By Osman Khan

Myanmar is seeing the brutal campaign of military regime destroying homes, villages, communities which engulfing an entire country in the aftermath of the 2021 coup. The Myanmar military has fiercely responded a widespread armed resistance movement in the Sagaing and Magwe regions, Chin State, and the Yaw Valley with a vicious assault of burning reminiscent of past pacification campaigns in other parts of the country.

The shocking destructions completely shows the Myanmar military mindset and utter disregard for the laws of the country and the laws of war. In these 16 months since the military seized the state and sparked a war against each person.

From February 1, 2021, until the end of May this year, the military has destroyed a total of 18,886 structures in 435 locations in Myanmar. The maximum number has been seen in Sagaing Region, with 13,840, 3,055 in Magwe, and 1,316 in Chin State, comprised religious buildings and schools as well as houses.

Recently, the United Nations (UN) High Commissioner for Refugees reported that the number of internally displaced people in Myanmar had passed one million, with 700,000 displaced since the coup.

Furthermore, the UN Fact-Finding Mission projected over 725,000 people had escaped to Bangladesh, and 392 villages had been subject to deliberate annihilation, including 37,700 individual structures, the 40 percent of all settlements in northern Rakhine State and 80 percent of the destruction occurred in the “bloody operation”.

The Myanmar military has been rampaging the sites of civilian resistance and rushing an enormous retaliations against locally raised People’s Defense Forces. Their main concern is to harass the civilian populace to frighten the support for the armed confrontation. The burning of villages by Myanmar regime stands blatantly against the civilians and at odds with the international community’s drive to bring peace in Myanmar.

Just in May, clearly coordinated arson attacks took place against the Kale, Khin-U, Mingin, Yinmabin, and Kantbalu townships in Sagain by the repeated attacks of regime. In many cases attacks are followed by an internet cut-off, and troops travel by river to burn settlements on the banks.

In the same manner, a number of homes burned down in Thantlang, Chin State is highly shocking, from August 2021 when military commanders warned the town elders that they would raze the town to deter local armed resistance. More than 1,000 buildings and religious places have been destroyed.

In the intensive fighting between the Arakan Army and the Myanmar military in Rakhine between 2019 and late 2020, the military destroyed more than 1,000 homes in tactics they had used against Rohingya civilians a few years prior. Tin Mar Gyi village in Kyauktaw Township saw most of its 700 homes destroyed, allegedly by artillery, possibly airstrikes.

Homes are destroyed including the structure, the garden, the food stocks, pots and pans and tools and toys, books, and religious artifacts that are destroyed. The people lose in the flames their belonging and statelessness: birth and wedding certificates, citizenship papers, identity cards, and passports, land tenure documents, tax and loan receipts.

There are intangible memories and milestones which nobody could comprehend as the loss is great, horrifying and shocking and cannot be described convey in words alone.

So many civilians live in incessantly conflict-wracked areas such as Karen. Many people displaced by conflict in Kachin and Shan states remain close to their old homes but are unable to return due to continued instability and landmine contamination that may make the area uninhabitable for many years.

Over 100,000 Rohingya have been confined in squalid camps on the outskirts of the Rakhine capital Sittwe for a decade, just a few kilometers from their former homes in town. Shelters are often unable to be maintained due to a lack of funds or governments not wanting to support prolonged displacement and looking for ‘durable solutions’ that fail to eventuate.

Myanmar also experiences widespread forced evictions throughout the country, in rural areas, urban slums and working-class areas as military-connected capital seeks prime real estate without fair compensation. In the past this has even included forced evictions of cemeteries: even the dead aren’t spared in Myanmar.

The combination of poverty and conflict, repression, and desperation has caused millions of people to leave Myanmar for many decades, an estimated four million to work as migrant workers in Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, and the Middle East.

In fields, fishing boats and factories, hotel lobbies, hospitals, and shopping malls, often harried by predatory police, corrupt brokers, and sadistic criminal opportunists who may often be your employer, using underground banking systems to wire monthly wages to family in Mon State or Mandalay, dedication, and devotion to a home you might not see for many years, your children being raised by grandparents.

This widespread collective punishment strategy in upper Myanmar should be etched into the institutional memory of all foreign interlocutors from now, in ways that past human rights atrocities never were. UN and international NGO workers, diplomats, and the private sector were all complicit in downplaying past war crimes and crimes against humanity and finding ways to ‘contextualize’ the crimes of the past decade.

The regret feeling of dislocation and the desire to return home is highly painful for Myanmar people and the memoirs of friends and family are there in the armed struggle with the losses of homes in Myanmar in similar ways.