With Myanmar’s currency plummeting and inflation soaring, the owner of three mobile phone shops in Mandalay announced he was giving his employees a raise. News of his generosity quickly spread on Facebook and his workers applauded the news.
But the military regime that rules Myanmar saw it differently. Soldiers and police arrested the owner, U Pyae Phyo Zaw, closed his three stores and charged him with inciting public unrest under a vaguely worded law often used to suppress dissent, his brother and an employee said.
Pyae Phyo Zaw is one of at least 10 businessmen arrested in recent weeks after news circulated online that they were raising their workers’ wages. Raising wages is not banned, but the businessmen are accused of undermining the regime by making people believe inflation is rising, according to a legal expert. They all face up to three years in prison.
Soldiers posted a sign outside one of Mr Pyae Phyo Zaw’s shops saying it was closed for disturbing “the peace and order of the community”.
Junta spokesman Gen. Zaw Min Tun declined to answer repeated calls from The New York Times.
“We were very grateful for the raise, but now the store is closed and I don’t receive my salary,” said the employee, who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid arrest. “Ordinary people like us are suffering from high prices, almost to the point of desperation.”
The military’s return to power through a coup in 2021 and the resulting popular rebellion against its government have plunged the country into an economic crisis, reversing the gains made during a decade of quasi-democratic leadership.
The junta is facing intense pressure from armed ethnic rebels and pro-democracy fighters who control more than half of the country’s territory and continue to make steady advances on the battlefield, overrunning numerous army bases and outposts.
While fighting rebels, the army burned villages and rice fields in Shwebo, the rice basin of upper Myanmar, destroying the harvest and contributing to a sharp rise in food prices. The rebels, by seizing important border crossings, have disrupted trade with China, India and Thailand.
Across the country except in Naypyidaw, the generals’ capital, electricity is often available for less than four hours a day, limiting manufacturing and spreading misery in a place where temperatures often reach 100 degrees. At least 250 people died of heatstroke in May in the Mandalay and Magway regions, according to a nonprofit ambulance service that took away the dead.
“Myanmar’s post-2021 economy has emerged from crisis, through chaos and now reaching what is surely its near collapse as a formally functioning developing entity,” said Australian economist Sean Turnell, a former adviser to the ousted civilian leader. . , Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. He now advises a leading opposition group, the Government of National Unity.
In June, the World Bank reported that Myanmar’s economic output had contracted by 9% since 2019 and that poverty had soared to levels not seen in nearly a decade. One-third of the population now lives below the poverty line.
The workforce has shrunk as more than 3 million people have fled the fighting for safety in remote villages and jungle camps in Myanmar, and many young men and women have escaped abroad to avoid being drafted into the military. Many thousands more have left the cities to join the resistance army.
While Western financial sanctions help cripple the economy, Myanmar’s growing isolation has left it short of foreign currency. The country’s currency, the kyat, has plummeted on the black market to a third of its pre-coup value.
The collapse of the kyat amounts to wealth destruction “on an epic scale,” said Turnell, who was imprisoned by the regime for 22 months on trumped-up charges.
The generals’ economic policy is “a desperate struggle to obtain the financial means to finance their war,” he said in a statement released by the Government of National Unity. It noted that the regime has cut funding for health and education, while military spending has increased by 60 percent since the coup.
Many of the regime’s weapons come from abroad, with Thailand emerging as a major entry point, according to a report released Wednesday by Tom Andrews, the UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in Myanmar.
Andrews said the junta imported almost $130 million worth of weapons and equipment from registered suppliers in Thailand last year, more than double the previous year. He urged Thailand to stop the flow of weapons.
The report also accused 16 banks from seven countries of helping Myanmar’s ruling junta evade Western sanctions. Andrews urged the banks to stop helping commit “war crimes and crimes against humanity.”
To fund its war, the junta has printed nearly 30 trillion kyats since the coup, or about $9.2 billion at the current official exchange rate, triggering a sharp devaluation of the currency and driving up inflation.
To counter inflation, the junta froze prices of key foods such as rice, meat and cooking oil; restricted the purchase of gold and foreign currency; and tried to stop the flow of money abroad.
In recent weeks, authorities have detained dozens of people for violating price and currency restrictions, including rice farmers, gold traders and money changers. They also arrested brokers for selling condominiums in Thailand (a major outlet for investment), as well as buyers who opened bank accounts in Thailand to facilitate their purchases.
On Sunday, a junta media outlet announced that 11 other people, including the heads of four major supermarket chains and seven major rice producers, were detained for charging more than double the junta’s price for rice. One of those detained is an executive of a Japanese supermarket chain, according to the report.
At a market in Mandalay, video captured a local official using a megaphone to announce fixed prices for pork, beef and lamb. He urged customers to report anyone charging more.
“Arresting shop owners for increasing prices is not complying with any law,” said human rights lawyer U Kyee Myint. “In Myanmar, the law exists in name only, so from a legal point of view, everything the junta is doing is absurd.”
For most people, rice is an essential part of their diet and rising prices have hit the poor especially hard.
A woman shopping in Mandalay, Daw Nge Nge Tun, said the price at her market has tripled and she can no longer afford to buy decent rice. She now buys cheap broken rice that is normally used as chicken feed.
“Before I could buy and eat good quality rice,” he says. “Now that I think about it, people’s lives in Myanmar are the same as chickens on the farm sitting and waiting for their turn to be slaughtered.”
