The inner demons of Myanmar’s NUG

The recently enacted Military Service Law, announced on February 10, has further shaken an already rattled and exhausted Myanmar population. That’s especially true for young people who meet the criteria under the law for conscription and who could be forced to fight on the side of a war they don’t support.

The motivations for the move are like much of what passes for decision-making, a mixture of making it up and desperate measures, for a gradually losing military regime. Another compulsion is surely to create new opportunities for corruption by a capricious and complicit bureaucracy.

The new conscription law has been rightly condemned by the opposition National Unity Government (NUG) and its ostensible supervisory body the National Unity Consultative Committee (NUCC). Both organizations must now develop a series of practical policies to respond to what is already a surging exodus of military-aged young people fleeing into neighboring Thailand.

But the NUG also issued a deeply worrying statement on February 24 from its “Counter-Terrorism Center” of its shadow Ministry of Home Affairs and Immigration (MOHAI), threatening punishment and prosecution under the 2014 Anti-Terrorism Law to anyone assisting in any way with the junta’s new conscription law.

The announcement, Notice 01/2024 (in Burmese, with no English version issued so far), claims that anyone assisting with the recruitment process would be prosecuted under Section 3, Subsection B and sections 13, 15 and 16 of the law, provisions that broadly ban acts deemed as terrorism or supporting terrorism.

The 2014 Anti-Terrorism Law was written with the assistance of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), an agency reflexively comfortable with assisting