MUTINY!

‘Why should I kill our own?’: Thousands of soldiers surrender as Myanmar junta shaken by rebel advances

Rebecca Ratcliffe and Aung Naing Soe
Mon, 29 January 2024 

Photograph: Aung Naing Soe/The Guardian

One night last August, as the monsoon rains poured, Wunna Kyaw and some fellow soldiers walked away from their military base in Myanmar. It was hours before they were due to be deployed to an area gripped by intense fighting, where the military was struggling to control attacks by armed pro-democracy groups.

“I believed I would die if I did not defect,” says Wunna Kyaw. As the senior officers and commander slept, they crept away from their compound in Kayin, also known as Karen state. It was an act punishable by at least seven years in prison and, potentially, the death penalty.

His decision was driven not only by fear of the battle ahead, but also by his objection to military violence against civilians. “I didn’t want to stay there any more.

It never happened [before] that fighter jets were taken down or tanks seized by enemies

Htet Myat, defector and former army captain

“I feel sorry for the people – people the age of my parents are being killed, and their houses destroyed for no reason. I saw it, I witnessed that,” he says.

Over the months that followed, thousands more military personnel – including entire battalions – are reported to have surrendered. In some cases, soldiers say they defected for moral objections or political reasons. In many others, they surrendered after being overwhelmed by their opponents.

Since seizing power in a coup in February 2021, Myanmar’s military has struggled to subdue opposition to its rule, including from pro-democracy groups that took up arms to fight junta violence and oppression, and armed groups of ethnic minorities that have long fought for independence, and which joined the struggle against the regime.

Pressure on the military increased dramatically on 27 October, when an offensive was launched in northern Shan state by a coalition of armed ethnic-minority groups, the Three Brotherhood Alliance, in coordination with newer anti-coup fighters.

The military, already stretched and fighting on multiple fronts, was apparently taken by surprise. The offensive, named Operation 1027 after the date it began, made rapid advances along the border with China and prompted offensives in other regions.

Progress by resistance groups elsewhere has been mixed, and analysts’ caution that initial hopes that the military was on the brink of a wider defeat were premature.

But the losses that have occurred since October in the north alone – aircraft shot down, weapons seized, key towns and supply routes lost – has proved a humiliation for the military, and stirred internal anger towards its leadership.

“When I served in the military it would be very, very rare news if a captain is killed – not even captured,” says Htet Myat, an activist who served as a captain in the military before he defected on political grounds in 2021.

“It never happened that military fighter jets were taken down or tanks seized by the enemy side or missiles taken by the enemy side,” he adds.

By early January, anti-junta fighters captured the key town of Laukkai near the Chinese border. Ye Myo Hein, an analyst at the Wilson Center, a Washington-based thinktank, described it as “the largest surrender in the history of Myanmar’s military”, saying he understood that 2,389 military personnel, including six brigadier generals, had surrendered.

It was reported that some of the six generals had been sentenced to either death or life imprisonment by the junta for surrendering. The junta has since denied this.

The military is like a state within a state, they have their own empire, their own hospital, their own schools

Thinzar Shunlei Yi, activist

Since Operation 1027, more than 4,000 soldiers are estimated to have defected or surrendered, according to Dr Sasa, minister of international cooperation for Myanmar’s national unity government, which was formed to oppose the junta.

This is in addition to 14,000 military personnel who defected since the 2021 coup through programmes set up by activists to persuade soldiers to join the resistance, he says.

Such figures are hard to verify. Ye Myo Hein estimates there have been at least 10,000 defectors, including soldiers and police. “Additionally, there has been a higher rate of deserters, historically a prevalent issue in the Myanmar military,” he says, adding that there was a growing trend of mass surrender, especially since Operation 1027.

“The surrender of entire battalions – and, more recently, entire regional operation commands – is unprecedented in the Myanmar military’s history,” he says.

The military remains experienced, well trained and has superior weaponry, including aircraft supplied by Russia and China. But recent defectors describe dire morale, and reports suggest such unhappiness extends well beyond the lower ranks.

Morgan Michaels, a research fellow for south-east Asian politics at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, says: “The bigger picture is whether or not the morale issue and the embarrassment issue could generate some sort of instability inside the regime.”

To clamp down on defections, which previously surged in 2022, recent defectors said their phones were confiscated and subject to random checks in training camps. Pay was withheld by their commanders, meaning they had no way of paying for transport to escape.

In one case, a sniper said that, while they were undergoing training, they were even escorted to the toilets by guards. For soldiers who had families living in barracks, there is the added fear that, were they to attempt to flee, their wives and children would face repercussions.

The military, which considers itself the protector of the nation, has long been an opaque and siloed institution, with its personnel subjected to propaganda and cut off from society.

“The military is like a state within a state – they have their own empire, they have their own hospital, they have their own schools,” says Thinzar Shunlei Yi, who was born into a military family but became a human rights activist.

Soldiers who left the military said they had wanted to leave for a long time, but had no opportunity to escape. They had eventually done so either out of fear they would die, frustration at conditions – including lack of pay, corruption among senior ranks and additional duties due to the pressure the forces were under – or moral objections to the military’s actions.

Thant Zin Oo, who defected in late August, said he had witnessed the extrajudicial killing of civilians while briefly deployed to Sagaing region, a heartland of the Bamar ethnic majority, from which the military has traditionally recruited but has since become a hotbed of resistance.

Thant Zin Oo said he was brought in to patrol urban areas and witnessed a senior officer of kill five civilians, alleging they were members of the resistance.

“They had no weapons, no ammunition,” says Thant Zin Oo, who says the civilians were forced to dig their own graves, before their hands were tied and they were shot. The incident occurred in late 2022, though he could not remember the exact date. The victims included two women and three men in their early 20s.

It is not possible to verify this allegation. However, such reports involving the military, which is also accused of genocide against Myanmar’s Rohingya Muslim minority, are not uncommon.

As a sniper, Thant Zin Oo said he was ordered to go out ahead of his unit to shoot the opposition. “There is no reason why as a sniper I should kill our own people. But we were forced to do that,” he says, adding: “I wish I could change the direction of my bullets.”

Wunna Kyaw said that during clearance operations in villages he was ordered to shoot at anyone, regardless of whether they were civilians, but said he avoided doing so, firing into the air instead. Thant Zin Oo gave a similar account.

The junta has previously denied atrocities against civilians, saying that its actions are in the interests of stability and tackling terrorism.

On the night of their defection, Wunna Kyaw’s group walked to a nearby temple, where they asked a monk for help. They were introduced to the village head the next morning, who contacted the Karen National Union (KNU), one of Myanmar’s oldest and biggest ethnic-minority armed groups, which has played a key role in fighting the junta.

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Wunna Kyaw believes all of his friends who remain in the military will try to defect. Now living in a safe house near the Thai border, he plans to help the forces he once had to fight against as an activist.

Others intend to return to the battle and join their former adversaries. Thant Zin Oo has registered to fight with the KNU. But he does not want to fight against other ordinary soldiers of his own rank. “I want to kill the leadership of the military,” he says.