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State employees who have fled conflict say they feel betrayed by the regime for failing to reassign or keep paying them, while those still serving in conflict zones go months without salaries.
By FRONTIER
In late February, Daw Kyawt Kyawt Khin left the village school where she had taught for more than two decades. Fighting between the military and the Arakan Army had engulfed the area of rural Ponnagyun Township, less than 50 kilometres from the Rakhine State capital Sittwe, and all the local schools were closed.
The AA has been taking over ever-greater swathes of Rakhine and has allowed local civil servants to defect and join its parallel administration. Kyawt Kyawt Khin, who asked to be identified by a pseudonym for security reasons, is from the state’s ethnic Rakhine majority, which largely supports the AA. However, as a regime employee, she doubted she would be trusted by the Rakhine armed group and wanted to protect her two daughters from conflict. Therefore, she fled to Sittwe and hoped to stay employed as a teacher there.
But on arriving in the Rakhine capital, she didn’t get the support she expected. She reported to the education department and formally remained a state employee, but the department has yet to reassign her – or, more troublingly, to pay any of her salary since she left Ponnagyun eight months ago.
State school teachers are paid K200,000 per month (equivalent to US$45 at the market rate) and an extra K60,000 monthly allowance. While this is barely enough to live on, there are few better-paying jobs available amid the economic collapse that has followed the 2021 military coup.
When Kyawt Kyawt Khin complained about going unpaid, she said she was met with bureaucratic stonewalling.
“The state office just told me that this is a matter for the township office, and that I should complain there. It’s ridiculous, because the education department of Ponnagyun has been closed since February and its head is not reachable,” she told Frontier.
Unsure of what to do, Kyawt Kyawt Khin has been left to wait in silence.
“I have not received any instructions from my ministry for months. It’s difficult for my family to live in Sittwe, where living expenses are higher than in the village,” she said. “My husband used to work in our farm before, but he is unemployed here. We opened a small shop to sell street food but we aren’t making enough money.”
Needing to provide for her daughters who are enrolled at a Sittwe high school, where parents must pay a range of informal fees, Kyawt Kyawt Khin sold the jewellery that she had kept for years as a prized asset.
Kyawt Kyawt Khin is not the only one in this situation. Frontier spoke to six other civil servants elsewhere in Myanmar who have similarly been left in limbo by the military regime. They too say they have gone without pay, and have yet to be reassigned, after fleeing the conflict between the military and armed resistance groups.
They describe the problem as widespread, particularly in the education and health ministries. They employ the largest workforces, numbering roughly 450,000 and 85,000 people respectively, as measured by the World Bank before the 2021 coup, and employ staff right down to the village level. Hundreds of thousands of these workers joined the Civil Disobedience Movement, a mass strike in opposition to the coup. Although many of them have since returned to work due to persecution and economic hardship, the ministries remain understaffed.
Those interviewed by Frontier, who had stayed in their jobs, had expected their loyalty to be repaid – especially after being displaced by anti-junta offensives. Instead, they say they’ve become the victims of a rigid, uncaring bureaucracy that fails to adapt to the sudden displacement of staff or to help them in emergencies.
A bureaucratic maze
The payment of civil servant salaries is a convoluted, highly centralised process. Schools, for instance, must submit staff lists to the township office by the 15th of each month. The lists are passed up through the district and then state or regional offices before ending up in the capital Nay Pyi Taw for final approval. School principals must then attend township-level meetings on the 28th of each month to receive cheques covering all staff salaries.
The principal of a village high school in Ayeyarwady Region’s Danubyu Township said they then usually have to wait for two or three days before returning to town to cash the cheques at branches of the state-owned Myanmar Economic Bank.
“We can only withdraw [the salaries] on the last office day of the month, and there’s a very long queue at the bank,” the principal explained, talking to Frontier on condition of anonymity to avoid reprisals. “So, we need to travel to town twice. This is a burden for us.”
Teachers go unpaid if any part of this two-week process is disrupted, or if schools or offices at any level have to close, and their staff relocate, due to conflict or other reasons.
Those affected include Ko Moe Thet, a teacher who in November last year fled fighting in a village of Kayah State’s Demoso Township. Speaking to Frontier using a pseudonym, he said he arrived safely with his mother and sister in Taunggyi, the Shan State capital. But almost a year later, he has yet to be reassigned to another school or receive any of his salary.
He says it’s unfair to be denied pay due to circumstances that are beyond his control. “It’s not that we don’t attend school when it’s open. Rather, the school was closed due to the war,” he told Frontier. “Since we’ve had to relocate due to the fighting, our expenses have gone up considerably, but we’re not getting paid. The government should look after its own employees who are having a hard time.”
Besides cases like these, where displacement has led to staff falling off the payroll, some civil servants still serving in their original postings say they’re going unpaid for months at a time due to disruption from the conflict.
A state-employed nurse in the Chin State capital, Hakha, said because anti-junta groups have taken over much of the Chin countryside and disrupted key roads, township branches of the MEB are often resupplied with cash by helicopter. These deliveries are infrequent and because of the resulting cash shortages, civil servants in some parts of the state have not been paid since June, she told Frontier while choosing to remain anonymous.
Although Hakha is better supplied, she said she and her colleagues couldn’t withdraw their salaries in June and July.
“Although we got back all our salaries in August, it was really difficult to live with the high commodity prices during the months they were delayed. We cannot say when we’ll face this again because the situation is unstable due to the fighting,” she said.
The nurse added that civil servants in rural areas face an additional safety barrier. “There are many staff in the villages, including teachers, who have not received salaries for several months because [anti-regime forces] often attack groups of civil servants visiting the town to withdraw salaries. They also can’t receive money from the town via mobile payments because the internet is not available in their villages,” she said.
Last year, the junta started rolling out direct, electronic salary payments to its staff in major cities, to replace the antiquated system of monthly cash disbursements, and there are plans to expand this. Civil servants of all ranks in these places are asked to open accounts at banks nominated by their departments and receive their salaries there, rather than as envelopes of cash from their superiors. The regime likely hopes that as mobile payment platforms also expand across Myanmar, allowing people to pay for goods and services digitally, there will be less of a need to transport large amounts of cash around the country.
But as indicated by the nurse in Hakha, electronic salary transfers would be of little use in rural, conflict-affected areas. The military has cut the internet in many of these areas as part of its crackdown on resistance groups, and few rural businesses accept digital payments anyway.
‘It made my blood boil’
There is, in theory, a solution for displaced teachers like Moe Thet and Kyawt Kyawt Khin. They can apply to join schools where they’re currently staying as “associate teachers”, without having to go through the usual cumbersome transfer process. However, in practice, applications are often rejected or require bribes.
Daw Zarchi Win, a school teacher in her 50s, said principals at schools in Yangon have rebuffed her since she fled to the city in early July with her younger daughter. They were escaping fighting in the town of Lashio in northern Shan, which fell to the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army the following month, and they decided to move to Yangon to stay with her older daughter.
“They said they are fully staffed and have no place for me,” Zarchi Win said of the school heads, speaking to Frontier using a pseudonym. “One principal told me clearly that she does not want to accept associate teachers because it would be extra work for her to get approval from the state where I originally worked.”
After being turned away at many different schools, she received an important tip from a friend who had been hired as an associate teacher in Yankin Township. The friend said she had to seek a recommendation letter from the local education department office – but this letter could only be obtained with a bribe.
“I went to meet [the office chief] with an envelope,” Zarchi Win said. “I had to pay K200,000 before he wrote me a recommendation letter and told me to go to a particular school. When I arrived there the next day, the principal couldn’t refuse me after seeing the letter.”
“With an unhappy face, she said the school is having me just because of [the letter], not because the school needs me. It made my blood boil, but I had to shut my mouth,” she said, describing the indignity she felt, having served three decades as a teacher.
Nonetheless, she said she was relieved to start receiving a salary again in September, although she started at the school in mid-August.
“I was particularly afraid that I wouldn’t receive a pension if I didn’t join a school in Yangon, because I don’t know when I can return to my original school in Lashio,” she said. “What if I were forgotten [by the education ministry] after having fled the war? I’ve spent many years on my career and don’t want to let it go.”
Civil servants are entitled to a pension of about K100,000 a month from the age of 62, or after 30 years of service. However, those interviewed by Frontier claimed that ministers often disregarded the latter threshold, and only granted pensions to those aged 62 or older.
Younger teachers, who are far off from their pensions, have been tempted to leave their careers after being displaced and falling off the state payroll.
Daw Thae Mar Lwin, who taught at a village primary school in Bago Region’s Thanatpin Township, fled in February with the rest of the community to escape conflict between the military and the Karen National Liberation Army. She moved with her parents and younger brother to stay with relatives in Taungoo, and applied to join schools there and farther afield.
“I tried to work as an associate teacher in schools in Taungoo and Bago town, but none accepted me and I needed to bribe the superior officers,” she told Frontier, using a pseudonym. “I have no money for that after the expense of relocating and living without income for many months.”
Instead, therefore, she moved to a hostel in Yangon and got an administrative job at a garment factory in the Hlaing Tharyar Industrial Zone. But while more financially secure, she says she’s heartbroken at having to give up on teaching.
“I loved teaching my young students even though the salary was low,” she said, adding that she felt lonely in Yangon, working with strangers in an unfamiliar place. “If my old school reopens after the war, I will immediately return to my children.”