Conflict and junta-imposed trade restrictions have throttled the supply of basic goods in southern Myanmar’s Tanintharyi Region, with displaced people paying the biggest price.
By FRONTIER
U Aung Kyaw fled with his wife and three children on December 18 as conflict closed in on their village of Hton Kha. The family found shelter in Chaunglamu village elsewhere in Tanintharyi Township, but the prospect of returning home grows more distant by the day.
“I haven’t been able to go back to check if my house has been damaged because there’s fighting every day. We often see smoke rising from our village,” Aung Kyaw told Frontier, requesting the use of a pseudonym for security reasons.
Displacement has already taken a toll on his family. The 45-year-old’s two school-age children have been unable to attend any classes since they fled their village.
But in the meantime, they face a more pressing problem. The conflict between the military regime and resistance groups, and tight trade restrictions imposed by the junta, have caused severe shortages of essential goods in Myanmar’s southernmost region.
According to the military’s decades-old counter-insurgency playbook, the trade restrictions are intended to deny food, fuel and medicine and other critical resources to the regime’s enemies, and to punish communities suspected of supporting them.
“The junta cut the routes to the towns when the clashes intensified two months ago,” Aung Kyaw said. “From here, there are two roads that go to Myeik and Tanintharyi towns, but transport on these roads has all but stopped and food prices have soared.”
His family still has a store of rice to work through and shares it with other displaced people, but there’s not much to go around and many in Chaunglamu village are going hungry.
“Some families with three or four members have to share one milk bottle of rice [about 250 grammes] each day, which is just enough for a meal for one person. The rice used to come from Myeik but now the junta doesn’t allow deliveries of rice,” Aung Kyaw said.
A rise in displacement is exacerbating the shortages. Local monitoring group FE 5 Tanintharyi has said more than 77,200 people were displaced from their homes in Tanintharyi as of late January. The number increased by over 10,000 in that month alone, as the military tried to secure key trade routes and retake bases through ground attacks, naval bombardments, village burnings and a total of 27 airstrikes counted by the monitoring group.
“Food and medicine for IDPs are always in demand, but recently it’s been particularly difficult to buy supplies due to transport challenges,” said Ko Yaw Na Than, who volunteers with charity group the Dawna Tenasserim IDP Supply Force
He told Frontier his group could only help “about 40 percent” of displaced people where they operate, mostly in the north of the region. “Many IDPs have to fend for themselves.”
Economic strangulation
Aung Kyaw’s family normally subsists on the money from their small areca (or “betel”) nut plantation in Hton Kha, but they had to flee before the harvest, which will soon spoil.
“If the nuts fall to the ground and aren’t collected, they will grow into plants and can’t be sold,” he said.
But even if he were able to collect the harvest, he would have to pay hefty bribes to soldiers stationed on the roads to get the nuts to market.
“When we go to the towns to sell our products, soldiers at checkpoints demand money as if they were collecting taxes,” he explained, adding that growers were nonetheless reluctant to stockpile and wait for roads to fully reopen. “They don’t dare to store their products because the region is unstable. They have to sell quickly.”
However, it’s not only the region’s minor roads, connecting towns with villages, that are being throttled. Basic goods are also being held up on Tanintharyi’s main trade and transport artery, Union Highway 8.
The regime and resistance forces have repeatedly clashed for control of the highway, which enters the region from Yangon at Yebyu Township and continues southwards down the coast to the port of Kawthaung, bordering Thailand. Checkpoints have proliferated as a result.
“Trucks going through the junta’s checkpoints are strictly inspected, and if they carry more than five bags of rice [weighing 48 kilogrammes each] the extra bags are seized,” Yaw Na Than said. “The same applies to medicine as well; large quantities can’t be transported.”
He explained that restrictions are particularly tight in the four northernmost townships of Tanintharyi – Yebyu, Dawei, Launglon and Thayetchaung – as well as Tanintharyi Township farther south, where the regime controls most of the highway.
“It’s becoming increasingly difficult to transport basic goods,” a Launglon resident said. “We can’t carry more than five gallons [almost 19 litres] of petrol through military checkpoints.”
“Transporting rice is even more difficult. Before, we were allowed to carry four sacks of rice without a problem, but now we need to pay bribes to the soldiers at the inspection gates. The same happens when we take goods from Dawei town; we need to pay bribes at military checkpoints for everything, including medicine,” he told Frontier, asking not to be named.
The economic strangulation of Tanintharyi is not limited to supplies via road. Fishermen on the region’s long coastline also have to pay onerous bribes to the military to work.
A fisherman in Launglon’s Thinbawseik village, talking to Frontier on condition of anonymity, said three naval vessels had been constantly patrolling the sea in front of his beachfront village since 2022. He said local fishing boat owners had to pay the naval personnel of each vessel up to K1.5 million (US$337 at the market rate) whenever they went out to sea.
He added that the military had banned all civilian boats on the water from 6pm and 6am. This has disrupted the daily cycle of catching fish and taking them fresh to markets in major coastal towns by sea.
“Timing is everything in the fishing industry,” he said. “We used to sell our catch in the towns right away when the boats came in at night, but now we have to wait until the next day when the fish is no longer fresh.”
However, there is little room for negotiation. “The military will shoot anybody who doesn’t follow their restrictions,” he said.
Moreover, he claimed that fishermen are made to sell their catch to middlemen favoured by the military.
“There is a person backed by the military we have to sell our fish to at a low price. For example, when I catch 10 baskets of fish in a day, I have to sell it to him at K2,000 when the market price is K3,000,” he said.
Healthcare denied
Back on land, Yaw Na Than said that soldiers at checkpoints pay special attention to civilians staying at IDP camps or villages suspected of hosting resistance forces. As a result, many of them are afraid to travel to the major towns of Myeik or Dawei for medical treatment, while the junta’s trade blocks have stemmed the flow of medicine to their areas.
“People in the villages have to rely on whatever medicine they have and use traditional remedies, because it is difficult to access medical facilities in town,” said Ma Nyein, spokesperson for the Nway Oo Myitta IDP Supply Force in Tanintharyi Township.
The barriers to healthcare are in large part financial. Even those who choose to brave the roads to visit hospitals must pay hugely inflated travel costs.
“Before the [2021] coup, a round-trip bus fare from Ta Ku village in Tanintharyi Township to Myeik was K10,000. Now, amid the transportation difficulties, it has risen to about K100,000 because you have to travel in stages,” she told Frontier.
Such barriers are insurmountable for many patients.
Ma Nyein mentioned the case of a 67-year-old displaced man in the township who suffers from pneumonia. Before fleeing his village with his wife in December, he received treatment at a hospital in nearby Tanintharyi town, but he can’t afford to travel there from his new location and his condition is deteriorating.
“The old man’s disease is getting worse because they’re sleeping on the ground in their shelter, with poor materials used for their roof and walls,” Ma Nyein said, adding that he also lacks adequate food.
“The main problem is that he can’t afford to get treatment in town because transport and healthcare charges are too high now. He can survive for as long as we can give him medicine,” she said, referring to the limited supply of antibiotics that her group is able to smuggle past junta checkpoints.
“The moment we can’t provide medicine, his life would be seriously at risk.”
