OPINION
The junta says the population count will help prepare for an election but it’s more likely meant to flush out dissidents, in an exercise that is destined to flop.
By MARY CALLAHAN | FRONTIER
A nationwide census is happening at a time when Myanmar is increasingly fragmented and destitute, and when authorities in Nay Pyi Taw have never been so out of touch, reckless and perverse.
Following the failure of two earlier population counts, in January 2022 and January 2023, the junta is undertaking what is, on paper, a more robust attempt from October 1-15. In speeches reported in state media, Minister of Immigration and Population U Myint Kyaing said his ministry is deploying 42,000 “volunteer” enumerators and supervisors to cover 110,000 enumeration areas across the entire country.
In reality, though, they are unlikely to get much further than the Mandalay-Yangon urban corridor and the Ayeyarwady delta, because so much of the country now eludes regime control. But where it can get access, the regime’s ambitions for data collection are high. The census is 68 questions long, up from the 41 questions in the last nationwide population count in 2014.
That earlier census cost US$74 million – mostly paid by Western donors – and was supported by the United Nations Population Fund at a time when governments around the world were trying to assist Myanmar’s nascent reforms. This time around, with a military regime in charge, there is no such help from the UN or any apparent aid from overseas, but the junta is undeterred.
The enumerators, who are mostly young women teachers at regime-run schools, must carry cheap, low quality Chinese-made tablets into strangers’ homes, interrogate the head of the household, and tap away on an LED screen, inputting information that in theory will be instantly uploaded to a ministry database.
Few of these enumerators have any choice but to serve, as was the case in the pilot census conducted on a limited scale in October last year. Those who provide security for them may include police or immigration officials, but are more likely to be the 35 to 65-year-olds who have recently been conscripted into ward and village “people’s security teams”. They also have little choice in the matter.
As with the first two failed population counts, junta chief Senior General Min Aung Hlaing claims this month’s census will generate a proper voter list, contrary to the basic principle of a census that all data must be anonymised. This would enable the regime to take the fifth and final step in the road map it announced following the 2021 coup: the holding of a “free and fair” general election, scheduled for November next year.
Min Aung Hlaing justified his seizure of power on February 1, 2021 on the pretext of fraud in the November 2020 election, won by the National League for Democracy in a landslide. He cited reports by the military’s True News Information Team that the voter list, compiled by an NLD-appointed election commission, included as many as 10 million fraudulent entries.
These reports relied on dubious evidence, including photos of the 2015 voter list (falsely captioned as 2020) and others of the draft 2020 voter list being displayed months before election day, precisely to allow voters to confirm or correct their entries. True News also misrepresented or simply misunderstood the Excel spreadsheets used for the voter list in 2020.
But as with the coup, the census is not, ultimately, about an election. If the aim was to draft a voter list, enumerators would only need to ask 6-10 questions, not 68. Essentially, it is a counterinsurgency operation, aimed in part at terrorising the population but mostly at flushing out armed opposition fighters.
Wholly off the radar of Myint Kyaing and Min Aung Hlaing, and of probably everyone else with guns in Nay Pyi Taw, are the lives of ordinary people, which have reached new levels of precarity. At this point, few families have not suffered a grievous and irreparable loss since the coup. It should be no surprise, therefore, that most of them will view strangers carrying electronic devices and surrounded by security as a threat. Perhaps that is the point.
Particularly vulnerable are households linked to the mass strike of government workers known as the Civil Disobedience Movement, with 16 questions about employment or job changes. At even greater risk are households whose members have joined the armed resistance, with questions about absent individuals, their whereabouts and their reasons for moving. The process could also be threatening for families receiving money from relatives or friends working abroad using informal transfer services, which the junta has been trying to crack down on, because seven questions are about foreign migration and another six take account of items in the house of any value.
Because the census is considered a key intelligence tool, Min Aung Hlaing seems unwilling to tolerate any delays – even in the face of nationwide flooding from Typhoon Yagi. At a natural disaster management meeting on September 17, he told state and regional chief ministers and high-ranking military and cabinet personnel that the hundreds of thousands of flood victims should be cleared out of relief camps and “returned to their respective homes as quickly as possible” so that the population count can proceed as planned.
Meanwhile, anti-junta actors are urging the population not to cooperate with the census. The ministers of justice and of home affairs in the parallel National Unity Government called for a public boycott in a press conference on September 16, while numerous armed groups have threatened violence against anyone participating in the census, or at minimum have called for people to answer with false information.
On September 27, anti-military Facebook page “People’s Spring” reported what might have been the first assassination of a census worker, attracting dozens of celebratory public comments. U Min Min Tun, identified as a 100-household leader in Yangon’s Insein Township and a member of a newly formed ward-level people’s security team, was shot dead the day before by unknown assailants for “helping the military council to take the census”, the People’s Spring post said.
On the other side, there are calls for retaliatory violence. On September 26, prominent pro-junta news outlet NP News broadcast on Telegram a rant by its founder U Kyaw Myo Min. He called on military supporters to counter groups like the Chinland Defence Force-Hakha, which pledged to fire on civil servants involved in the census. “Don’t hesitate. Just shoot them down,” Kyaw Myo Min said. “Or you will die… Make apologies later… Say sorry later if you were wrong.”
While enumerators may face the greatest threats, even if they’re working under duress, ordinary households are being put in an impossible position. Those who follow the NUG in boycotting the census or giving false information face possible jail time under the 2013 census law. But if they cooperate, their homes could be marked with an all-weather sticker, as was the case in 2014, or some other symbol that would be difficult to remove – making these households a possible target for anti-junta groups.
These dangers jar with the junta’s upbeat public messaging about the census, suggesting new heights of magical thinking. Dozens of Nay Pyi Taw trainings, meetings of the Central Census Commission and those of lower level commissions, state media reports and op-eds, drab videos and roadside billboard erection ceremonies exhort everyone to dutifully participate in a census that will only frighten and imperil an already vulnerable population.
These theatrical displays are not only surreal, but also callous and grotesque when the rest of the country is growing more desperate, hungry and angry by the day. Seeing Min Aung Hlaing, Myint Kyaing and other regime officials use the census preparations to play their imagined parts – that of beloved, paternalistic leaders making sacrifices to protect the nation from “terrorists” – is beyond what most ordinary Myanmar people can endure.
Nonetheless, the exercise may fall flat even without any deliberate obstruction. Anti-junta forces should therefore think hard before responding with violence, and can take comfort from the example of previous censuses, in 1973, 1983 and 2014. According to my own extensive research, enumerators in those population counts rarely asked more than a few questions to each household, filling out the rest of the form later using their imaginations. Amid the present insecurity, and with enumerators instructed to spend only 20 minutes on each household, there is even more incentive to feed the junta with useless data.
Mary Callahan is Associate Professor of International Studies at the University of Washington. She is the author of Making Enemies: War and State Building in Burma and has spent 30 years researching conflict, ethnic politics, census-taking and elections in Myanmar.
