(Translated staff article from the KHIT THIT MEDIA on 18 October 2024.)
Myanmar Army officers have been forcing newly conscripted
soldiers to take Ya-ba pills (Meth or Ice tablets) by telling them that the
pills will relieve exhaustion from the lack of sleep at the frontline facing
the rebel ethnic armies. Ya-Ba is a Thai word: Ya is pill or medicine, and Ba
is crazy or mad. So, Ya-Ba is the Crazy Pill in Thai.
Khit Thit Media was contacted by many draftee
soldiers, from the First Batch of National Conscription Program, with bitter
complaints of being forced into drug addiction in the Myanmar Army. Following
is a typical complaint from one 18-year-old Myanmar soldier now being stationed
at Pin-long Town in Shan State South nearly overrun by TNLA the Pa-laung Army.
His Army Company CO, a Captain has encouraged him to take Meth-emphetamine pills (widely known as the Ya-ba pills) so that they will be alert and active all the time. He also taught his new soldiers how to use and enjoy the expensive pills provided on credit.
“Just ask me more if you guys want more, I will deduct when your monthly pay comes,” was what he happily told them about the so-called free pills. “He showed us how to use the pills and gave each of us a water bottle and a small tube and a piece of foil. How to roll the grounded pill in the foil and how to heat and suck in through the tube into our noses, every step. Not only us, he himself is using it every day.
“I was an addict before, so I refused to use it. He didn’t force us so far though. He knew I didn’t want to be an addict again. But he told us to get as many pills as we wanted. He just tallied it in his little book and said he would deduct out of our pays later,” added the brand-new teenaged soldier who just came out of the Taik-kyi Army Tarining School as part of First-batch National Conscription Program a few months ago.
Apparently, Myanmar Army is supplying those front-line army units with tons and tons of Methemphatamine pills (manufactured in long-established Army labs) together with foodstuff and other essentials as if their official policy to turn the young soldiers into Ya-ba addict zombies.
Since the very beginning Myanmar Army used to
supply bottles of Army-rum laced with Quinines to the jungle-troops as their
standard ration to fight the Malaria. That was the reason most Myanmar soldiers
are violent alcoholics.
The young soldiers also told Khit Thit Media that
the bags and bags of Ya-ba pills came direct from the battalion headquarters
with the re-supply convoys. The food was only for 15 days, and they always were
running out of food, but the pills never ran out.
“In the jungle we had nothing else as outlets and we just have to keep on drinking army rums and smoking the pills, all the time,” said the young soldiers. “We’ve got our pay regularly, but not 510,000 kyats (about US$100 a month) as they promised. We got only 170,00 kyats (about US$ 40 a month) and out of that most were taken out by the officers for the pills they gave us on credit. We are the captive Ya-ba market for them motherfucking- pusher-officers,” added the young soldier.
The illegal Myanmar military junta is forcefully recruiting teenagers as new soldiers for the dangerously depleted Myanmar Army since a year ago and the current draft is for the sixth batch. The military carried out two rounds of conscriptions in April and May, training about 9,000 new recruits in total. A third round of conscription began in late May, with draftees sent to their respective training depots by June 22.
The first batch of recruits completed their three-month training on June 28, and family members told RFA Burmese on Tuesday that the new soldiers were sent to conflict zones in Myanmar’s Rakhine and Kayin states, and Sagaing region, beginning in early July.
While the junta has
never said how many recruits were trained in the first group, a mid-April
report by the Burmese Affairs and Conflict Study, a group monitoring junta war
crimes, indicated that it was nearly 5,000 young people from across the
country.
