Hnin Aye sat listening with growing concern as the officer called out numbers at the Myanmar embassy in Bangkok. “Why are they skipping me?” she thought. A former schoolteacher, she was waiting to get her passport renewed so she could stay in Thailand where she now lived and studied. A denied renewal could lead to imprisonment in Bangkok, or worse, being forced to return home.
Finally, when there was no one left in the room, the official told her to approach the desk. “You better call the person who has been assisting you,” he said. Hnin Aye, 33, glanced at her small red passport on the table, which she had submitted to the official earlier. It was her most prized possession. She snatched it and left to call her broker. She got lucky, the broker told her later; the embassy officials could have simply canceled her passport.
Hnin Aye is one of hundreds of thousands of civil servants who went on strike after the Myanmar military seized power in a coup in February 2021, overthrowing the democratically elected government. (Hnin Aye is a pseudonym.) The mass strike, known as the Civil Disobedience Movement (CDM), hoped to topple the regime through non-violence. The strike has undermined the junta’s ability to provide public services. Many hospitals and most public schools were completely shut following the coup, and many remain closed today, while others limp on with limited capacity. After the political crisis escalated to civil war, some who quit their jobs as part of the strike became civil servants in rebel territories, which are ruled through a patchwork of decentralized governments. Others fled the country entirely to escape persecution and to find new work as the economy collapsed.
Hnin Aye is one of an estimated 4 million Myanmar people living in Thailand, roughly half of whom crossed the border in 2023 and the first half of 2024 alone. She’s been able to live relatively freely in Thailand, attending university and traveling for conferences and academic workshops. But her seemingly normal life is clouded by constant anxiety over the possibility of being sent back home.
The junta has tried to compel civil servants living in Myanmar to come back to work. It has threatened family members of dissidents, expelled strike participants from government housing and even brutally murdered some. (In 2022, a teacher was publicly beheaded by the junta in central Myanmar, where resistance to the military is fierce.) The junta promises amnesty, but most greet this with skepticism.
The military has exerted pressure on those outside the country through their passports. Myanmar passports are only valid for five years, which means that anyone who applied for a travel document right after the coup in 2021, including Hnin Aye, must now get it renewed. Many choose to make use of a corrupt brokerage system, where people with connections in the foreign ministry and other regime appendages facilitate large bribes for new, and sometimes fake, documentation. But it is by no means a guarantee, especially as the junta expands a digitalized system to track, restrict and repress its citizens. Identity and statehood have become a new weapon.