Myanmar junta forces are illegally taxing and extorting travellers at 37 checkpoints they have set up on the 180-mile-long Tanintharyi Highway in southern Myanmar, according to rights group the Human Rights Foundation of Monland (HURFOM).

Reliable sources told HURFOM fieldworkers that they believed the extortion was happening because the junta has authorised its soldiers to raise their own funds in the face of inadequate support at both state and regional levels.

“It is as if they their daily incomes are at the lowest level; this means more and more extortions, illegal levying taxes, arbitrary arrests and demanding ransoms from civilians”, said a local.

According to one of the cargo drivers HURFOM spoke with on 2 May, they are forced to pay various illegal taxes: “Sometimes the junta extorts us for money and our property. It is all unjust taxation. Imagine how little money we have left after doing our jobs to feed our families”, said the 50-year-old truck driver from Ye Township, Mon State.

Even daily road users, such as farmers, rubber plantation workers, and inhabitants, suffer from the junta’s actions. A 30-year-old Tavoyan rubber plantation farmer from a village in Yebyu Township told reporters: “We have to encounter thieves and criminals in our daily life while crossing their checkpoints and security gates.”

Before the coup, there were only seven tollgates for road tax on the Tanintharyi Highway. After the coup, the junta occupied all these tollgates for security reasons and installed another 30 tollgates and checkpoints along the road to the South.

"We have been in this living hell for over two years. Everything has collapsed, and we are suffering under the military’s boots. On top of that, we face these kinds of robberies at gunpoint on the road almost daily. More and more road users of this expressway have given up their jobs because of these illegal charges”, said a small-scale merchant from Yebyu Township, Dawei.