Myanmar’s Anti-Coup Resistance Looks to Tatmadaw Defections, Sabotage

On April 7, Myanmar’s opposition shadow government announced that it would begin offering large bounties in order to encourage soldiers to defect or inflict serious damage on the armed forces.

In a statement, the National Unity Government (NUG), which was set up in April 2021 by members of the country’s ousted civilian government and their allies, set out a scale of payments for various acts of defection or sabotage. As The Irrawaddy reported, these topped out at $500,000 for any airman or sailor who was able to defect from their unit with an intact military aircraft or navy vessel. A reward of $300,000 would go to anyone who successfully disabled a parked jet fighter, military helicopter, logistics plane, or warship, and $100,000 for those successfully sabotaging a jet fuel reserve tank, blowing up a regime armory or weapons factory, or defecting with a tank or armored personnel carrier.

In addition to reflecting the growing fundraising prowess of the anti-coup resistance, the bounty announcement reflected the next logical iteration of the resistance’s main strategy for defeating the coup government: weakening the armed forces from within. Unlikely to defeat the powerful Tatmadaw through head-on conventional military operations, in part because of the dispersed and decentralized nature of its own forces, one of the NUG’s most promising avenues is to simply encourage its foe’s foot-soldiers to give up the fight.

This is not an entirely fanciful strategy. Public views of the Myanmar military have reached a new nadir since the coup and the ensuing fierce crackdowns that followed, and there is evidence now that the resistance has had some successes in inducing soldiers to defect. Reliable numbers are hard to come by, given the incentives that both sides have to either inflate or downplay the extent of the defections, but The Irrawaddy reports that nearly 3,000 soldiers have now defected from the army in the 15 months since the coup, including officers up to the battalion commander level.

Whatever their exact number, the resistance and its supporters claim that the defections are beginning to have some effect on the cohesion of the armed forces. In an editorial on March 26, The Irrawaddy noted that “the military enjoys the lowest-ever level of support from the people. And now it is increasingly suffering from internal splits and cracks are beginning to appear in what was once a rock-solid wall of green uniforms.”

Meanwhile, reports that the junta is forming its own militias, recalling veterans, and giving military training to the spouses and children of service personnel suggest that the high command is concerned about its internal cohesion. A similar conclusion was implied by the passage of a law in late March, authorizing the military to deploy police to the frontlines.

In this context, it only makes sense for the NUG to offer further inducements for soldiers to defect, especially if that also results in valuable arms or materiel falling into the hands of the resistance. But bringing down the Tatmadaw through defections faces a host of challenges.

In purely numerical terms, 3,000 represents a relatively small proportion of the Tatmadaw’s total manpower. Even accepting the fact that a large chunk of the military’s personnel are not frontline combat troops, most estimates put the number of active duty personnel at around 100,000-120,000. While such a strategy involves many intangibles, defections probably remain far from reaching the critical mass necessary to catalyze a breakdown of the Tatmadaw as a whole.

Even then, those promoting defections have to persuade soldiers to break free of years of military indoctrination, and take an irreversible step into a fearful unknown. As Andrew Selth, a veteran observer of Myanmar’s military, noted in a paper for Griffith University’s Asia Institute last September, Myanmar’s military is bound together by a mix of patriotic and ideological indoctrination, which focuses on the starring role played by the military in winning the country’s independence from Britain and holding together a fractious union in the face of a nefarious coalition of internal and external enemies.

“This starts with classes at cantonment schools for the children of servicemen and women, and continues for the entire careers of all service personnel,” Selth write. The clear aim is “to create a narrow and self-serving view of the armed forces and its place in Myanmar’s history and society.”

As one defecting soldier described this indoctrination to Al Jazeera in March, “The talking point that they always propagate is that the Tatmadaw is an institution that holds the country together, an institution that protects Buddhism. Should the Tatmadaw not exist, then Myanmar would become a slave state of the West and Buddhism would cease to exist in the country.”

This indoctrination is further reinforced by the isolated and cloistered nature of military life, and the fear of what might happen to those who defect. Most servicemen and women and their families live on military bases, where they are subject to the constant scrutiny of their peers and the surveillance of their superiors and the ubiquitous military intelligence service. To a large extent, they are cut off from the outside world, and encouraged to view themselves as sitting above the mass of the civilian population, which they are conditioned to view with distrust.

According to a report from a defector published by Myanmar Now in April 2021, many soldiers are interested in dropping out, but fear the consequences for themselves and their families. “Those living in military compounds have basically been kidnapped,” Capt. Lin Htet Aung, who defected shortly after the coup, confided to the publication. “They use soldiers’ family members to control them so they can’t act freely. If a soldier wants to run, he has to take his family with him.”

As a result, soldiers need a network of support and protection that will aid them after they choose to drop out of the service. This is exactly the approach taken by newly established groups such as People’s Goal (formerly People’s Soldiers) and People’s Embrace, run by former soldiers, which assist servicemen and women who plan to defect. As Robert Bociaga wrote for The Diplomat in November, the two groups each claim to have facilitated more than 2,000 defections.

In this context, the recent news that the Australian government has granted protection visas to defectors from the Tatmadaw could be crucial. Nyi Thuta, the former army captain who founded People’s Goal, told The Irrawaddy that in the three days after the news broke in the Australian press, “I have received hundreds of enquiries about defections from people who are still in the service.”

In 2015, Robert Taylor, a longtime watcher of Myanmar, wrote that “only the army can end its own role in Myanmar’s politics.” That may be less true than it once was, but it hints at the monumental scale of the challenge that Myanmar’s anti-coup resistance has set itself: of extricating the armed forces from the country’s economic and political life and rebuilding it upon new and more inclusive foundations. Whether or not it ever gets there, with every passing month that the Tatmadaw wages war against its own population, its legitimacy – and manpower – are ebbing ever further away.