Workers Are Bearing the Brunt of Myanmar’s Civil War
Since Myanmar’s military seized power in 2021, the country has been caught in a bloody civil war. While the army fights bitterly for control over the mines and other industries that fund its war machine, workers pay the cost.
In the mines supplying the world with jade and rubies, miners have little protection from arbitrary violence meted out by gangsters, militias, and soldiers, to say nothing of the dangers of oxygen shortages and cave-ins. (Ye Aung Thu / AFP via Getty Images)
Since February 1, 2021, when the Burmese military seized power in a coup, ending a decade-long period in which they had allowed multiparty democracy limited by the army’s claim of 25 percent of the seats in parliament, a violent civil war has raged throughout the country. It has killed over eight thousand civilians and displaced 4.6 million, a quarter of whom have left Myanmar entirely.
In the three years of fighting since the outbreak of the civil war, anti-coup forces have largely succeeded in confining the junta to cities. Only 14 percent of Myanmar’s territory, and 33 percent of its population, are under military control. In response to the military coup in 2021, a cross section of Burmese society, including unions, youth, women, civil servants, and health workers organized thousands of protests against the junta in the Spring Revolution. But as the junta responded with live bullets, assassinations, sexual violence, communications blackouts, and mass detentions, much of the pro-democracy movement took up arms.
Three years later, guerrillas routinely ambush junta forces in the central lowlands, which are effectively surrounded by dozens of armed groups in provinces that have since independence never truly been controlled by the central government. Military rule in Myanmar was always predicated on a suppression of ethnic minorities, most notably the Rohingya, who faced persecution and denial of citizenship under the rule of Aung San Suu Kyi. Consequently, opposition to the junta has largely taken the form of ethnic armed organizations.
The military’s attacks on rural areas have forced anti-coup forces to construct their own organizational structures, not all of which ally themselves with the ousted 2021 government. Outnumbered and isolated, the military has largely retreated to cities and garrisons from which it launches indiscriminate air strikes, dodges sanctions, and tries to maintain Russia and China’s economic and military support, although the latter has of late been putting pressure on the junta to accept another ceasefire. The People’s Republic helped to broker cease-fires between the junta and its opponents in January and June of this year.
Over the last few weeks, ethnic armed organizations have made significant gains. The Three Brotherhood Alliance, made up of the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army, the Ta’ang National Liberation Army, and the Arakan Army, control an area larger than Belgium in the north of the country with close trade ties to China. Last week, the alliance successfully captured Lashio, the headquarters of the military junta’s Northeast Regional Command, and it is also in control of Mogok, the center of Myanmar’s world-leading ruby industry. The city of Lashio, the first of the junta’s fourteen military command centers to fall, is essential to controlling the expansive Shan State. With these victories, anti-coup forces hope to take control not just of territory, but vital economic and political centers and weaken the military’s decade-long grip on power within the country.
The Generals Protect Themselves
Myanmar’s military refers to itself as the Tatmadaw (Royal Armed Forces), but the average Burmese knows it less glamorously as the Sit-Tat (military). Myanmar’s military has dominated the country’s politics for eighty years, fighting British and Japanese occupiers and then communist insurgents and ethnic militias throughout the turbulent 1940s and ’50s. In its half-century (1962–2011) of one-party rule, the Sit-Tat subjected Myanmar to a torpor of stage-managed politics, economic catastrophe, and international isolation. Dictator Ne Win (1962–1988) initially attempted a Buddhist-socialist hybrid that glorified the military without handing real power to peasants and workers. Shock nationalization largely transferred Indian, Chinese, and Western assets into the generals’ hands, while mismanaged agricultural and financial policies condemned most Burmese to abject poverty.
After the economy collapsed, Ne Win and the Sit-Tat’s ideology and structure became more malleable, contorting into whatever preserved military dominance. The boiling point came with the 8888 Uprising (August 8, 1988), a broad-based, pro-democracy protest movement that still inspires today’s opposition. The Sit-Tat shot and killed thousands of protesters, and though Ne Win was ultimately ousted, the military maintained its grip with mass detentions, torture, arson, and executions. Afterward, the Sit-Tat largely shed its ideological posturing and redoubled efforts at self-preservation and self-enrichment. It created an artificial capital (Naypyidaw) to escape urban protesters, built up a domestic weapons industry to fend off its citizens, and captured significant portions of the Burmese economy to exchange for its officers’ loyalty.
By the time the Sit-Tat finally conceded to democratic elections in 2015, a wealthy caste of officers and their families inhabited a vast patronage network whose lavish lifestyles were funded by confiscated land, factories in which abuse took place, and sweltering mines. Even pro-democracy officers and some within the democratic opposition shared with the military a commitment to the suppression of minorities and kleptocratic rule. But the 2021 coup proved that even this concession was too much for the military, which, under General Min Aung Hlaing, once again turned to brute force to preserve its dominance.
The Political Economy of Military Rule
Today’s military oligarchy does not rely on any one export or industry. Resources, consumer items, manufacturing, and land are all plundered by the military and its associates. Jade, gold, rubies, lumber, oil, gas, and clothing are either owned by officers, gifted to associates, sold to the highest bidder, or protected for foreign corporations. Any opportunity for extraction, extortion, and profit is ruthlessly exploited through systematic, decades-old practices of forced labor, union busting, land expropriation, public embezzlement, and corruption in licensing and procurement.
The Sit-Tat surrounds Chinese mines and oil facilities with deadly landmines and sends soldiers to break up strikes at garment factories. Corporations owned by current and former generals or their family members, like the massive Myanma Economic Holdings Public Company Ltd (MEHL), make billions of dollars for the Sit-Tat’s upper echelon through complex webs of investments and money laundering. All the while, the average government soldier scrounges for food and goes into battle without adequate training or equipment.
The inequality and plunder that are the basis of Myanmar’s economy have been well-integrated into international supply chains and financial networks, both before and after the coup. As Myanmar reopened to international investment in 2011–12, states and multinational corporations became heavily involved in all of the industries central to the country’s economy, despite continued human-rights abuses, widespread corruption, and the clear role of the Sit-Tat in many of these industries. A host of international corporations and state actors have remained essential partners for the Sit-Tat ever since, even as it carried out a vicious military campaign in Kachin State in 2012, invaded Shan State in 2015, and committed genocide against the Rohingya in 2017.
Today, the Sit-Tat bombs civilians with Russian airplanes serviced with Indian parts and running on jet fuel shipped by Chinese and Vietnamese companies while Singaporean and Thai banks facilitate weapons procurement for the Sit-Tat’s state banks. The coup has not deterred Australian mining companies, put off state-owned Israeli and Indonesian arms manufacturers, or halted a European Union trade agreement that allegedly promotes workers’ rights from coming into effect. Ultimately, though states maintain complex relationships with the junta, sometimes sanctioning, regulating, or divesting from these dealings, the Sit-Tat’s economic architecture remains diverse and extensive. Divestment and sanctions have been slow and incomplete, all while Myanmar’s ordeal continues.
Working Against the Junta
Every day, Myanmar’s workers experience this military oligarchy firsthand. Even if the junta were to follow the law, Myanmar’s worker protections have long been inadequate. Workers face frequent, arbitrary wage cuts and wage theft, long hours and appalling working conditions, forced and unpaid overtime, restrictions on speech and assembly, dismissal and arrest, and sexual harassment and violence in the workplace. Employers frequently call in the Sit-Tat, its police force, or pro-junta militias to break strikes or intimidate workers. Employers even maintain agreements with the military that allow soldiers to enter factories at will to arrest organizers.
In the mines supplying the world with jade and rubies, miners have little protection from arbitrary violence meted out by gangsters, militias, and soldiers, to say nothing of the dangers of oxygen shortages and cave-ins. Women (though not exclusively) across Myanmar face serious risks from sex traffickers, sexual extortion and abuse by employers and soldiers, or sexual violence and torture in the junta’s many overcrowded detention centers. School closures and poverty have created widespread child labor, while LGBTQ populations have lost much of their socioeconomic autonomy in a targeted campaign by the junta and its supporters.
Despite all the hurdles, Myanmar’s diverse workers are prolific organizers. There were three thousand unions registered by 2021, and they routinely went on strike, including widespread walkouts in the garment industry in 2019. Unions like the Federation of Garment Workers would then be at the forefront of the protests and civil disobedience campaign after the coup. The junta was quick in banning sixteen large unions for supposedly failing to register, but general strikes still shut down the country as railroad operators, civil servants, and doctors and nurses took to the streets for months. In Myanmar’s largest industrial district, Hlaingthaya, workers spent six weeks shutting down production before the Sit-Tat violently stormed the township and killed multiple people. Despite great personal risk, workers and protesters mobilized over Facebook and called for domestic and international boycotts of businesses with ties to the military.
After the protests were repressed and Myanmar descended into war, workers were left under the watchful and repressive eye of the junta, which clung to its urban strongholds. Their very proximity to the junta’s vital sources of income ensure workers and organizers are constant targets for surveillance, harassment, arrest, and prosecution. While they constitute an essential pro-democracy base for the opposition, Myanmar’s laborers have had to endure three years of war and economic crisis. Yet they remain resilient. On February 1, 2024, even within the junta’s grip, workers and supporters managed to shut down Myanmar’s towns and cities in a “silent strike” commemorating the third anniversary of the coup. It remains to be seen how much longer they will have to wait for a semblance of stability.