Bangkok, Thailand -Aung, an English teacher at high school, thought it was time to leave Myanmar the day that the military generals who took over the country intensified the application of a long -standing recruitment law they had dredged.
That was at the end of January, a little more than 11 months after the generals announced plans for compulsory military service, to deal with the growing defections of their military and losses on the battlefield to armed groups that fight against their 2021 coup d'etat.
The first contingent of 5,000 recruits in the Myanmar Army began its basic training a year ago this week.
Thousands of recruits followed, and the military gave themselves even greater powers in January to press any man between 18 and 35 years or women between 18 and 27 in the military service. Those who try to evade the face of the draft up to five years in prison.
At that time, Aung, 29, made the decision to flee from Myanmar.
“I decided that I should leave … as soon as possible,” he told Al Jazeera.
That same day, he threw some clothes, medications and some of his favorite books in a backpack and caught the next bus that went east of Yangon, the extensive commercial capital of Myanmar.
Dozens of military control points, several bribes to the soldiers and three days later, was standing on the muddy shores of the Moei River, where, in a rickety wooden boat organized by local smuggers, crossed Thailand.
A year after the recruitment campaign of the Army of Myanmar, thousands of young men and women have done the same, whether it is aimed at the border lands controlled by the rebels out of the reach of the military regime or leaving behind Myanmar completely.
Like Aung, they are rejecting the order to fight for the military rulers accused by the United Nations and innumerable human rights groups of a brutal campaign to consolidate their government, indiscriminately attacking civil populations through Myanmar and dragging the country into a non -endless civil war.
“They are destroying the whole country, they are killing our people, our civilians. I do not want to be part of the murderers. That is why I do not want to enter the army and I do not want to obey the recruitment law,” Lic to Al Jazeera recently told Al Jazeera recently from a safe house near the border of Thai-Myanmar.
'They don't want to serve … like slaves'
The army has not published official recruitment figures.
Having called the 11th recruit contingent in March, the Myanmar Army may be close to achieving its goal of writing 60,000 new soldiers in the first year of the program, analysts tell Al Jazeera.
The analysts said that recruits will be a welcome relief for the regime battalion commanders throughout the country, who have been less frequent to handle their units with full force after four years of fighting a civil war that is estimated to killed tens of thousands on all sides.
Richard Horsey, Myanmar's main advisor for the International Crisis group, said the new recruits are becoming more difficult to gather.
While some responded voluntarily in the first months after it entered into force last year, that has changed.
“Over time, the authorities have had to resort to more and more draconian measures to obtain recruits, including the kidnapping of young men from bus stops and other public places,” said Horsey.
“Local officials have been extorting money from possible recruits to avoid draft. Some officials have been killed when they entered the communities that tried to compile lists of drafts or enforce recruitment orders,” he said.
And instead of being sent to protect duty around the military bases or other positions behind the front line, as planned, it is said that many of the recruits obtain some of the most risky battlefield tasks.
“There are many recruits reports that receive the most difficult and dangerous duties than the most experienced soldiers are reluctant to do, such as accumulated behind enemy lines. Give, as expected, failing in these tasks, whether they are killed, desert or flee if they have the opportunity,” said Horsey.
The recruits are also rushing to the battle with much less training than the soldiers to which they join or replace, in some cases only three months, and more treated as Fodder de Cannon than the combatants, said Kyaw Htet Aung, who directs the conflict research program, peace and security in the Institute of Strategy and Policy of Myanmar, an independent thought.
“For example, when they [the military] Enter the new … Area, first of all them alone [send in] This type of people recruited like the first troops, and then the royal soldiers could be later, [as] The second line, ”he said.
'Human shields'
Ko Ko, 24, who fled from Myanmar to evade recruitment in March last year, only weeks after the draft was announced, a story that echoed Kyaw Htet Cong was echoed.
“On the battlefield, they use the [conscripts] Like the human shields, to step on bombs, dismantle bombs, something like that, “he told Al Jazeera in northern Thailand.
“That is why nobody wants to go to the army; they don't want to serve … as slaves,” he said.
Ko Ko says that his parents paid a family friend, with a high position in the regime's immigration office, around $ 300 to fix it to pass through the immigration counter at Yangon's International Airport without being arrested to be able to leave the country and avoid the military draft.
A friend was not so lucky, said Ko Ko.
Instead of serving in the army after receiving his Draft documents, he took his life, said Ko Ko.
Despite the mandatory call, analysts say that the draft has not been able to change the course in a civil grinding war that has mainly seen a series of losses for the military.
In December, months after the recruitment of thousands of recruits, the military lost another regional command base to the rebel forces, their second from the coup in 2021, in the state of Rakhine.
According to some estimates, the military can only have total control of less than a quarter of the country, although it still has a firm control in the main cities such as Yangon, Mandalay and the capital Naypyidaw.
The recruitment campaign has given some relief to the diminished battalions, promoted morality among the officers and has allowed some defensive operations on the battlefield.
“But it is certainly not a silver bullet for an army that is experiencing historical weakness,” said the crisis group.
Fighting a stop with recruits
Even with thousands of new troops, says Kyaw Htet Aung, the military have managed to launch only a few new offensives or counteroffensive to resume the lost land.
Mainly, the regime continues to depend on long -range artillery and air attacks for most offensive fighting operations. At most, he adds, the draft has helped the military to minimize losses.
That may be the objective of the regime, he added: Use soldiers written to help maintain as many land as possible and play for the time while the generals try to end the civil war at the negotiating table, with the help of China, its main sponsor.
“I think this [conscription] The law has become part of that strategy, ”he said.
The armed groups arranged against the army asked for a truce after the devastating earthquake that hit Myanmar on March 28, killing more than 3,600 people. At first, the military ignored the call of a high fire, carrying out air attacks near the epicenter around the city of Sagaing, but then said it would fulfill.
Since then, each side has accused the other of violating the agreement.
The recent local news reports say that one of the armed groups, the Army of the National Democratic Alliance of Myanmar (Mdaa), would be delivering to Lashio, the largest city in the state of northern Shan, to the Army of Myanmar after being under the pressure of China.
The Mdaa seized the city, home to the Northeast Army Command base, last year in what was a great blow to the regime.
In the relative security of a security house in the distant west of Thailand, Aung continues their work as a teacher, instructing students back to Myanmar about an irregular internet connection for a parallel school system established by groups opposed to the military.
After crossed the border illegally, he still lives for fear of being arrested by the Thai authorities and sent back to Myanmar, and directly, he believes, to the military service he fled to avoid.
“YO [have] I heard that there are many people who are deported back to Myanmar, are arrested, arrested and sent to the military, ”he said.
“If they are forced to return to Myanmar, it is very, very clear that I will be [treated] So, and I don't want to be. “
