MYANMAR Burmese military junta purchases weapons through Thai banks

Until last year, transactions were facilitated mainly by financial institutions in China and Singapore. Between April 2023 and March 2024, Burmese generals spent $253 million on weapons, a drop of a third, but there is still much to be done on sanctions, said the United Nations special rapporteur on human rights. Humans in Myanmar, Tom Andrews. Meanwhile, former President Thein Sein traveled to China.

Yangon () – Foreign banks continue to facilitate the purchase of weapons by the Burmese Military Junta, and the most active are Thai banks, says the latest report prepared by Tom Andrews, United Nations special rapporteur for human rights in Myanmar. “With the help of financial institutions willing to do business with Myanmar’s military-controlled state banks, the junta has access to the services necessary to carry out systematic human rights violations, including airstrikes against civilians,” that in the last six years six months have “quintupled”, the official specified from the ONU.

For more than three years, Myanmar has been devastated by civil conflict: the Army, which took power with a coup d’état in February 2021, fights against resistance groups, but has always also attacked the civilian population with aerial bombardments.

According to the document, titled “Banking on the Death Trade: How Banks and Governments Enable the Military Junta in Myanmar”, 16 banks from seven countries processed transactions for the Junta between April 2023 and March 2024. In this period the military spent $253 million on weapons. It doesn’t seem like it, but it is a positive fact, because compared to last year the volume of military equipment acquired by the Junta through foreign banks has decreased by a third (previously it was 377 million dollars).

This improvement was achieved primarily through a decline in exports by Singapore-registered entities, which in turn was the result of extensive and significant government research. The city-state’s banks were, until a few months ago, “the most important financial facilitators for Myanmar’s military purchases”, with $110 million in transactions, along with China and Hong Kong, which in fiscal year 2022 recorded sales of 140 million dollars, compared to 80 million the following year. Purchases from Russia increased from $25 million to $10 million, while purchases from India remained stable at $15 million.

The primacy now passed to Thailand, whose banks facilitated military purchases worth $60 million in 2022, a figure that doubled the following year. “The good news is that the Board is becoming more isolated,” says Andrews. “The bad news is that the Board is evading sanctions and other measures by exploiting loopholes in sanctions regimes, changing financial institutions, and taking advantage of the inability of Member States to fully coordinate and implement actions,” the report continues.

Thailand’s Siam Commercial Bank (SCB) alone processed more than $100 million in transactions in fiscal year 2023, up from just over $5 million the previous year.

Thailand’s Foreign Ministry – which has also been working towards a resolution of the conflict in recent months and has proposed sending aid to Myanmar – said in a statement yesterday that it had read the report. “Our banking and financial institutions follow banking protocols like any other major financial centre. Therefore, we will have to establish the facts before considering any action,” a ministry spokesman added. The SCB has denied the allegations and said an internal investigation has established that its transactions with Myanmar are not linked to arms trading.

However, Andrews said international banks should be aware that there is a “high likelihood” that transactions involving Burmese state entities – such as the Myanma Foreign Trade Bank – could be used to buy weapons or war materials. And other loopholes in sanctions (imposed individually by some countries and not by the UN) allow the country to continue to be able to buy aviation fuel, the report continued.

The analyst David Scott Mathieson argueshowever, that the new sanctions on fuel alone may not be enough “to have a real impact,” because the Army “has access to raw materials and is capable of manufacturing projectiles, weapons and mines” and in this way can “continue fighting for quite a long time.”

Once again, the solution to the war seems distant. Yesterday the former reformist president Thein Sein, who led the country between 2011 and 2016, before the government of democratic leader Aung San Suu Kyi, traveled to China, the Chinese embassy in Yangon reported. Thein Sein met with the Chinese ambassador, with whom he discussed “the situation in Myanmar and cooperation between the two countries.” Although China has supplied weapons to the Burmese regime, relations with the junta deteriorated last year when the military failed to dismantle online scam centers on the border, involving thousands of Chinese citizens.