A small number of Myanmar soldiers who have deserted the military since the country’s February coup have joined at least two groups working to persuade others to also desert, help those who do and funnel them into a swelling armed resistance.
The groups, the People’s Soldiers and the People’s Embrace, are now running dedicated campaigns to draw more troops out of the ranks.
“We encourage soldiers to take the right action. But even if they know that they have to take the right action, we still have to encourage them to do so. We do this by telling them that we know how hard it is because we ourselves have endured this, and we tell them that we are here to support them,” Nyi Thuta, a former captain who cofounded the People’s Soldiers in March, told VOA.
Defectors in Myanmar can face the death penalty, a sentence usually commuted to life in prison.
People’s Soldiers claims to have some 100 staff in Myanmar running propaganda, fundraising and aid programs from hiding, many from the relative safety of remote borderlands where sympathetic ethnic minority rebel armies have been fighting the military for autonomy for decades.
Spreading the word
Nyi Thuta knows what he is talking about regarding desertion and defection. He abandoned a promising career in the military’s propaganda unit writing speeches for commander-in-chief and coup leader Min Aung Hlaing on February 28, repulsed by the army’s bloody crackdown on peaceful protests in the wake of the putsch.
Rights groups claim soldiers and police have killed more than 1,000 civilians since the coup, most of them unarmed protesters, although the junta disputes the figure.
“The leaders of the military, their belief is only to kill the people instead of protecting the people,” Nyi Thuta said. “The leaders are not establishing and nurturing a professional army, so the soldiers should disobey the orders and attempt to get out.”
He said his group gets its message out via social media, recording regular discussion groups and broadcasting them on the Facebook channels of popular local media outlets. It also fields direct messages from soldiers wrestling with thoughts of deserting or defecting and desperate for advice.
Groups opposing the junta claim at least 1,500 soldiers, from privates to majors, have joined the resistance since the coup. That is a fraction of the military’s estimated force of 300,000 to 400,000 but Nyi Thuta says monthly defection numbers are ticking up.
Converts welcome
For those who do make the leap, People’s Soldiers says it can help get ex-soldiers and their families back on their feet with monthly living allowances, food, shelter and even a modest jobs training program. With the group’s fundraising efforts having scraped together only a few hundred dollars thus far, though, most of the help comes from in-kind donations from locals.
A former private who spoke with VOA on condition of anonymity said he left his base in the central Bago region making weapons for the military in September, convinced to act on his conscience after hearing People’s Soldiers’ broadcasts and visiting its website.
“To see the soldiers killing innocent civilians with the guns that I helped produce was something that I could not stand at all,” he said.
“Especially hearing Captain Nyi Thuta speak about his experiences led me to increase my desire to defect to the people,” he added.
After reaching rebel army-held territory along the Thai border, he said People’s Soldiers provided him a place to stay and a monthly allowance.
“I would be lost and have no place to go or to live without People’s Soldiers’ support,” he said. “This group is everything for me.”
A numbers game
Nyi Thuta said his group remains unarmed, confident in the power of its message, but will connect deserters who want to fight back with a growing number of civilian militias that have emerged across Myanmar since the coup. His team also advises the new militias on combat strategy, he added, and passes on what it knows about troop forces in their area.
“We are able to tell the groups the weaknesses that the military has, the weaknesses in their arms, the weaknesses in their organization structure, so that the groups can then use the knowledge that we have shared to implement their goals,” he said.
Min Zaw Oo, director of the Myanmar Institute for Peace and Security, a local think tank, said soldiers who join armed resistance groups can have useful intelligence but may find it hard to pass on in the face of popular, deep-seated resentment of the military and suspicions that they have been planted as spies.
The analyst said the reported numbers and ranks of defecting soldiers are also still too low to give the military much to worry about for now.
“All the reports that we saw [are of] individual defections or desertions, but we haven’t seen [any] unit-level defections. If we see that, that is a sign that there are serious problems going on in the military,” he said.
