Myanmar Junta Evades Sanctions and Increases Airstrikes
The family ducked for cover when junta jets roared over their home in central Myanmar. U Har San and his wife crawled under a table, and their daughter, eight months pregnant, hid under a bed. Bombs rained down, he said, even though no rebel fighters were in their village.
One bomb killed the mother-to-be, Ma Zar Zar Win. “She was our only daughter, and now our family line has been cut off,” Mr. Har San said.
The attack last month on the village of Lat Pan Hla is a feature of Myanmar’s brutal war strategy. Unable to defeat the rebels on the ground, it has increased its indiscriminate bombing of civilian targets to terrorize the population.
The airstrikes have also taken a heavy toll on resistance fighters. But the resistance fighters continue to make gains on the ground. In recent weeks, rebel armies seized a prison in Shan State, freeing hundreds of political prisoners, and on the opposite side of the country, another rebel army captured a civilian airport in Rakhine State.
The escalating attacks on civilians have made it clear that Myanmar is evading sanctions aimed at blocking the flow of jet fuel that the regime needs to keep its bombers, fighter jets and helicopter gunships in the air. In separate attacks, the junta recently bombed a wedding and a monastery, killing some 60 people.
Myanmar Peace Monitor, a nonprofit group that tracks aerial attacks, said at least 1,188 civilians had been killed by aerial bombing since the military seized power in February 2021. By the group’s count, the regime has already conducted more aerial attacks in the first half of this year than all of last year — a demonstrating the regime’s ability to circumvent sanctions.
Tom Andrews, the United Nations special rapporteur for human rights in Myanmar, urged the United States and other Western nations to cut off the regime’s access to aviation fuel by imposing tougher and better coordinated sanctions.
“The junta is a criminal enterprise,” Mr. Andrews said in an interview. “They are stealing the natural resources of the country and using it for their criminal activities and to attack the people of Myanmar.”
The junta’s spokesman, Gen. Zaw Min Tun, declined to answer repeated calls from The New York Times.
Myanmar produces some jet fuel, but most arrives on tanker ships at a military-controlled port in Yangon, its largest city, after passing through ports in different countries with the assistance of foreign trading companies, banks and insurance companies. The junta maintains effective control over the aviation fuel supply, including that used by the country’s commercial airlines, which have close ties to the military.
Myanmar’s aviation fuel sector is among the targets of a wide range of economic sanctions that the United States, Europe, Britain and others have imposed on junta leaders and companies doing business with them.
The companies targeted by Western sanctions have disguised their operations by transferring their assets to new companies, changing their names and selling and reselling fuel shipments while they are en route, activists and U.N. investigators say.
Among those involved in shipping aviation fuel to the regime are companies registered in Singapore and Thailand, according to a report Mr. Andrews released in June.
“The junta now makes aviation fuel purchases through multiple layers of intermediaries, including trading companies and fuel storage terminals, that obscure the overall supply chain, making it difficult to trace fuel shipments backwards to the initial seller,” the report said.
In a separate report last month, Amnesty International said that a Chinese-owned oil tanker, Singaporean and Chinese trading companies and a Vietnamese storage terminal all played a role, with one shipment making its final stop in Vietnam before reaching Myanmar.
“It is a raw display of both the sheer impunity with which the Myanmar military is operating, and the utter complicity of the states responsible, including Vietnam, China and Singapore,” said Amnesty International’s secretary general, Agnes Callamard.
In a statement to The New York Times, China’s Foreign Affairs Ministry defended Chinese assistance to the Myanmar military and denounced sanctions imposed by other countries. The ministry did not address the accusations that Chinese companies were providing aviation fuel used in deadly attacks on civilians.
Singapore’s Foreign Ministry also did not address accusations that Singaporean companies were helping to evade the fuel sanctions, but said it prohibits the transfer of arms to Myanmar and does not authorize the transfer of dual-use items that could be used to harm unarmed civilians.
Vietnam’s Foreign Affairs Ministry did not respond to a request for comment.
In addition to evading sanctions, Myanmar’s military is making bombing civilians more energy efficient — and reducing its reliance on jet fuel — by ramping up its drone program.
The regime began acquiring low-cost, battery-powered rotary drones from China after seeing resistance forces use drones effectively, said Anthony Davis, a Bangkok-based security analyst with the Jane’s group of military publications. The new weapons have been inflicting severe casualties on rebel soldiers, he said.
U Nay Win Aung, a former Air Force flight sergeant who now aids the resistance, said the military was also using Chinese-made transport planes in aerial attacks because they were more fuel-efficient than bombers and can stay aloft for many hours. Soldiers drop the bombs by securing themselves to the planes with rope and pushing the explosives out the door, he said.
Mr. Andrews said the junta had been able to evade international restrictions because Western nations had imposed a hodgepodge of sanctions that left gaps it could exploit.
He encouraged the United States, Britain, the European Union, Canada and Australia — which have all imposed some sanctions — to coordinate their efforts and agree on a comprehensive approach that would keep weapons and aviation fuel from reaching the regime. He also addressed a Thai parliamentary committee last month and called on Thailand’s banks to stop aiding weapons transfers to Myanmar.
For now, though, many more towns and villages are likely to face the fate of Lat Pan Hla, the community 40 miles north of Mandalay where bombs fell from the sky and killed Ms. Zar Zar Win, 33. She had gone home two days earlier to be with her parents when she gave birth.
The bombing of their village continued for four days, said the grief-stricken Mr. Har San, as the fighting moved to within 10 miles of Mandalay, Myanmar’s second-largest city. He and his wife took refuge in a monastery, where a regime-backed militia robbed them of their valuables.
“We hear the sound of airplanes day and night,” he said. “The Myanmar army is treating the people as their enemy and killing people at random by dropping bombs on them.”
Zixu Wang contributed reporting.
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