Myanmar’s junta takes advantage of a devastating earthquake

Since March 28th, when a powerful earthquake shook Myanmar’s central heartlands, the country’s brutal junta has tried to show the world its softer side. Min Aung Hlaing, its leader, has visited survivors in a hospital and asked foreigners to send help. Yet the generals who seized power from a democratically elected government four years ago—plunging the country into a civil war that has displaced millions—are also seeking to draw advantage from the catastrophe.

Five days after the 7.7-magnitude quake the official death toll in Myanmar had risen to around 3,000, though the true number is doubtless much higher. Good information is scant, both because the tremor has wrecked communication networks and because the junta has long disrupted data services in order to control what people see. Local journalists work under close scrutiny; the junta has said foreign ones must keep out. Modelling by the American government, using information such as the magnitude of the tremor and the size of the population it affected, suggests the toll could end up exceeding 10,000.

Destruction in Mandalay, Myanmar’s second-largest city, is widespread. More than 500 buildings have been completely destroyed (or close to it), according to analysis of satellite imagery by Microsoft’s AI for Good Lab. All across the affected region, the secondary impacts of the quake are starting to bite. Running water, fuel and other basic necessities are in short supply; UN agencies warn of a growing risk from cholera. International aid teams are gaining access, though the going is slow. Journeys along the main road from Yangon (Myanmar’s biggest city and business hub) to Mandalay are taking around 13 hours, compared with eight before.

Not long after the tremor, rebel groups who have been fighting the junta said they would suspend offensives so that rescue efforts could get under way. The junta, by contrast, waited until April 2nd to announce that it was also going to pause its fighting, for 20 days. It used the intervening period to give rebel forces a solid thumping. The Kachin Independence Army, an armed group fighting the generals in northern Myanmar, says at least 30 of the young soldiers it was training were killed in an air strike on April 1st. Residents of a township in Sagaing region, an area affected by the quake that lies west of Mandalay, say they suffered bombing the day before. “Most young people here want to help with earthquake relief but they’re afraid of being attacked by the army,” says a local rebel fighter.

The UN has accused the junta of preventing aid from passing through some checkpoints that lead to regions controlled by rebel groups. On April 1st the regime’s soldiers fired shots at a convoy operated by the Chinese Red Cross that was carrying relief supplies to Mandalay through a region that was not under the junta’s control, according to the Ta’ang National Liberation Army, a rebel group that was escorting it at the time. Blowback from that incident could help explain why the generals at last felt obliged to promise a brief ceasefire of their own.

Yet outright conflict is not the only thing that risks leaving vulnerable people without aid. Although Mandalay and Sagaing town, both very close to the epicentre, are under the junta’s control, regions around them are rebel territory. On March 30th Ko Zaw Zaw, a mechanic who has been using his tools and skills to help rescue people, drove to Sagaing from a neighbouring city to extract two people from a collapsed home. He says soldiers and police sent his group packing. They accused his band of rescuers of being criminals, thieves or members of the resistance. The people he was trying to help died.

Analysts sense the junta is directing an outsize share of international aid towards its capital, Naypyidaw, which was hit by the earthquake but which does not appear to have needs as great as those of communities closer to the epicentre. Ideally governments would be trying harder to channel help across Myanmar’s borders with China, India and Thailand, which abut the vast swathes of the country that the junta does not control. “The junta should not be the automatic go-to partner,” says Kim Jolliffe, an analyst who specialises in Myanmar’s ethnic politics. “The ethnic armed organisations are not just rebel groups. They are not just insurgents,” says Nyantha Lin of Anagat Initiatives, a think-tank. “Some have become excellent at delivering education, health care and agricultural support in the territory they control.”

Before the earthquake the junta had been losing territory—and yet its leaders were, oddly, being granted more opportunities to hobnob on the international stage. Min Aung Hlaing recently made official visits to Russia and Belarus, having trekked to China last year. On April 4th he is due to attend a high-level summit in Thailand for countries situated along the Bay of Bengal; this will be his first appearance at a big multilateral meeting since the coup. In the best case the catastrophe could help remind the world that Myanmar was already suffering a deep humanitarian crisis—and galvanise fresh efforts to resolve it. It is more likely that the international attention ends up strengthening the junta’s callous rule. ■