This photo taken on September 10, 2024 shows recovering drug addicts from Myanmar attending classes during a rehabilitation program run by the non-governmental organisation DARE Network (Drug and Alcohol Recovery and Education) at an undisclosed location in Mae Sot along the Thai-Myanmar border.
| Photo Credit: AFP

In a drug treatment centre in a wooden stilt house deep in the Thai jungle, young refugees from Myanmar wait patiently for the prick of an acupuncture needle.

They are among the thousands who have become addicted to methamphetamine and other synthetic drugs that have flooded camps housing those forced to flee their homes by Myanmar’s civil war.

Myanmar’s military ousted Aung San Suu Kyi’s government in a February 2021 coup, igniting a conflict that has killed thousands, displaced nearly three million people and triggered a boom in drug production.

Also read: A closer look at Myanmar’s discontent

A rehabilitation programme across the border in Thailand, run by former addicts, is trying to help stem the rising tide of addiction among young people living in the camps.

“Youths from the camps are hopeless… they don’t know what to do. They have no guarantee for jobs and no future,” said Marip, a counsellor and former addict, using a pseudonym because of the stigma associated with addiction.

“They end up taking drugs. Drugs are easy to find in the camps,” the 34-year-old told AFP at the camp in a remote forest location in Thailand’s western province of Tak.

The Drug and Alcohol Recovery and Education (DARE) rehabilitation centre, funded by the UN and other aid agencies, uses acupuncture as part of its regimen, along with massages to reduce drug cravings and yoga to help manage intense withdrawal pains.

The group operates in five refugee camps, as well as more than 40 villages in Myanmar’s Karen state, and claims a 60% success rate for its 90-day treatment programme.

It did not allow AFP to speak to any of its patients or former cases, saying doing so would violate its treatment principles.

‘Cheaper than beer’

More than three years of conflict in Myanmar combined with the easy availability of drugs have created a “perfect storm”, Edward Blakeney, a director at DARE, told AFP.

“You have two large problems, trauma from people who fled their homes and saw their relatives killed and an abundant supply of drugs and a sense of hopelessness,” he said.

The junta led by General Min Aung Hlaing is battling multiple armed groups opposed to its rule across the country.

As well as death and displacement, the conflict has also seen law enforcement wither, enabling drug gangs to ramp up production.

The “Golden Triangle” region where Myanmar, Thailand and Laos meet has long been a hub for the illegal drug trade.

But the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) said in a report this year that methamphetamine production has “significantly increased”, sending wholesale prices of the drug’s crystal form crashing from over $10,000 a tonne in 2019 to $4,000 a tonne in 2023.

On the streets and in the camps, a tablet of “yaba” — a potent mix of methamphetamine and caffeine — can be bought for small change.

“They are so cheap at this point, it is really easy for people to buy drugs,” Benedikt Hofmann, the UNODC’s Southeast Asia and Pacific deputy representative, told AFP.

“Right now, in most parts of the Mekong, getting a tablet of yaba is cheaper than buying a beer.”

Drug-funded groups

The displacement camps are in border regions of Myanmar mostly controlled by ethnic minority armed groups — many of which fund their activities by making and trafficking drugs.

One senior anti-drugs police official in Myanmar told AFP that many new trafficking routes had opened up around the country due to the fighting.

“We face many difficulties in cracking down on the drug trade,” the official who asked not to be named told AFP.

“The problem is severe, as many armed groups are involved.”

The costs fall on those who have suffered most, and counsellor Marip told AFP : “There is no price that compares to the freedom from drugs.”

Smoke rises from debris and corrugated roofing of a school structure that was burned to the ground in Taung Myint village in the Magway region of Myanmar on October 16, 2022.
| Photo Credit: AP

An intensification of fighting in Myanmar’s civil war has brought a sharp increase in destructive attacks on schools, a group that monitors armed conflict in the Southeast Asian nation said in a report on July 20.

Myanmar Witness said the attacks have further strained Myanmar’s already fractured school system, taking away education for millions of children who have also been forced to flee their homes, miss vaccinations and suffer from inadequate nutrition.

The group, a project of the United Kingdom-based Centre for Information Resilience, identified a total of 174 attacks on Myanmar schools and universities since the military seized power from the elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi three years ago. It said the count came from evidence in social media and news reports.

Myanmar’s civil war and India’s interests

Other groups have suggested higher numbers of attacks. The Global Coalition to Protect Education from Attack, an advocacy group based in New York, counted over 245 reports of attacks on schools and 190 reports of military use of educational facilities in 2022-23.

The 2021 military takeover was met with widespread nonviolent demonstrations for democracy, but those were crushed with lethal force. Many opponents of military rule then took up arms, and large parts of the country are now embroiled in conflict. The military government is estimated to control less than half the country.

“Education underpinned the democratic movement in Myanmar, but today Myanmar’s youth are witnessing their schools — and life opportunities — reduced to rubble,“ said Matt Lawrence, project director at Myanmar Witness. “If education is not protected throughout Myanmar, the next generation’s view of the world risks being driven by factionalism and war, rather than hope and reason.”

Student enrollment in Myanmar dropped 80% from the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 through 2022, a year after the Army’s takeover, according to the humanitarian group Save the Children. By mid-2022, about half the country’s children, or 7.8 million, were not attending schools, it said.

Myanmar Witness said it documented reports of 64 fatalities and 106 injuries associated with the 176 attacks on schools, though most could not be verified.

Myanmar’s shadow National Unity Government, which leads the pro-democracy struggle against military rule, estimated in January that more than 570 children under age 18 had been killed in various circumstances by security forces. Upwards of 8,000 civilians have been killed in the conflict, according to the multinational Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project.

Myanmar Witness put most of the responsibility for the destruction of schools on airstrikes conducted by the Myanmar military. Air attacks have become more frequent as pro-democracy forces and ethnic minority armed groups allied with them have made gains on the battlefield.

The military “has had to resort to more and more airstrikes, often with less and less appropriate aircraft, as they lose effective access to the ground” as a result of offensives by the resistance, Mr. Lawrence told The Associated Press.

The military government has consistently denied targeting civilians or using disproportionate force.

The report said resistance forces also have attacked schools, but much less frequently and less destructively, often using drones with small explosive loads.

Education is also being disrupted by other factors. Many young people, including older students, have taken a greater role in the resistance. Thousands of teachers left their jobs after the army seized power and joined a civil disobedience movement aimed at disabling military control over government institutions. And the conflict’s shifting front lines make it difficult for teachers to provide lessons on a reliable basis.

Some teachers have established or joined schools outside the reach of the military’s control.

“What we see is almost a dual system that’s developing in Myanmar, where there are state-sponsored schools and then schools sponsored by other parties and retribution for participating in either system,” said Lisa Chung Bender, executive director of the Global Coalition to Protect Education from Attack.

“It puts children and educators in an impossible position where they have to go through checkpoints and say where they’re going, and if it’s determined that they’re going to an enemy school, whichever enemy that is, they can be harassed, detained, or physically punished,” she said.

OPINION | The Myanmar conflict is a regional problem

The lack of proper access to education is only part of a deepening humanitarian crisis in Myanmar. More than 3 million people have been displaced from their homes by fighting, most since the military’s seizure of power in 2021, and the country suffers from a deepening economic crisis.

A report in June by the United Nations Children’s Fund on global child food poverty said 35% of Myanmar’s children live in food poverty, defined as having access to half or fewer of the eight food groups children need daily for healthy growth and development.

According to the U.N. Development Program, over half of Myanmar’s children now live in poverty as the country’s nascent middle class has disappeared.

New fighting has broken out in northeastern Myanmar, bringing an end to a Chinese-brokered ceasefire and putting pressure on the military regime as it faces attacks from resistance forces on multiple fronts in the country’s civil war.

The Ta’ang National Liberation Army, one of three powerful militias that launched a surprise joint offensive last October, renewed its attacks on regime positions last week in the northeastern Shan State, which borders China, Laos, and Thailand, and the neighbouring Mandalay region with the support of local forces there.

Since then, the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army has joined in, and by Friday, combined forces from the two allied militias had reportedly encircled the strategically important city of Lashio, the headquarters of the regime’s northeastern military command.

‘Safety of people’

This is the next phase of October’s “1027” offensive, said Lway Yay Oo, spokesperson for the TNLA, which last week said the military provoked retaliation with artillery and airstrikes despite the cease-fire. “In phase two, our number one aim is the eradication of the military dictatorship, and number two is the protection and safety of local people,” she said.

Thet Swe, a spokesperson for the military regime, which seized power from the elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi in February 2021, accused the militias of putting civilians in jeopardy by restarting the fighting. “As the TNLA are starting to violate the ceasefire, the Tatmadaw is protecting the lives and the property of the ethnic people,” he said in an email, referring to the military by its Burmese name.

There was no indication that the third ethnic armed organisation that makes up the Three Brotherhood Alliance, the powerful Arakan Army, has joined in the renewed fighting in Shan state.

The TNLA claims to have already captured more than 30 army outposts, and to now control the western part of Mogok, whose ruby mines make it a lucrative target. There is also fighting for the town of Kyaukme, which sits at a highway crossroads, and Nawnghkio to the southwest, which leads toward the major military garrison town of Pyin Oo Lwin along the same highway.

“That’s where you need to cut it off to prevent the military from sending reinforcements,” said Morgan Michaels, a Singapore-based analyst with the International Institute of Strategic Studies who runs its Myanmar Conflict Map project.

In Mandalay, the region west of Shan, a local People’s Defence Force — one of many armed resistance groups that have sprung up in support of the underground National Unity Government, which views itself as Myanmar’s legitimate administration — joined the TNLA’s offensive.

Osmond, a spokesperson for the Mandalay People’s Defence Force who would only give his nom de guerre because of safety concerns, said his and other local resistance groups have seized nearly 20 military outposts.

The October offensive by the Three Brotherhood Alliance made rapid advances as the militias took large expanses of territory in the north and northeast, including multiple important border crossings with China and several major military bases.

Chinese ties

The alliance militias have close ties to China, and it’s widely believed that the offensive had Beijing’s tacit approval because of its growing dissatisfaction with the military regime’s seeming indifference to the burgeoning drug trade along its border and the proliferation of centres in Myanmar at which cyberscams are run, with workers trafficked from China.

China then helped broker the ceasefire in January, bringing the major fighting in the northeast to an end.

With the renewed violence in the northeast, China’s Foreign Ministry said it stood ready to again provide support for peace talks, but would not say whether it had been in direct contact with the Three Brotherhood Alliance or the military State Administration Council.

“China urges all parties in Myanmar to earnestly abide by the ceasefire agreement, exercise maximum restraint, disengage on the ground as soon as possible, and take practical and effective measures to ensure the tranquillity of the China-Myanmar border and the safety of Chinese personnel and projects,” the Ministry said in a faxed reply to questions.

The Myanmar army doesn’t appear to have been surprised by the TNLA attacks, with evidence that it mobilised forces and prepared defences as well as security checkpoints and patrols ahead of the renewed offensive, Mr. Michaels said.

“They didn’t get caught completely off guard, although they’ve not been able to respond yet, there’s been no counter-offensive,” he said.

Objectives unclear

It is not yet clear what the TNLA’s objectives are, and it could be that the group is just looking to expand gains and consolidate positions now while the military is stretched thin by fighting on several fronts, and before new batches of conscripts are trained for service.

Likewise, with the MNDAA, it is not clear whether it is planning to join the broader offensive or whether it intends to take encircled Lashio by force, lay siege to it, or simply tie up the troops now trapped there. The group did not respond to requests for comment.

Gutted buildings, vacant windows and blocks bombed to rubble show the price paid by the western Myanmar town of Pauktaw for victory against the junta in the country’s civil war.

Fighters from the Arakan Army (AA) ethnic minority armed group took control of the fishing port of 20,000 people in January, as the conflict sparked by the military’s coup entered its fourth year.

Pauktaw was one of a string of losses suffered by the junta across the country at the time, leading many to hope its decades-long stranglehold over Myanmar’s politics could be broken.

Four months later, the Arakan Army remains in control but Pauktaw is mostly empty of residents, who are living on the outskirts and fearful of a repeat of the junta’s heavy artillery attacks on the town.

“We are frightened of them (the military),” one man told AFP from his temporary home just outside Pauktaw, asking for anonymity for security reasons.

“We don’t know what will happen or what kind of weapon they will drop on us if we go and stay back at home in the town.

“We can’t detect their air strikes or bombs and we will be killed if they attack.”

Video taken by locals this month and obtained exclusively by AFP shows streets silent apart from birdsong and the sounds of AA soldiers sifting through piles of debris and sheets of corrugated iron.

Near a deserted market that once bustled with vendors buying and selling crabs and tiger shrimp, a ragged awning advertising a mobile phone carrier flutters above the doorway of a gutted shop.

Phone and internet services have been all but cut off.

No chance

The AA has fought an on-off war for years against the Myanmar military, seeking more autonomy for the state’s ethnic Rakhine population.

As the army has faced growing resistance to its rule, from multiple armed groups — some new, some long-established — the AA has stepped up its campaign.

As the junta has lost territory on the ground, it is increasingly calling on its air power to support its ground troops.

Rights groups accuse the junta of using the strikes to punish communities suspected of opposing its rule.

When a military helicopter hovered over Pauktaw and began shooting into the town last November, many fled in panic.

“There was no chance for us to take a single thing from our house,” one woman now living outside the town told AFP.

“We had cooked a pot of rice and we were not able to eat it,” she said, also asking for anonymity.

“We had no money when we fled. We only had some gold jewellery with us. We tried to pawn that but it wasn’t easy. The interest was too high.”

The fate of Pauktaw’s residents reflects a nationwide tragedy. Across Myanmar, around 2.7 million have been forced to flee by the civil war.

Looting

The AA has not allowed residents to live back in Pauktaw, citing the danger of more air or artillery strikes on the town, although it does allow them to come and go to pick up items.

The man who spoke to AFP said he had returned to check on his house and found it partly in ruins, with the family statue of the Buddha fallen onto the floor.

His savings box — containing money for a Buddhist ritual for his children and for timber to repair a roof damaged by a cyclone last year — was gone, he said.

“I have lost all of that money,” he said.

“Everything in our house got stolen… my father’s fishing nets were stolen,” another woman said, also requesting anonymity.

“I am a tailor, and luckily, I managed to save my sewing machines.”

During the fighting, both sides looted houses and damaged buildings, according to local reports.

In March, the AA said it would “investigate” any reports of looting by its members during the fighting.

‘Decisive battle’

The AA’s offensive has seized swathes of territory in Rakhine state and along the border with India and Bangladesh.

It has said it will capture the state capital Sittwe, 25 kilometres from Pauktaw and the last major town in northern Rakhine in the military’s hands.

In April, the AA warned residents of the town, which is home to an India-backed deep sea port, to leave ahead of a “decisive” battle.

Sittwe residents contacted by AFP said the military was restricting travel out of the town by road and river and the prices of basic foods such as rice and eggs had doubled.

Those already displaced from Pauktaw fear further fighting nearby.

“I am sad that we have fled our own house and we can’t live in it,” one resident told AFP.

“I have pawned my necklace for 18 lakhs ($850) so we have money to live. I still hope I can claim it back.”

Others said they wanted payback.

“I haven’t joined the Arakan Army because I am worried about who will look after my child,” one woman said.

“If I wasn’t… I would join them and fight back. I will be satisfied only if I can take revenge.”