Jet Fuel and Loopholes in Myanmar

On the morning of May 9, jets belonging to the Myanmar Air Force approached the village of Akyi Pan Palun in Magwe, a region in the central dry plain of Myanmar. Swooping down low, the jets dropped several 500-pound bombs on the village’s Buddhist monastery. The century-old wooden structure was instantly incinerated, along with much of the surrounding grounds. According to a later investigation by the rights group Amnesty International, the attack killed 12 civilians and injured 26 others.

Photos published by local media outlets showed the building’s charred teak supports standing upright in a pall of smoke, with only brick and concrete staircase openings remaining intact.

Local media reports stated that the village lay in a liberated area controlled by a local anti-regime People’s Defense Force, whose members were attending a meeting with civilians in the monastery at the time. According to The Irrawaddy, junta drones had been seen above the village in the preceding days.

“The monastery was completely razed to the ground, and several adjacent houses suffered damage,” one member of the local people’s administration told the exile news site Mizzima. “Due to the extent of burns on the bodies,” he added, “it has been challenging to identify individuals.”

The attack on Akyi Pan Palun village was just one of many that has taken place in Myanmar over the past year. Indeed, such punitive airstrikes have become more frequent as the military junta, which seized power in in a coup in February 2021, has lost ground across the country over the past year.

In June, Tom Andrews, the U.N. special rapporteur on human rights in Myanmar, reported that military airstrikes against civilian targets had increased five-fold in the first half of 2024.

Nyan Lynn Thit Analytica, a Myanmar non-profit monitoring organization that tracks airstrikes carried out by the Myanmar Air Force, similarly reported that between January and April of this year there were a total 819 airstrikes that killed 359 civilians and left 756 wounded, many of them women and children. At this rate, 2024 will see more air attacks and casualties than the previous three years combined.

This sharp increase has been possible despite the sanctions that the United States and United Kingdom announced last year against companies that import jet fuel to Myanmar. In August 2023, the U.S. Treasury Department issued a determination that “allows for sanctions to be imposed on any foreign individual or entity determined to operate in the jet fuel sector of the Burmese economy.” It also specifically announced sanctions on two Myanmar nationals and one company, Shoon Energy, which it said were involved in procuring jet fuel for the use of Myanmar’s military.

Even with the threat of U.S. sanctions, however, the high-grade Jet A-1 fuel continues to flow. In January, Amnesty International reported that the junta had already found ways of getting around the sanctions. The report found that Myanmar’s military was sourcing jet fuel from China and Malaysia, which was then shipped to Yangon from a port in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Amnesty documented at least seven shipments in 2023, all involving the same Chinese-flagged tanker.

In an update to the report released last month, Amnesty argued that shipments were continuing to pierce the wall of foreign sanctions. The NGO identified “at least two, and likely three, additional shipments of aviation fuel” between January and June of this year.

The two confirmed shipments were carried out by the Chinese-owned HUITONG78 oil tanker, which transported fuel from Vietnam to Thilawa port close to Yangon, Myanmar’s largest city, in January and February of this year. As with the previous shipments, “the fuel was bought and sold multiple times before reaching the last leg of its trip in Viet Nam [sic] ahead of shipment to Myanmar.”

Amnesty tracked the January shipment back to the Vopak Singapore Banyan Terminal, a storage facility in Singapore controlled by Dutch storage and logistics company Royal Vopak. The shipment was sold to a Vietnamese company by the Singapore branch of the global fuel trader Sahara Energy, the report found.

The second shipment was traced to the BP Hua Dong terminal at Ningbo port, in southern China, and was reportedly sold by the Singapore trading branch of the China National Offshore Oil Corporation, a Chinese state-owned enterprise.

Amnesty also mentioned a likely third shipment, also carried out by HUITONG78, which appears to have arrived in Myanmar from the United Arab Emirates in May.

While it is hard to say definitively where this fuel went after entering Myanmar, given the fact that the Thilawa port is controlled by the Myanmar military, it is very likely that it has been used by the armed forces – including for air strikes on civilians.

Agnes Callamard, Amnesty’s secretary general, described these shipments as both a “raw display of … sheer impunity” on the part of the Myanmar military, and a sign of the “utter complicity” of the states – including Vietnam, China, and Singapore – that function as nodes in this supply chain.

What the report highlights above all is the complexity of global supply chains. Fuel traders have responded to the threat of sanctions by creating layer upon layer of transactions in order to complicate and obscure the origin of fuel shipments.  

In theory, the awesome reach of the U.S. financial system has the potential to reduce this flow of fuel to a trickle and ground the death machines of the Myanmar Air Force. The only test is whether it can dedicate enough resources to closing every loophole as it opens, and – most importantly – encouraging (or pressuring) other nations to do the same.