Long queues outside Thai Yangon embassy as youth try to escape conscription
The Thai embassy in Yangon has been flooded with visa applications as Myanmar youths are seeking to leave the country following a junta announcement on compulsory military conscription that now also includes women.
More than 1,000 people – many of them young Myanmar men and women – lined up at the Thai embassy to apply for visas on Friday.
A long queue was formed inside the compound while a large number of people gathered outside the embassy. The embassy said it was issuing 400 numbered tickets a day in order to manage the queue, news agency Agence France Presse reported.
It said there was a queue of between 1,000 and 2,000 people snaking through the streets near the Thai mission in downtown Yangon. That marks an exponential surge from less than 100 people the previous day.
The Myanmar junta announced last Saturday it would enforce a law that allows the military to summon all men aged 18-35, and women aged 18-27, to serve for at least two years. The People’s Military Service Law was authored by a previous junta in 2010 but was never brought into force.
Under a directive issued by junta leader Min Aung Hlaing, men aged 18-35 and women aged 18-27 could face up to five years in prison if they refuse military service.
Junta spokesman Maj-General Zaw Min Tun said that starting in April, about 5,000 people each month would be enrolled in the military to perform “national defence duties”, Radio Free Asia reported on Thursday.
The spokesman told several junta-affiliated newspapers that as many as 50,000 men would be recruited this year into the military, which has suffered numerous battlefield defeats and large-scale surrenders in recent months.
The junta has faced growing opposition against its rule as pro-democracy protests have turned into widespread armed resistance.
Many Myanmar youths seeking to apply for Thai visas had to stay overnight outside the embassy to ensure they would be among the first in the queue the following morning.
A 20-year-old student going by the pseudonym Aung Phyo told AFP on Friday that he had arrived at the embassy the previous evening and slept in his car before starting to queue around midnight.
“We had to wait for three hours and police opened the security gate around 3am and we had to run to the front of the embassy to try to get places for a token,” he said. “After we got a token, people who didn’t get one were still queuing in front of the embassy hoping they might give out extras.”
The young man said that he would go to Bangkok with a tourist visa and hope to stay there for a while. “I haven’t decided yet to work or study. I just want to escape from this country.”
Even as many Myanmar youths in Yangon are waiting in long queues to apply for visas to Thailand, dozens of their compatriots living in border towns have been arrested in Thailand’s Tak province after crossing illegally into the kingdom, apparently fleeing compulsory military conscription.
Twenty-seven young Myanmar nationals – 13 men and 14 women – were arrested by a border taskforce in the northern Thai province on Friday after 27 others were earlier caught there.
