Myanmar school attacks rise amid intensified fighting, researchers say

The Associated Press

Intensified fighting in Myanmar’s civil war has brought a sharp increase in destructive attacks on schools, a group that monitors armed conflict in the Southeast Asian nation said.

Myanmar Witness said the attacks further strained Myanmar’s fractured school system, taking away education for millions of children who have also been forced to flee their homes, miss vaccinations and suffer malnutrition.

The group, a project of the United Kingdom-based Center for Information Resilience, identified 174 attacks on Myanmar schools and universities since the military seized power from the democratically elected government more than three years ago.

The New York-based Global Coalition to Protect Education from Attack, meanwhile, cited over 245 reported attacks on schools and 190 reports of military use of educational facilities in 2022-23.

The February 2021 military coup was met with widespread nonviolent demonstrations for democracy, but those were crushed with lethal force. Many opponents of military rule then took up arms, with large parts of the country embroiled in conflict. The military is estimated to control less than half the country.

“Education underpinned the democratic movement in Myanmar, but today Myanmar’s youth are witnessing their schools — and life opportunities — reduced to rubble,” said Matt Lawrence, project director at Myanmar Witness. “If education is not protected throughout Myanmar, the next generation’s view of the world risks being driven by factionalism and war, rather than hope and reason.”

Student enrollment in Myanmar dropped 80% from the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 through 2022, a year after the military takeover, according to the humanitarian group Save the Children. By mid-2022, about half of the country’s children, or 7.8 million youngsters, were not attending school, it said.

Myanmar Witness said it documented reports of 64 fatalities and 106 injuries associated with the 176 attacks on schools.

The National Unity Government, which leads the pro-democracy movement, estimated in January 2024 that more than 570 children had been killed by security forces. As many as 8,000 civilians have been killed in the conflict, according to the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project.

Myanmar Witness said military airstrikes are the primary cause of the destruction of schools. Such attacks have become more frequent as pro-democracy forces and ethnic minority armed groups make gains.

The military “has had to resort to more and more airstrikes, often with less and less appropriate aircraft, as they lose effective access to the ground,” Lawrence said.

The report said some resistance forces also have attacked schools, but much less frequently and less destructively, often using drones with small explosive loads.

Other factors are disrupting education. Many young people, including older students, have taken a role in the resistance. Thousands of teachers left their jobs after the coup and joined a civil disobedience movement aimed at disabling military control over government institutions.

Shifting front lines make it difficult to reliably provide lessons, and some teachers have established or joined schools outside the military’s control.

“What we see is almost a dual system that’s developing in Myanmar, where there are state-sponsored schools and then schools sponsored by other parties and retribution for participating in either system,” said Lisa Chung Bender, executive director of the Global Coalition to Protect Education from Attack.

“It puts children and educators in an impossible position where they have to go through checkpoints and say where they’re going, and if it’s determined that they’re going to an enemy school, whichever enemy that is, they can be harassed, detained or physically punished,” she said.

Inadequate access to education is only part of a deepening humanitarian crisis in Myanmar. More than 3 million people have been displaced from their homes by fighting, most of them since the military seized power. The United Nations Children’s Fund said in June 2024 that 35% of Myanmar’s children live in food poverty, defined as having inadequate access to the necessary nutrition for growth and development.

According to the U.N. Development Program, over half of Myanmar’s children live in poverty.