Burmese Language
Burma introduces military draft
Men and women over the age of 18 will be required to serve up to three years in the Burmese military or face a lengthy jail term, reports claim.
Documents seen by Japanese broadcaster NHK suggest that the legislation was enacted on 17 December last year and requires all able-bodied adults to register with local authorities for the draft. Men between the ages of 18 and 45 are obligated, while for women it is between 18 and 35. Burma already has a standing army of close to half a million, one of biggest per capita in the world.
Reports of forcible conscription are common, and may well be the reasoning behind the new law: the 2008 constitution will officially come into force when the new parliament convenes this month, and fears of greater judicial reach and scrutiny of the practice may have the generals worried.
Laws surrounding forcible conscription are murky. According to Burmese and international law, the practice comes under the banner of forced labour, which the International Labour Organisation (ILO) describes as “any work that a person is required to do against their will, under threat of any form of penalty if they do not comply or cooperate”.
The new constitution says this is illegal except for “duties assigned by the Union in accord with the law in the interest of the public”.
It also says however that “Every citizen has the duty to undergo military training in accord with the provisions of the law and to serve in the Armed Forces to defend the Union.”
How universalised such policies will be, or how thoroughly they are enforced, is not clear but it seems likely to form a shield for the government, with forcibly conscripted individuals now without a legal basis to complain.
Tin Oo, deputy chairman of the National League for Democracy (NLD), who held the position of commander in chief of the army until 1976, said that parliament should have debated the law before it was enacted.
“It is true to an extent that every citizen has the duty to protect the country…but it is not right to decide on a matter that concerns the people without proposing it to them first. A referendum should be held first before making the decision.”
The necessity for a large army is a practical consideration, with multiple ethnic armies refusing to sign a Border Guard Force deal which would see them assimilated into the Burmese army. There are a number of restive areas where large numbers of troops are required, and clashes have occurred recently in Arakan, Kachin and Shan states.
Aung Kyaw Zaw, a military analyst on the China-Burma border, said that there are pros and cons to the new law. “From the bad side, our country is already in deep poverty and the people barely have anything to eat. So [adopting such a law] may cause bigger negative effects on the country, which is already…struggling to feed the current army and carry the burden of military expenses.
“On the plus side, civilians will learn how to use guns and be given a chance to understand the nature of the military. With the knowledge of how to handle weapons, the people will be able to rise up against the military – in a way they will be trained for the revolution.”
Desertion is believed to be an ever-present problem for the military, which pays lower-ranking troops around $US10 a month. Audio recordings of Senior General Than Shwe, obtained by DVB, show him to be concerned about the problem.
Additional reporting by Peter Aung
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Thailand abuses more Burmese every day than Than Shwe. Lies Lies Lies
Finally, our children have opportunity to learn basic Military training and how to use gun and how to shoot military dictatorship by Junta issue gun in Burma. Everyone in this country is responsible to overthrow corrupted and oppressive Military regime out of Power. The Military Draft is one of rare opportunity given by Junta. To get free military training and weapon from our enemy is rare opportunity. One day, regime weapon is our weapon and the dictatorship must be killed by their weapon.
We did not have weapon during 1988 Uprising and after uprising now the chance is coming by regime at their costs. Be man and do not afraid to go front line. You and your friend can flee with Junta weapon to your brother ABSDF army and Ethic Army.
We must learn how our Independent hero Gen. Aung San and his army have done during the WWII in Burma. One day, our enemy weapon will be our weapon.
If your son or daughter is recruited under the name of \training\ and then sent to the frontiers just to die, will you still support this draft? This is another way of the Burma military trying to get money from the already-poverty stricken citizens. Furthermore, there can be very strategic plan in the head of Than Shwe to long-live his dynasty. This move also has strong potential to a civil war.
Anything can happen depending on their policy, you are in the military that does NOT mean you will get the weapons and Ammo. I hope they will give new recruits educations. Military way to live life is not easy, there is one rule for everybody. abuse or use is up to them. Instead of judging now, just wait and see what they want to do with the new soldiers.
This is quite retarded. It will back fire if they plan to actually implement mandatory draft laws like South Korea, Taiwan or Singapore. Even if they systematically categorize recruits by race and religion to fight ethnic armies on different fronts it will still back fire once they give arm to an unwilling recruit. But if they put the law in place just so they can legalize military slavery then everyone’s in trouble.
All of the hopeful comments seeing the mandatory service as an opportunity for the draftees to receive military training are pipe dreams at best.
The regime has decades of experience training young Buddhist men to become vicious soldiers who will put aside their religious beliefs and moral values in order to unquestioningly follow orders to rape, murder, torture, and exploit innocent civilians.
I am not aware of any past cases where any significant groups of Tatmadaw soldiers turned against their commanders.
We have all seen a glimpse of the results of the Burma army training, citizens and monks beaten and shot in the streets like dogs, and that was the punishment of the favoured urban Burman citizens for having dared to protest rising (previously subsidized) commodity prices.
Heaven only knows what their punishment would have been had they been protesting the brutal regime war of ethnic persecution and revenge which has raged against their fellow Burmese citizens for decades in the ethnic homelands.
But of course, they have NEVER protested the forced labour, forced relocation, and forced starvation carried out by their sons in the ethnic homelands, have they?
In fact, the Burma army brutality witnessed in Rangoon during the wasteful and ill-fated “Saffron Revolution” in 2007 can be thought of as the “tip of the iceburg”.
The whole pre-election thinking by liberals that the regime would be turning over a new leaf after the elections, has become a nightmare of new regime programs such as this one coming out nearly every day.
And through it all the regime has not only maintained the status quo of suffering in the ethnic homelands, they have now broken many of their cease-fires with ethnic armed forces by their insistance in the Border Guard force program.
Meanwhile like a swarm of locusts, these thousands of Burma army soldiers extort or steal rice, vegetables, and livestock from poor starving farmers in their base areas, often using them as porters or road crews, or making them supply bamboo building materials to build the army bases while their crops rot in the fields.
Offensive operations are often scheduled for the rice-harvest season when villages are attacked and destroyed forcing civilians to flee into surrounding jungles.
They are seldom pursued, because it is preferred that they will remain within eyesight of their rotting crops, while they slowly starve in the hostile jungle environment and fall victim to disease. Any villagers returning to the villages or fields will be shot on sight.
In this way the regime is able to weaken the resolve of the villagers in order to make them commit to relocation and forced labour, and also uses Mother Nature as a regime mass murderer which is not subject to UN scrutiny or prosecution.
The psychological warfare value of the rice rotting in the fields outweighs the value of the rice being harvested and confiscated to be sent to feed starving people elsewhere in cyclone ravaged areas, or even the profits they could make by selling it.
My point is that the regime is good at what it does, it understands redundancy, and it is good at killing many birds with the same stone.
Dams generate electricity, but they also displace villagers, inundate river-bottom rice-fields, create watery no-man’s lands, deny water as neccessary, create floods as neccessary, and as we will soon see, will power factories and steel mills behind the bamboo curtain filled with forced labourers to be used and abused until they burn-out, and then replaced as neccessary.
I have often wondered when the regime would begin to take advantage of the hundreds of thousands of unemployed men in Burma’s urban centers, and this draft scheme may be the first step. Once in the military, who says they will be given a gun?
The regime, its cronies, and their international corporate partners can make a lot of money from cash crops like rubber, palm oil, castor bean oil grown on converted ricefields, and the regime has a lot of experience in confiscating land and resources for their investors.
Perhaps the draftees will only be given shovels, hoes, rakes, and pick-axes, and wherever they go they will still have the same locust-like impact on the local food sources as the armed soldiers who will be “guarding” them.
Just the tip of the iceburg.