A group that monitors armed conflict in Southeast Asian countries has said in a report that deadly attacks on schools have increased as fighting in Myanmar’s civil war intensifies.
The group, Myanmar Witness, says such attacks have further strained Myanmar’s fragile school system, where millions of children are being deprived of education. They are forced to run from house to house, deprived of vaccinations, malnourished.
A project by the Britain-based Center for Information Resilience says the group has attacked Myanmar’s schools and universities a total of 174 times since it wrested power from the elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi three years ago. They said the figure was calculated from social media and news reports.
Other groups also say the number of attacks has increased. The Global Coalition to Protect Education, an advocacy group based in New York, reported 245 attacks on schools and 190 reports of the use of military force against educational institutions in 2022-23.
Against the military coup of 2021, pro-democracy protests took place widely but were violently suppressed. Many opponents of the military regime then took up arms, with a large part of the country now facing conflict. As one, the military government is said to be able to control less than half of the country.
Matt Lawrence, Project Director of Myanmar Witness, said, “Education has been the bedrock of Myanmar’s democratic movement but today Myanmar’s youth are seeing their schools – their life’s opportunity – reduced to rubble. If education in Myanmar is not preserved, the future generation’s view of the world will be driven by division and war rather than hope and reason”.
According to the humanitarian group Save the Children, after the military took power, student enrollment in Myanmar dropped by 80% in 2020-2022, around the time of the outbreak of Covid-19. By mid-2022, nearly half of the country’s children, or 7.8 million children, were out of school.
Myanmar Witness said 64 killed and 106 injured in 176 attacks on schools, although most could not be verified.
Myanmar’s shadow government of National Unity, which is leading a pro-democracy fight against the military government, said in January that security forces had killed 570 students under 18 under various circumstances.
Myanmar Witness blamed airstrikes by the Myanmar Armed Forces for destroying most of the schools. The pro-democracy forces and the ethnic minorities were able to unite and occupy many places on the battlefield.