Internet restrictions and tight media controls initially limited footage of the destruction caused by a massive earthquake in central Myanmar last month.
In one of the first videos to trickle out, captured in Mandalay region, a girl is buried up to her neck in rubble. Men in sarongs, barefoot or wearing flip-flops, dig around with their hands, lifting chunks of concrete and trying to shift a massive stone beam. The woman cries out while one rescuer holds a water bottle to her lips.
Since the military seized power in a coup more than four years ago, Myanmar has regressed on almost all development metrics. Its economy is in crisis, with the currency losing about half of its value since February 2021. Hundreds of thousands of civil servants walked off their jobs after the coup; the country’s health care and education are in disarray. The junta has cracked down on public services operated by other groups, and electricity is being rationed.
After the military killed hundreds of protesters in the immediate aftermath of the coup, pro-democracy forces joined up with long-standing ethnic armed organizations to fight the junta, plunging the country into civil war. Against this backdrop, foreign countries and international aid agencies began mobilizing after the earthquake to deliver desperately needed aid and became embroiled in a rhetorical battlefield.
The Myanmar military has a history of endemic corruption and politicizing aid; as a result, many activists called for international actors to avoid working with the regime entirely. Assistance “cannot go through the junta. They will not deliver aid to the areas where it’s most needed—especially in the areas where it’s not under junta control,” Yanghee Lee, a former U.N. human rights rapporteur for Myanmar, told the BBC this month.
Myanmar civil society groups instead recommended that aid be funneled through community groups, ethnic armed organizations, and the National Unity Government (NUG), a parallel administration appointed by elected lawmakers deposed in the coup. Some groups falsely claimed that most of the affected areas were in resistance-controlled territory.
Though opposition groups have seized territory from the military regime, most of the earthquake destruction took place in three urban centers under junta control: Mandalay, the nearby town of Sagaing, and the capital of Naypyidaw. The ethnic armed groups are based in Myanmar’s borderlands, and pro-democracy militias operating under the NUG only control rural pockets in central Myanmar, which didn’t experience severe earthquake damage.
Most of the NUG leadership is also based in the border areas or abroad, and the parallel administration has struggled to exercise control over the various militias nominally under its command. Any aid sent to the NUG would have to be disbursed to civil society groups operating in regime territory.
Furthermore, some rights advocates pointed out that the regime still has an obligation to provide relief.
“Despite well-founded suspicions that the military may not be willing to impartially deliver and facilitate aid in a crisis … and despite the fact that we and others have documented military attacks in the aftermath of the earthquake, we also cannot let them off the hook by ceasing to insist that they fulfill their obligations on aid,” said Joe Freeman, the Myanmar researcher for Amnesty International.
To be sure, the military has a poor track record—paranoid, indifferent, and always prioritizing its own political ends at the expense of those whom it is meant to serve. In 2008, after Cyclone Nargis devastated Myanmar’s southern coast, the previous military regime refused to allow waiting U.S. Navy ships to unload aid as tens of thousands of people died, fearing that it could be a pretext for invasion.
In the last two years, after Cyclone Mocha and Typhoon Yagi, rights groups and relief workers accused the current regime of blocking aid from reaching border areas under rebel control in Rakhine and Kayah states. This was likely intended to prevent rebel troops from commandeering dual-use goods, such as food and medicine—but also as a form of collective punishment against civilians seen as supporting the resistance.
The regime called for outside support immediately after the March earthquake, which made its opponents suspicious, who suggested that the military would use the natural disaster to gain international legitimacy. Junta leader and commander in chief Min Aung Hlaing took advantage of the moment, meeting with leaders in Thailand during a regional conference, many of whom posted photos with the general mentioning the earthquake.
But concerns about political legitimacy are largely overblown: The military has mostly ruled Myanmar since 1962, despite being domestically unpopular and internationally isolated for long periods of time. Its power comes through force. In 2021, the pro-democracy movement was mostly limited to symbolic victories—but since then, the country’s crisis has evolved into an armed uprising that has expelled the regime from large swaths of Myanmar.
Despite reports highlighting some isolated incidents, sources on the ground said there were no major aid blocks, particularly compared with the situation during other disasters, such as Cyclone Mocha. (Foreign Policy agreed not to name any aid workers or their organizations for security reasons and to allow them to speak freely.)
Sources also confirmed that aid is making its way into the town of Sagaing, across a river and bridge from Mandalay. Reporting by Frontier Myanmar suggests that rumors about aid being blocked initially discouraged rescue workers from going to Sagaing. By the time they realized that aid was allowed in, a crucial window had closed: People trapped under the rubble were dead.
The head of a local medical organization said there have been no real restrictions on aid movement by the military. “We are expanding our activities every day actually,” he said. “I must say they are not obstructing at the moment. … There’s no point in trying to make it look worse than it already is.”
He said his organization has simply ignored an April 5 order to register with junta officials and request travel permissions, while other organizations that have complied have gotten bogged down in bureaucracy. The organization works in NUG-controlled territory, but he said his team “didn’t see significant damages” there.
An aid worker with an international organization said that after the earthquake, the military was most conspicuous in its absence, with local volunteer rescue teams leading the response. “Military is not on the ground at all. … Except for in the Muslim community, where there’s hundreds of dead bodies being dug out, I saw presence of military in the corner,” he said.
The military’s atypical response is likely because it is in disarray after the earthquake struck Naypyidaw and less concerned about aid supplies reaching rebels since the territories that they control were less badly impacted. That provides an opportunity for aid organizations to help people in need—and one that should be taken, because the ever-suspicious military might not allow it for long.
Another source said members of pro-regime militias appeared to be acting as local authorities in Sagaing in the absence of junta officials. Military supporters formed these militias after the coup, largely in response to the proliferation of pro-democracy forces in central Myanmar, and they have played a central role in counterinsurgency operations there.
Richard Horsey, the senior Myanmar advisor for the International Crisis Group, said the military’s relative absence from the earthquake response reflects both its diminished capacity to govern and its priorities. “Local communities are left to fend for themselves, as they always have been. But I do think this is a moment of weakness for the regime—its disaster response failures are all too evident, and its areas of control have been disproportionately affected,” Horsey said.
Both sides of the conflict have launched attacks since the earthquake, despite a temporary cease-fire. In recent days, armed rebel groups seized the town of Indaw, 200 miles north of Sagaing, and the town of Falam, near Myanmar’s border with India.
As elsewhere, the military has resorted to aerial assaults in the face of ground losses, including against civilian targets; women and children were among those killed in bombing near Indaw this month. Horsey said the earthquake response is yet another indication of “the rot within the regime and its administration, which has already been clear for some time on the battlefield.”
Those calling for aid to be funneled to the NUG when it makes little practical sense are themselves politicizing aid. But these problems will persist as long as the military clings to power in Myanmar. Every action it takes is fiercely resisted by the people—at times with costs to themselves. Since the 2021 coup, nearly every facet of life has become a battlefield: public services, aid delivery, political legitimacy.
From the panic that sometimes arises in activist circles during these proxy wars, one might forget that the military is losing where it matters the most: the actual battlefield.