a midwife from a city in the south of the country, who, like others, did not want her name to be mentioned, to protect her relatives.
Known by the nom de guerre of Snow White, she arrived in May in an area controlled by an armed ethnic group that has been fighting for autonomy for decades. Since then, ethnic rebels and army defectors have taught him how to load a rifle, assemble a homemade grenade and perform battlefield triage.
“Our generation has ideals,” she said. “We believe in freedom.”
Facing attacks by civilian militias fighting alongside ethnic insurgents, the Tatmadaw has mounted a counter-offensive, launching airstrikes, burning villages and terrorizing those opposed to its takeover.
“All Tatmadaw knows how to do is kill,” said Ko Thant, who was a captain before defecting from the Army’s 77th Infantry Division last year. Since then, he has trained hundreds of civilians in battle tactics. “We were brainwashed all the time, but some of us woke up.”
Opposition to the military coup in February 2021 began with the demonstration of millions of people on the streets of Myanmar’s cities. In sandals, high heels or barefoot, in the case of Buddhist monks, the country peacefully united for the return of its elected leadership. Within weeks, the Tatmadaw returned to his old manual. Snipers hit the protesters with deadly shots to the head.
Some young people who had come of age during Myanmar’s decade of reform saw little use in the message of nonviolent dissent coming from veteran democracy activists. They wanted to fight back.
“Peaceful protests don’t work when the enemy wants to kill us,” said Naw Htee, a social worker who became a militia sergeant. “We have to defend ourselves.”
With small pins in her hair, she gestured to the mortar fragments and artillery shells, war debris that rained down on the jungle camp where she lives. A young man crouched next to her, with a big scar on his shoulder from a gunfight last month.
Today there are hundreds of civilian militias across Myanmar, loosely organized into what are called the Popular Defense Forces, or FPD. Each militia pledges allegiance to a shadow civilian government, the Government of National Unity, which was formed after the coup, and some battalions are led by deposed lawmakers.
In a human rights report released on March 15, the UN accused the military junta of committing mass war crimes against its own people after the coup.
But beyond some financial sanctions and words of condemnation, the global community has done little to punish the Myanmar junta. The Government of National Unity has not been recognized by any country, although its ranks are full of elected politicians. With little hope of outside help, the parallel authority has allied itself with ethnic rebel groups that control territories in Myanmar’s border regions. Together, they formed an underground railroad to get young people to safety — and train them in basic warfare.
The shadow government claims that the People’s Defense Forces, fighting alongside more experienced ethnic militia fighters, killed about 9,000 Tatmadaw soldiers from June 2021 to February 2022 (about 300 militia members died in combat, according to the report). parallel government). A spokesman for the Myanmar military said the actual death toll was lower, and the parallel authority’s figures could not be confirmed. But military sources acknowledged that the Tatmadaw was concerned about rising casualties.
Resistance wounded are treated at a jungle clinic with bamboo surgery tables and a dispensary made from bamboo strips. Ko Mon Gyi, a militiaman, was resting on a wooden platform, his leg bandaged from a bullet he was shot fighting last month. Another eight fighters were wounded that day.
“As soon as I recover, I will fight again,” he said. “It’s my duty.”
The clinic’s director is a doctor who has served in the army for nearly 12 years. As a battlefield medic, Dr. Drid, as he calls himself, treated soldiers wounded in fighting some of the ethnic rebels who now house his Popular Defense Forces battalion.
“I believe in human rights and democracy,” Drid said. “The Tatmadaw should fight for these things, protect these things.”
The former army doctor’s voice shook and so did his hands as he described the day last year when he left home and deserted. He did not tell his family where he was going, for fear that the military would retaliate; some relatives of soldiers who defected were arrested and tortured. For all his son knows, he may have been killed in action, he said.
“They are cowards,” he said of the military, which he entered at age 15. “These are robots that cannot think.”
For members of Myanmar’s younger generation, the coup was a throwback to an almost unimaginable past, with no Facebook and no investments. Under a previous military regime, Myanmar was one of the most isolated countries in the world. Since the coup, the new military junta, led by General Min Aung Hlaing, has banned social media, destroyed the economy and once again put the entire country in a bunker.
“The generals stole our future,” said Ko Arkar, who until the coup worked as a chef at a hotel in Rangoon, the country’s largest city.
He used to spend his days clarifying beef consomme and grilling steaks to perfection. Today he patrols the front lines with a network engineer, a textile worker and a sailing medalist at the Southeast Asian Games.
“We know how bad the Tatmadaw is because they are killing our people and raping our women,” said Saw Bu Paw, battalion commander for the Karen National Liberation Army, one of dozens of ethnic rebel groups. “With the coup, everyone in the country knows their evil nature.”
UN investigators said the military’s treatment of some of the country’s ethnic minorities bore the hallmarks of genocide. This month, the United States also designated the Tatmadaw’s campaign against the Rohingya Muslim minority as genocide.
Although there is no solid data, the number of desertions from the army seems to be increasing. Even before the coup, soldiers were overworked and underpaid.
“Who wants to be a soldier today?” asked Wai, another doctor who defected from the army and now works with the Popular Defense Forces in the forest. “It’s a shameful profession.”
The war is ugly, and the rebels have been accused of abuse. In the cities, members of the FPD carried out a campaign of assassinations and bombings that raised questions about personal disputes being resolved under the guise of fighting for democracy.
But resistance continues to grow, attracting unlikely recruits.
Until last year, John Henry Newman, as he is known by his given name, was studying to be a priest at a Catholic seminary in Rangoon. His fingers, which had previously caressed rosary beads, squeezed a rifle trigger several times. In the December fighting in eastern Myanmar, the enemy was so close that he fired, but he doesn’t know if the bullets hit any targets, he said.
“Killing is a sin,” he said. “But not when it’s a good war.”
