Photo – AFP
(This English Column is the ISP’s translation of the original Burmese version published on February 23, 2025. Read the original Burmese Column here.)
Apart from not pulling a cap low over his face or changing his appearance, Yangon youth Ko Lin Nay says he lives like a fugitive.
The moment he steps out of his house onto the street, he is on edge. He scans ahead and to both sides, never relaxing, always alert to the possibility of an unseen enemy. If a car pulls up nearby, he instinctively freezes. For a young man in the city, every day feels like life on the run—aware that an “invitation” from death could come at any time.
He traces this fugitive feeling back to November 2024, when conscription roundups began on the main roads of Yangon. By December, the situation had intensified. Each morning, when he opens Facebook, his feed is flooded with stories of people across Yangon being seized for portering. Some posts are clearly embellished hearsay, but from what he sees and hears around him, he knows many are all too real.
Since December, he has not dared to walk even to the end of his street after 6 pm, like an obedient daughter from his mother’s generation. Yet even at home, he cannot shake the fear that soldiers might arrive under the pretext of checking overnight guest registration. Every time the neighbourhood dogs bark at night, he feels compelled to peer outside. The exhaustion, he says, is relentless.
For a young man in the city, every day feels like life on the run, aware that an “invitation” from death could come at any time.
Although he belongs to the much-famous Generation Z, he is neither a member of the People’s Defence Force (PDF) nor an active protester. His contribution to the revolution is limited to small donations and anti-dictatorship poems and posts on a pseudo-social media account, when he can no longer contain his anger. Compared with young people risking their lives on the frontlines, he calls himself—half jokingly, half in shame— a “Gen Lee armchair revolutionary”. (Gen Lee is a derogatory label for older-generation individuals who publicly align with the resistance while prioritizing self-interest and safety.)
In short, he has lived at some distance from formal politics. It is the illegal and coercive Conscription Law that has forced politics to his doorstep. The regime activated the law in February 2024. By April, as the first conscript training batch began, some quick-thinking young people slipped away to join PDF units. Others fled to Mae Sot in Thailand, and those with means left to study abroad. Those who could, resettled.
But people like Ko Lin Nay—unable to join the PDFs, without the money to go overseas, and unsure what to do—remained stranded, stuck in a fog of indecision. He states that at first he tried to pretend that the conscription drive did not exist because he saw no way out. In November 2024, he learned that the ward administration office had compiled a ledger listing those eligible for conscription. He paid a bribe to the clerk to look at it. There was his name—spelled correctly—alongside his age, his father’s name, and his address. After that, there was no more pretending.
By day, he became even more cautious when stepping outside. By night, he sought to reduce the risk of an arrest while being checked for the guest register by sending food and drink to the ward clerk and humbly requesting advance warning if an inspection was planned.
By the end of 2024, Training Batch No. 9 had already begun. The junta had announced that it would take 5,000 people per batch, for a total of 45,000 so far. Training lasts barely two months, hardly enough time to learn to handle a rifle. New recruits are then sent directly to the front lines, where the fighting is fiercest. It would be difficult to believe whether half of those 45,000 are still alive and uninjured.
On 23 January, the People’s Military Service By-laws were issued. Men aged 18–35 and women aged 18–27 subject to conscription can no longer leave the country without permission. Two days later, a large-scale roundup began in Monywa; photographs showed city streets deserted even during the day. The Mandalay Strike Committee reported that at least 237 people were conscripted in Mandalay in January alone. Conscription roundups were happening everywhere, in Yangon, and in towns up and down the country. In every town still under junta control, stories of forced recruitment abound. The Conscription Law is herding young people into a death trap. Inside the hearts of those trapped, burdens burn.
What is striking is how little attention this has drawn internationally. The law is a flagrant assault on basic human rights, yet the global response has barely risen to a murmur. Meanwhile, the guidance issued by the National Unity Government (NUG)—to evade conscription by one’s own means, or, if drawn into the regime troops, to flee to the nearest resistance force—is widely seen as inadequate, and unworthy of a government claiming to represent the people. Resistance forces have so far failed to dismantle the junta’s conscription system, which has now been in operation for a year. If it cannot be stopped outright, then the question becomes how to rescue young people trapped inside the country—and not only rescue them, but also support their survival and livelihoods.
Whatever the justification used for their recruitment, there is one hard fact: these new conscripts become fuel that keeps the junta machine running. Any serious strategy for change must start with this uncomfortable truth.
Ko Say is a poet and independent journalist based in a resistance-controlled region.