Forced to Fight for Your Oppressors, Daily Brief April 10, 2024

We’ve committed countless atrocities against your people. We’ve burned down your villages, slaughtered your fathers and brothers, and raped your mothers and sisters. We’ve sent hundreds of thousands of you fleeing over the border, and those of you who remain we brutally repress, with tens of thousands of your families locked up in open-air prisons.

Now, we expect you to fight for us – to lay down your lives to defend us.

The vicious audacity of the Myanmar military’s treatment of the Rohingya minority is almost impossible to imagine. For years, the military has committed crimes against humanity and acts of genocide against the Rohingya, and now they are forcing Rohingya to collaborate with them, to fight alongside them.

And “forcing” is the key word here.

Myanmar’s military has abducted and forcibly recruited more than 1,000 Rohingya Muslim men and boys from across Rakhine State since February. A new report describes how Rohingya have been picked up in nighttime raids, and threatened with arrests and beatings if they don’t join up. Some victims are as young as 15.

The military has also used other threats, made possible by the horrific situation they keep many Rohingya in.

While more than 730,000 Rohingya have fled the country, especially during the military’s 2017 campaign of mass atrocities, some 630,000 Rohingya remain in Myanmar under a system of apartheid and persecution. This includes about 150,000 people held in detention camps. Since the 2021 military coup, the junta has imposed severe movement restrictions and aid blockages on them.

All of this increases their vulnerability to forced recruitment in the military. Join up, they say, or the restrictions will get worse, your rations will be cut, or maybe we’ll unleash another round of mass arrests against your family and your neighbors.

It’s vile, and it gets even worse. The junta is basing their actions on a military conscription law that only applies to Myanmar citizens, yet the Rohingya have long been denied citizenship. A key part of the authorities’ justification for terrorizing the Rohingya for years has been exactly that: they say they’re not citizens at all. And now, they’re expected to join the military like citizens?

What happens to the men and boys after they’re forced into military service will probably come as no surprise. They’re sent to abusive training camps for a short time, and then, many are put on the front lines of the junta’s fight with the Arakan Army armed group.

A number of the forced recruits have already been killed, with some of their bodies not even returned to families. Others have suffered serious injuries. The whereabouts of many more are unknown.

What’s happening in Myanmar, as my expert colleague Shayna Bauchner says, is the military’s “latest exploitation of a community made vulnerable to abuse by design, over decades of oppression.”

The horrific situation in the country has been allowed to fester and deteriorate for years. Crimes like forced recruitment keeps happening because the perpetrators pay no price. The outside world has not been doing enough to support justice and hold junta leaders accountable for their abuses, past and present.

If the future is to be any different, this has to change.