Young men flee Myanmar in panic after struggling military starts draft

Tens of thousands of young people have been fleeing Myanmar every month since the junta in February announced that for the first time it was instituting a draft, according to migration researchers and aid groups.

Stung by a string of battlefield losses to pro-democracy insurgents and ethnic rebel groups, the military is now looking to add as many as 60,000 soldiers within a year. The decision, say security analysts, reflects mounting anxiety within the military, which is confronting its biggest challenge since it ousted a democratically elected government three years ago and triggered a civil war.

Panic has gripped families even in urban centers like Yangon that had been largely spared the airstrikes and battlefield clashes that have pounded more remote areas. Young fathers have disappeared from their homes overnight. Mothers have packed up their teenage sons and sent them away. In parts of the country, rebel groups have claimed responsibility for killing local officials collecting information about potential conscripts.

Many of those fleeing are morally opposed to fighting for the junta or afraid of being killed in combat. The most fortunate among the fugitives have left by plane with tourist, student or work visas for other countries. Far more, however, have slipped across the border, traveling in darkness across the long and porous stretch of jungle that separates Myanmar from Thailand.

Nearly 60 percent of the 120,000 people who entered Thailand in March have no documents, twice the figure a year ago, according to the United Nations’ International Organization for Migration. In enclaves of Myanmar migrants near the Thai capital Bangkok, the population of new arrivals has swelled, with young men crowding into airless apartments and sleeping on thin mats on the floor.

Many of those who make it to Bangkok travel through Sangkhla Buri, a serene border town surrounded by rubber plantations, where local officials say the flow of migrants has increased as much as eightfold since February.

Migrants once considered it straightforward to cross the border here. But for Lin Soe, it wasn’t.

Thailand has intensified its crackdown on undocumented Myanmar migrants in recent months and sent some back, citing an inability to accommodate them in such large numbers. Migrant worker agencies and nonprofit groups estimate that hundreds of Myanmar migrants have been deported since the start of the conscription law.

One night in late April, Washington Post journalists accompanied joined Thai officials in Sangkhla Buri on a border patrol. After nearly eight hours on back country roads, officials tracked down Lin Soe’s convoy and gave chase. Three of the six trucks escaped but Lin Soe’s vehicle was stopped in a clearing. As the passenger door was yanked open, Lin Soe blinked at a flashlight that illuminated his face.

“Where did you come from?” demanded a Thai official with bloodshot eyes. “Where?”

Lin Soe stayed quiet, hunched in the truck, pinching the corners of his elbows. He didn’t understand what the man was saying in Thai.

Days after Myanmar’s military announced conscription, long, snaking lines formed outside foreign embassies in Yangon. People were killed in stampedes outside a passport office in Mandalay, local officials said, while factories and companies across the country reported that chunks of their workforce were disappearing seemingly overnight. In interviews, 14 migrants in Thailand who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of being deported described why and how they fled.

A pair of cousins, 21 and 22, said they traveled 430 miles from their city of Pathein to Sangkhla Buri, where they hid for hours in rubber plantations before being picked up by smugglers on motorcycles.

A 22-year-old, whose older brother was a gunner in a rebel army, said he left their mother alone in his hometown of Taikkyi because he didn’t want to fight on the other side of the war.

A 14-year-old said he was sent by himself across the border because he was tall for his age, and his family worried that when military officials came knocking, they wouldn’t care that he was just an adolescent.

The military does need more soldiers as it confronts a multi-front offensive and plunging troop morale, said Richard Horsey, a senior adviser on Myanmar for the International Crisis Group. But the draft also represents a way for the junta to telegraph that it intends to fight its way out of this crisis, he said.

The junta did not respond to inquiries from The Post. Speaking to a state broadcaster in February, spokesman Maj. Gen. Zaw Min Tun said: “What we want to say is that national defense is not only the responsibility of the soldier. It is the responsibility of people in all parts of the country.”

For months after the junta announced the conscription, Lin Soe wavered over whether to leave, he said.

He hated the junta. He’d seen soldiers in his hometown in the southern district of Mawlamyine steal motorcycles from people at gunpoint, and he’d watched endless videos on his phone of troops attacking civilians. The idea of fighting for the military repulsed him, he said. But he’d never lived away from home before and his family counted on his income as a construction worker. If he left, he told himself, his mother and his grandmother would be defenseless.

As his town emptied of young men, Lin Soe stayed on, he said. Then in April, when military officials began going door to door collecting household information, his mother called him into a room. He had to leave, she said.

Lin Soe stumbled out of the truck, followed by four male relatives who had been squeezed into the back seat with him. Thai officials had apprehended 26 migrants in three vehicles. There were children stacked on top one another and women who said it’d been days since they’d eaten anything.

There had always been a flow of migrants through Sangkhla Buri, usually laborers from border towns trying to find work in Thailand, said district investigator Somchai Gaysorn, 49. But a few months ago, he said, he started seeing something different: Groups of baby-faced teens with soft, uncalloused hands. They came from deeper inside Myanmar and, when caught, often broke down crying.

Thai authorities did not respond to questions asking for official numbers but said the vast majority of migrants slip across the border undetected. Thai officials said they are not cracking down on the migrants at the behest of the Myanmar government. Thailand, after a decade of military rule, last year elected a civilian government that has sought to distance itself from Myanmar’s ruling junta and engage with its opponents.

Somchai had called the deputy district chief, Nutchpat Ngamsirirote, who swerved his truck into the clearing. Nutchpat directed the soldiers to gather the migrants under a tree, then stood in front of them as a local reporter took out his phone to record. “Today, we have arrested nearly 30 illegal migrants,” Nutchpat said, his voice booming over the sound of babies wailing.

“We will charge those without documents,” Nutchpat continued. “And then we will deport them all.”

Even when migrants make it to Thailand, they lead difficult lives in the shadows. Without documents, they can’t attend school or seek formal employment, so many end up working illicitly at seafood or garment factories, where they’re exploited by employers, say worker rights groups.

One 20-year-old who goes by his last name, Soung, said before he fled conscription in March, he’d been a university student in Yangon with plans to become a software engineer. Now he cruises the streets of a Bangkok suburb, asking strangers if he can do odd jobs for cash. Still, said Soung, he wouldn’t go back to Myanmar unless he was forced.

To stem the exodus, the junta put out an order to the Labor Ministry last month barring men ages 23 to 31 from seeking work permits abroad.

But as long as there are ways for people to get out of Myanmar, people will leave, say migration officials at the United Nations. “It’s not possible for us to stop this,” said Rangsiman Rome, a Thai member of parliament who heads a committee on national security. Millions are already in Thailand, he said. “And more are coming.”

By 10 a.m. the day he was caught, Lin Soe and the other migrants had been taken to a police station. Waiting in the heat for his turn to be interrogated, Lin Soe considered his future. According to the junta’s conscription law, those who refuse to serve could face up to five years in prison. If he was sent back to Mawlamyine, he worried, the military wouldn’t just punish him — they’d punish his family too. “They kill and they torture,” said Lin Soe. “I’ve seen it with my own eyes.”

But he wouldn’t need to return to his hometown, said those seated around him. Once a Thai judge gave the police deportation orders, they’d bring the migrants only as far as the border and drop them there. From there, one migrant said, they could try to cross again.

Lin Soe listened and began to form a plan. There was still a way out. He would try again, he said.

Wilawan Watcharasakwet and Yan Naing contributed to this report.