Delusions of Grandeur
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During his military indoctrination, Kyaw Kyaw recalls, an officer told his class how to avoid a court martial while operating against ethnic armed groups in conflict zones. He advised the recruits to always carry batteries in case they killed a civilian, so they could slip them into the victim’s pockets and claim he or she was planting landmines.
“And then you can just get off the hook from charges of murder and killing of a civilian,” Kyaw Kyaw says. “They are teaching that kind of thing, like it’s a smart or right thing to do! Really that is just one small example, like their ideologies are so wrong, against their religion, against the ethnic groups, and everything.”
It would be years later, one month after the coup, when Captain Kyaw Kyaw defected from the military in protest at the seizure of power from the elected democratic government. He took with him critical insights into an organization that is dysfunctional, and in some ways delusional, yet maintains key levers of power in a society shattered by conflict.
His personal journey from enlistee, to officer and military doctor, and then to defector has traversed nearly 20 years, juxtaposed to an institution that in some ways seems stuck in time. After graduating high school, Kyaw Kyaw joined the military in 2006 for a mix of reasons. “Back then, military propaganda was a bit strong across the country for young people like us. I partly believed that I could do good for the people while serving,” he says. Another reason was to further his education, given the expense of civilian medical school. Eventually he made the rank of captain as a military pediatrician serving the families of soldiers.
Disillusionment with the public service promise came long before the coup, in the first or second year of his enrolment in the military medical academy. There was not much information available on the military’s tactics, neither about the history of the 1988 uprising of protests and nationwide strikes, nor the bloody crackdown that followed. During the 2007 Saffron Revolution, however, Kyaw Kyaw was already enrolled at the medical academy and in Yangon, witnessing first-hand the brutality against monks and civilians by an institution that was supposed to be protecting them.
In his progressing career, he continued to think critically about what he was being taught. “When they were teaching some kind of military tactic, military indoctrination, and their ideology, the more I learned about their ways of doing things, I realized that they were in the wrong place all along the history.” After he graduated, he attended a six-month training in Karen State. He remembers asking commanders about the danger of an attack, with the reply deepening his disgust. “They don’t dare to attack us, because we have all the artillery aimed at their villages. It doesn’t matter who attacked us, [the soldiers] would just blindly shoot artillery everywhere and there will be a lot of fatalities among the civilians.”
During his training, he never heard war crimes mentioned, and believes that most soldiers do not know what the Geneva Conventions are. “It’s part of their ideology that these kinds of things are not against their code of conduct. They want the soldiers to think like that,” he says. “If they wrongfully torture or interrogate a villager, they suggest that soldiers get rid of the body, so the villagers or civilians don’t know who the culprit is or which unit did it.” He remembers a court martial connected to the killing of civilians in 2007, when the perpetrators were identified and convicted, only to serve very short prison terms, while a soldier who had refused to murder civilians and testified at the trial was sentenced to 20 years.
From the beginning of his career, he questioned his decision to enlist and the mission of a military. “But I stayed. I still had some love for the people in the military and in the army, especially those in the lower ranks who are suffering, with so much oppression and violations of human rights,” Kyaw Kyaw says. “I wanted to help them.”
When the political transition began in 2010, and seemed to be realized in the 2015 election, he joined so many in hoping for reform, for him specifically in the institution in which he still served. “I was hoping that our military could change along with the country, as people wanted. I wanted the military to be a better institution that really did good for people. And I wanted it to be clear of the politics,” he says, adding that corruption was another area of concern. “As soon as they started the coup, I knew all of my dreams and all of my hopes were being thrown into the ditch.” He waited to see if the protests might force the military to walk back the attempted takeover – and then the killings of civilians began.
That directly led to his defection. As Kyaw Kyaw looks back now, he wants to communicate what he knows about the military, what are its weaknesses, and how it maintains its power.
The reality is that conditions are also brutal for the rank-and-file soldiers, with poor food and accommodation, and a military culture that is designed to break them psychologically. The “right kind of discipline” in officers’ minds can include punches and slaps to the face or being beaten with sticks. Most importantly, Kyaw Kyaw believes, only a fraction of the Myanmar military population has heard of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), much less been diagnosed or treated. He estimates that at least one in four soldiers is an alcoholic or drug addict.
“The military usually does psych evaluations, but not properly and they don’t care about the results because they need manpower,” he says. “I think at least 30 to 40% of infantry soldiers have to be dismissed because of mental instability, drug addiction or alcoholism, but they are using them as a weapon.” The consequences are borne both by the soldiers and their victims. “Half of the brutality, war crimes, and atrocities occur on the front line and among the civilians. A portion of the soldiers are already like psychopaths with psychological trauma,” Kyaw Kyaw says. “These soldiers are victims from the mental abuse and the operations from the top of the army. And they are also perpetrators of killings, oppressing the civilians. Those soldiers in the bases need to have the right punishment, but in my opinion, the leaders should take twice that punishment.”
The fighting and setbacks suffered by the military recently has exposed some of these weaknesses with prisoners of war and casualties showing a disproportionate number of older soldiers as well as signs of substance abuse or other medical conditions. Even before the coup, the stated force strength numbers were considered a joke in military ranks, with frequent desertions because of the harsh conditions and commanders fabricating roll calls to protect their promotions and enable them to confiscate supplies for the missing personnel.
“Now, if they say they have 400,000, I could say 200,000! The fighting force will be less than 80,000 since they have a lot of technicians, female soldiers and near pension-age soldiers,” Kyaw Kyaw says. “Everyone from the military knows that the real fighting force is not even half the number that they are saying in public.”
The weakness is aggravated by top-down corruption. Commanders routinely inflate their budgets and embezzle the difference. The procurement and construction tender processes are broken, with contracts regularly funneled to family members of senior officers, with inferior construction and production exempt from quality control or accountability.
As the top tier enriches itself, rank-and-file soldiers barely make living wage. As a captain, Kyaw Kyaw was receiving about 3.7 lakh kyat (370,000) per month, which he estimates converted to about US$200, while police forces and lower-ranking soldiers earned about 2 lakh. “It would only allow them to survive month-to-month,” he says. “They cannot build any kind of future for their children or for themselves.” Soldiers are also required to buy shares in the military-owned conglomerates Myanma Economic Holdings Public Company Limited (MEHL) and Myanmar Economic Corporation Limited (MEC) as well as life insurance that has no guarantee of payouts.
Since the coup and subsequent revolution, Kyaw Kyaw sees four different groups within the military, each comprising about 25%. Some, like himself, know the military is in the wrong and have the courage to leave. The second group also sees the injustice of the situation but are afraid. “The penalty would be life imprisonment or the death penalty, that would be one thing. And then some might be afraid how they would live in the community, how they would keep running from the military, and how they could survive and earn money,” he says. “Some people also fear how they will be treated by democratic and resistance forces, that they will not be welcomed, but it is not the case. They are very welcome, but they are not sure.” He believes that promises of safe refuge and livelihood training would double or triple the rate of defection, but that it’s not possible at present given the limited resources.
He calls the third group “greedy people” who know the military is in the wrong but are earning money, either as specialists or doctors, or as commanders and soldiers extorting bribes or conducting other illegal activities, ranging from small amounts extracted from civilians to multi-million-kyat black market trading. These people will stay, Kyaw Kyaw believes, as long as they can profit without facing consequences.
The last group he calls “ignorant” in their belief that they are serving the country, protecting Buddhism, the government, and the people from foreign influence, even as Russia and China exert increasing control. It is this final quarter of the military that poses the most resistance. “Most of the soldiers don’t have a proper education. Since before the coup, they were forbidden to follow and like real media outlets revealing the truth about the country. They are forced to follow the pro-regime and military-owned TV channels,” Kyaw Kyaw says. “Commanders keep saying that they are winning, they are in the right position, they are doing the right thing. That kind of propaganda has been going on in the military for decades.”
There is a solidarity of interests at the top that make a counter-coup unlikely, in his estimation. “When you get to that kind of level in the military, all of your profits and all your interests are already aligned with the other generals and top leaders, because you are already a major shareholder in that kind of organization, and all of your companies are already related,” Kyaw Kyaw says. “Every general has at least one or two company already. In the top group, all of their interests and profits are tied to each other.”
In addition to the crony capitalism, the junta continues to draw power from their manipulation of traditional beliefs. “The top commander and soldiers really believe in their chants and rituals guided by some kind of fortunetellers or shamans.” Kyaw Kyaw recounts a rumor, which he believes is credible, that during the protests soldiers were directed to shoot people in the head as some sort of black magic ritual. “It’s not even real Buddhism,” he says. “It’s a superstitious misconception and a very conservative belief. But it grows very strong and is rooted in the military for a very long time.”
These ritualistic beliefs have guided military decisions ranging from major economic policies to gendered perspectives and their approach to Aung San Suu Kyi. The concept of hpon, or merit earned in past last lives that confers power, exerts considerable influence in traditional thought throughout society. “They are also using it like a weapon. In some parts of our country, civilians believe that a country leader has to have the highest hpon and the highest aura,” Kyaw Kyaw says. “That’s why Min Aung Hlaing is desperately trying to find white elephants since it is a symbol of our old Myanmar kings. Every time a white elephant comes to state leaders, it means that the leader deserves to lead the country or be worthy as a king… It’s like a laughingstock for us, like academic persons, but it really works for some people inside the country. As long as he keeps building big pagodas and big monasteries and he keeps finding those kinds of white elephants, some people might think that he is the right leader for the country.”
Throughout his analysis, Kyaw Kyaw brings granular knowledge about the military’s inner workings contextualized within decades of Myanmar society. The lessons he draws, however, have a universal relevance. “Injustice can be very infectious. If more countries believe in power, instead of dialogue, instead of justice, it will backfire for every nation in the world. China and Russia will not be an exception,” he says. “Letting slip some kind of small injustice could lead to a chain reaction, like a hydrogen bomb. It could destroy the world, that’s what I believe.”