With Myanmar's currency plummeting and inflation on the rise, the owner of three cellphone shops in Mandalay announced he was giving his employees a pay rise. Word of his generosity spread quickly on Facebook, and his employees cheered the news.
But the military government that rules Myanmar saw it differently. Soldiers and police officers arrested owner U Pyae Phyo Zaw, closed his three shops and charged him with inciting public unrest under an obscure law often used to suppress dissent, his brother and an employee said.
Mr Pyae Phyo Zaw is one of at least 10 business owners arrested in recent weeks after rumours circulated online that they were raising their workers' wages. Pay hikes are not illegal, but the business owners face charges of undermining the regime by misleading people that inflation is rising, a legal expert said. They could all face up to three years in prison.
Soldiers pasted a notice outside a shop belonging to Mr Pyae Phyo Zaw saying it had been 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 pay rise, but now the shop is closed and I don’t get paid,” said the worker, who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid arrest. “Ordinary people like us are suffering from high prices, almost to the point of despair.”
The military's return to power following a coup in 2021 and a popular uprising against its rule have plunged the country into an economic crisis, reversing much of the progress made during a decade of quasi-democratic leadership.
The military regime is facing enormous pressure from armed ethnic rebels and pro-democracy fighters who control more than half of the country's territory and who are steadily gaining battlefield advantage and seizing a number of military bases and posts.
Fighting the rebels, the army burned villages and rice fields in Shwebo, the rice bowl of upper Myanmar, destroying crops and causing a sharp rise in food prices. The rebels have disrupted trade with China, India and Thailand by seizing key border posts.
Across the country — except for the generals’ capital, Naypyidaw — electricity is typically available for less than four hours a day, crippling manufacturing and spreading misery in a place where temperatures often reach 100 degrees. At least 250 people died of heatstroke in May in the regions of Mandalay and Magway, according to a nonprofit ambulance service that carries the dead.
“Post-2021 Myanmar’s economy has moved from crisis, through chaos, and is now almost certainly on the brink of collapse as a formally functioning, growing entity,” said Sean Turnell, an Australian economist who was a former adviser to ousted civilian leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and now advises the National Unity Government, an opposition-led group.
The World Bank said A report in June said Myanmar's economic output had fallen by 9 per cent from 2019 and poverty had risen to its highest level in a decade, with a third of the population now living below the poverty line.
More than 3 million people in Myanmar have been forced to take refuge in remote villages and jungle camps to escape the fighting, leading to a shortage of the workforce. Many young men and women have fled abroad to avoid military conscription. Thousands have left the cities and joined resistance forces.
Myanmar's growing isolation, with Western financial sanctions hurting its economy, has left it desperate for foreign currency. The country's own currency, the kyat, has fallen to a third of its pre-coup value on the black market.
Kyat's collapse amounted to a waste of money “on an epic scale”, said Mr Turnell, who himself was jailed for 22 months by the regime on trumped up charges.
He said in a statement issued by the National Unity Government that the generals' economic policy was a “desperate attempt to make up for the lack of financial resources for the war.” He said the regime had cut funding for health and education, while military spending had increased by 60 percent since the coup.
Most of the regime's weapons come from abroad, with Thailand emerging as a major conduit, according to a report released Wednesday by Tom Andrews, the UN special rapporteur on human rights in Myanmar.
Mr Andrews said the military regime had imported about $130 million worth of weapons and equipment From registered suppliers in Thailand The number of arms shipped in was more than double that of the previous year. He urged Thailand to stop the flow of arms.
The report also accused 16 banks in seven countries of helping Myanmar's ruling military evade Western sanctions. Mr Andrews urged the banks to stop helping “war crimes and crimes against humanity”.
To finance its war, the junta has printed nearly 30 trillion kyats (about $9.2 billion at the current official exchange rate) since the coup, leading to a sharp devaluation of the currency and soaring inflation.
To combat inflation, the junta froze the prices of staple food items such as rice, meat, and cooking oil; restricted the purchase of gold and foreign currency; and attempted to curb the flow of money abroad.
In recent weeks, authorities have detained dozens of people for violating price and currency restrictions, including rice producers, gold traders and currency exchangers. They also arrested brokers selling condos 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 more people, including the heads of four major grocery chains and seven large rice producers, had been arrested for charging more than double the junta-set price for rice. One of those arrested is an executive of a Japanese grocery chain, the report said.
In a video, a local official at a market in Mandalay used a megaphone to announce fixed prices for pork, beef and mutton. He urged customers to report anyone who charged higher prices.
“Arresting shopkeepers for price gouging is not following any law,” said human rights lawyer U Kyi Myint. “In Myanmar, the law exists only in name, so from a legal point of view, what the junta is doing is absurd.”
For most people, rice is an essential part of their diet, and rising prices have particularly affected the poor.
Daw Nge Nge Tun, a woman shopping in Mandalay, said prices at her market have tripled and she can no longer afford good rice. She now buys cheap, broken rice, which is usually used as chicken feed.
“I could have bought good quality rice and eaten it before,” she said. “When you think about it, the lives of people in Myanmar are like chickens sitting in a field, waiting for their turn to die.”
