Junta-appointed administrators are forcing people to give them money to allegedly hire outsiders to take the place of locals on conscription list in Thamoke Village Tract, Myeik Township, Tanintharyi Region.
Normally, conscripts are selected by a lottery system. But, in some areas if people do not want to be conscripted, if they can find a substitute to take their place the authorities will accept the substitute instead of the conscript. Though this isn’t officially allowed the authorities usually turn a blind eye and the practice has never been officially prohibited.
In the early days of conscription, conscripts had to find their own substitutes, but nowadays, more often than not, the recruitment of substitutes is managed by junta-appointed administrators and local community leaders.
They collect money from families with members of conscription age and when the junta asks them for conscripts, instead of conscripting those on the conscription list the administrators use the collected money to hire poor youths or migrant workers to be substitutes and take the conscripts’ places, so that the required targets are met. In most cases these substitutes receive three to five million kyats (MMK) to voluntarily attend military training.
Obviously, this system is open to abuse and money ostensibly paid for substitutes can be stolen by administrators.
In Thamoke Village Tract, which consists of seven villages and approximately 2,000 households, hundred-household and ten-household administrators are spearheading the door-to-door money collection drives.
The administrators told the villagers, on 12 September 2024, that each household must contribute 40,000 MMK to pay to hire substitutes for the locals on the conscription list. This amount has to be paid in two installments, on 15 and 30 September.
A 40-year-old from Thamoke Village Tract said: “They informed us in a threatening way, leaving us no choice but to comply with their demands. With a junta checkpoint nearby, our concerns only grew. Even though we didn’t have the money, we had to borrow it to pay what they asked for.”
This is the second time that administrators have made residents of Thamoke Village Tract pay for conscription substitutes. They already forced every household to give 50,000 MMK in June to allegedly pay for conscription substitutes.
Many Thamoke Village Tract residents rely on fishing, work in rubber plantations, and various manual labor jobs for their livelihood. However, such jobs are scarce now because it is the rainy season, meaning that many families already have precarious finances.
Many families say that 40,000 MMK is a heavy burden during this period of rising commodity prices and job scarcity.
In early September, in Thityarwa Village, Myeik Township, a young man from a family that refused to contribute MMK 40,000 to hire substitutes for conscripts was framed for theft and arrested by the local administrator who sent him to a junta military training centre. There he was given the choice of being conscripted or facing further punishment.
According to locals, similar extortion of villagers is also happening in the Myeik Township villages of Thityarwa, Tanyat, Pathaung, and Pazaw, where the junta-affiliated Pyu Saw Htee militia has a strong presence.
