Myanmar junta's forced conscription becomes human trafficking enterprise

In Hpa-An, the capital of Myanmar's southern Karen state, young people no longer venture out after dark. The fear is not abstract. Zaw Min, a 26-year-old tuk tuk driver who asked that his real name be withheld, knows the risk intimately. "I worry, but I have to go out to work," he says. His family calls constantly with reminders: don't drive passengers too far, watch who you pick up, stay alert. "People are panicked and frightened," he explains. "Some people I know have been taken."

What is happening in Hpa-An is happening across Myanmar. Plain-clothed members and supporters of the military junta have been systematically roaming streets, arbitrarily arresting people in their teens, twenties, and thirties and forcing them into military service. Leaked documents reviewed by BBC Burmese show that authorities have been ordered to aggressively meet military recruitment quotas across all jurisdictions. The junta is fighting a war of attrition against ethnic militias, pro-democracy groups, and civilian-led resistance movements—and it is losing. Since the military coup in February 2021 that ousted democratically elected leader Aung San Suu Kyi, Myanmar has been locked in a bloody civil war. By 2024, after humiliating military losses, plummeting morale, and soaring desertion rates, the junta enacted a mandatory conscription law requiring all men aged 18 to 35 and women aged 18 to 27 to serve at least two years in uniform. Refusal carries a sentence of up to five years in prison.

Maj Naung Yoe, a military affairs official at the Myanmar Defense and Security Institute and a former military officer who defected to join the anti-coup Civil Disobedience Movement, calls the law "one of the most severe and impactful actions taken against the entire civilian population since the military coup." Over the past two and a half years, an estimated 100,000 young recruits have been conscripted—many through coercion, extortion, and abduction. Security forces track young people's movements to arrest them. They extort money through threats of detention. They conduct raids during guest-list inspections. The conscription law has created what amounts to a human supply chain, and it has worked: reinforcements have helped the regime claw back territory. But as more youths evade conscription—either to join the resistance or simply to avoid fighting their fellow countrymen—the junta's recruitment methods have become increasingly extreme. International rights groups including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Fortify Rights document systematic abductions and forced military service. In July, the open-source research organization Myanmar Witness analyzed hundreds of missing-person advertisements collected from Facebook between 2021 and 2025. Missing person notices for January rose from four in 2021, before the coup, to 82 in 2025, after the conscription law took effect. Men and boys made up the majority of reported missing persons.

The machinery of forced conscription has spawned something darker still: a trafficking market in human beings. On the morning of May 8, 2025, Ma Moe San Pan saw her 33-year-old husband Phyo Wai leave their home in Yangon after an argument. She told her cousin, who worked at the local ward administration office, and asked him to bring her husband back. Two days later, Phyo Wai called from a military recruitment centre across the city. Her cousin had taken him to the ward office, which had sold him to another ward for 4 million kyats—roughly $900—to fill that ward's recruitment quota, according to Ma Moe San Pan. The BBC could not reach her cousin. U Maung Maung Lwin, the administrator of the ward that received Phyo Wai, later admitted to the BBC that he had played a role in sending him to military recruitment authorities. When asked about allegations that individuals were being conscripted outside their home township, he said such transfers do occur when local quotas cannot be met. He denied that money was involved, though Ma Moe San Pan says her husband was sold. In her desperation to bring him back, she was scammed out of 4.5 million kyats by strangers who falsely promised his release. She filed police complaints about both the sale and the scam. Police accepted her complaint but refused to register it as human trafficking, claiming that human trafficking cases could only be registered if a person had been sold abroad. She does not know where her husband is now.

Ma Moe San Pan's case reveals how mounting pressure from above has created perverse incentives down the chain of command. Surging demand and dwindling supply have fuelled an illicit market for eligible recruits. Security officials now arrest youth at road checkpoints, track and ambush workers during their daily commutes, set traps via fake job advertisements, and forcibly enter people's homes. In late August, police in Yangon arrested a member of the Fire Services Department—a branch of the home affairs ministry—and his son-in-law for abducting four young men with the intention of selling them for military conscription. The reserve fire brigade unit commander allegedly deceived the men with promises of employment, lured them to his house, and trapped them in purpose-built detention rooms. He was charged with kidnapping and wrongful confinement, facing up to seven years in prison. According to Naung Yoe, lower-level administrative bodies, military personnel, and local criminal gangs employ diverse tactics to press-gang and arrest young people. They sell these individuals to military units and regional commands facing manpower shortages, or traffic substitute recruits on behalf of wealthier individuals seeking to buy their way out of service. While conscription orders are indiscriminate on paper—demanding a quota proportional to each village, ward, or township's population—wealthier conscripts can simply pay to dodge the draft. It is the poor who disproportionately bear the burden.

These practices are escalating due to increasing difficulties in meeting monthly recruitment quotas and the lucrative financial profits made from recruit trading at ground level, Naung Yoe says. But the hardening fist of forced conscription also reveals the junta's empty hand. Dr Sandeep Singh, a research fellow teaching military studies at the National University of Singapore, sees it as "another step in the junta's efforts to enlist unwilling youth in a conflict that underscores its embattled position in the civil war." The climate of routine abductions has generated further difficulties for Myanmar's youth, already affected by years of civil war, and their families. Many would-be recruits now fear being forced to fight in a deadly conflict they do not believe in and actively oppose. This constant threat has fuelled massive internal displacement and severe labour shortages in an already flailing economy, and sent people fleeing to neighbouring countries. Having spent more than half a decade waging war against its own population, the junta is now wielding the conscription law as yet another tool of subjugation. As the Myanmar Defense and Security Institute put it in a statement published in June: "The generals have benefited by using military law to make the citizens fight against each other."