When Captain Lin Htet Aung went public after his defection from the Myanmar armed forces in March following the 1 February attempted coup, he estimated that three-quarters of troops would consider following if they and their families could be guaranteed protection.
This indicates something deeply troubling amongst members of the Myanmar’s army, beyond dissatisfaction with the coup.
Widespread poverty and abuse of Myanmar army foot soldiers was not on emerging academic Sai Latt’s mind when he started his PhD research journey. However, his focus was gradually honed onto this same reality the more he spoke with people from Shan State displaced to Thailand.
The pervasive experience of Tatmadaw foot soldiers’ looting of food and property from civilians in conflict and militarized areas kept sticking in his mind. First, he asked of all the violent and abusive ways Myanmar soldiers treated people in their vicinity, what exactly turned them into food looters?
His research interviews made him realize that looking solely at soldier’s poverty in the battlefield was inadequate because it was chronic and systematic. This led to his next question, ‘What are the institutional dynamics of the Myanmar military that create poverty that turns soldiers into looters?’
Conversations with former army personnel of various ranks led him deeper and deeper into the internal power dynamics that structured the entire Myanmar army from top to bottom.
Most examinations of military-civilian relations take a macro-level perspective that understands the violence as part of the military’s nation-building agenda to forcefully control populations and territories. These crimes have been documented in relation to natural resource extraction, gender-based violence, forced relocation, child soldier recruitment.
While this highlights the oppressive and ruthless nature of Myanmar army as an institution, it also portrays it as homogenous. Sai Latt’s micro-level perspective sheds more light on this battlefield relationship and the Myanmar army with insightful results.
He explored how, layer on layer, internal brutal hierarchical power relations and extreme poverty enables foot soldiers to off-load their burdens onto civilians.
In no way does Sai Latt excuse the crimes perpetrated against the locals encountered where they are stationed or on patrol. But he knows that human rights abuses cannot be addressed unless their root causes are understood. Subsequently, he focuses on researching peace processes and reconciliation.
Delving deep into these issues, Sai Latt argued that understanding military-civilian relations must include an appreciation of the class exploitation that structures everyday life in the army. That is, how officers extract personal wealth with impunity from lower ranks through dictatorial authority, physical and mental violence, exploitation and theft leaving the lowest ranks chronically poor and abused.
Rapid Growth of the Myanmar Army
Underlying the institutional dynamics that generate and sustain chronically poor foot soldiers are a cluster of factors related to the transformation of the Myanmar Army from an institution of national pride and protection to one of personal wealth seeking. This began, noted Sai Latt, with the military’s rapid expansion in the 1990s-2000s during which, it is estimated, troop number grew from 200,000 to over 400,000 and battalions from 168 to over 500.
First, each battalion was unfunded by the military and responsible for raising its own finances to expand and operate its units, bases and activities. Battalion officers found major sources of income in criminal activities in illicit economies. Second, massive recruitment problems commonly resulted in registering children, youth and adults with histories of poverty, violence, crime and abandonment.
Third, as then dictator, Than Shwe, began opening up the Myanmar economy, battalion officers began corruptly exploiting their authority for personal profit via channels such as approving business licenses and illegal cross-border trade. Fourth, the rapid growth of the Defense Services Academy began graduating officer characterized as power and wealth seeking and arrogant.
Fifth, physically and psychologically brutal military training programs for rank and file soldiers instilled in them a sense of complete loyalty and unquestioned obedience to senior members in the mindset tradition of ‘one blood, one voice, one order.’
Since their early days in the military, soldiers, including children, were exposed and became accustomed to violence, exploitation and various forms of injustice committed by seniors. Sai Latt explained,
The common experience of most trainees was extreme poverty, forced labour and endurance of physical violence. They were locked up and denied medical treatment. At night they were forced to sleep naked to prevent desertion. Two or three of them were tied up together if they wanted to use the washroom at night. Often times, loss of life occurred due to malnutrition and physical violence…
The trainees were no strangers to death, violence and atrocious environments.
Combined, these factors have contributed to building a pervasive military culture of pleasing the ones above while pressing the ones below and created a ‘spoiled army’ where officers abuse subordinates with impunity.
Institutional Dynamics Sustaining Foot Soldier Poverty
From the beginning, soldiers who commit violence against civilians are also victims of violence in their own world. Therefore, Sai Latt turned to considering the institutional dynamics of the Myanmar Army that shaped this world. And he identified three key points.
The first point concerns the characterization of power relations as hierarchical, exploitative and corrupt. To illustrate the impact of this on soldier poverty Sai Latt highlighted the constant battalion funding raising demands. ‘My research found that arbitrary taxation, forced labour and cheating in the context of battalion financial management enabled wealth to be extracted from poor soldiers and their families.’
Second, the dictatorial character of power relations produces subservient soldiers and enables officers to exploit their juniors. The culture of unquestioned obedience is pervasive to the extent that subordinates must obey their seniors at all times, including when off-duty.
As Sai Latt explained, ‘a top-down command and control system and ‘one blood, one voice, one order’ tradition had become personalized to such an extent that a senior’s power and authority endorsed for military tasks worked similarly in everyday affairs.’
The impossibility of dissent, and intolerance of questioning, even for clarification, has created the conditions for exploitation, abuse, and even stealing and cheating to become cultural practices.
The third point concerns the dominance of patron-client relations. There are wealth seeking power holders at every level of the military and meeting the exploitative wealth needs of senior officials is the only way to rise in rank and improve one’s situation.
Pain experienced by abusive demands and orders of seniors is relieved through gift giving and pleasing seniors with the hope of being granted a promotion or some form of advantage. Specifically, gift giving is the means to show loyalty, or phar, to seniors and is measured in terms of how much a subordinate can earn for his seniors.
These constant demands raise the question of where does this money come from? For low ranks soldiers, the demands take the forms of mandatory fees and opportunistic expenses regularly extracted from wages; heavy and constant involuntary labour demands and unpaid involuntary work demands on family members.
‘Exploitation of rank-and-file soldiers and their families in the process of Tat financial management was the channel through which wealth was sucked up from the bottom of the hierarchy and eventually reached the top,’ Sai Latt explained. This, he concluded, means that the relation between violence and poverty does not occur only at the level of poverty, but involves many actors and all levels. It is institution wide and deep.
Foot Soldier-Civilian Relations
On front lines in Myanmar soldiers often approach villagers and villages starving. They grab what they can in the abusive way they were accustomed to being treated. They use force to get what they want and to avoid begging which, according to an interviewee, is unthinkable.
Their approach is legitimized by the official military discourse that people in areas to which they are deployed are rebel supporters and sympathizers who should be treated as deadly enemies.
The immediate and individual reasons for soldiers’ violence against civilians, it turns out, is often for their own everyday survival even though the military’s institutional aim may be nationalistic nation-building and capitalistic control over natural resources.
‘It is a story,’ concluded Sai Latt, ‘of systemic harsh exploitation from top to bottom, an extreme form of patron-client relations in the context of a totalitarian military regime and capitalist resource exploitation.’
