Myanmar's Junta Is Starving a Hundred Villages. ASEAN Will Not Say So.

The woman at the edge of Kin Ma village had a green plastic tarp and three children. By the time this correspondent arrived on March 28, she had been there eleven days. She said the soldiers came on March 17, burned the rice stores, and told everyone to leave. She walked fourteen kilometres with what she could carry. The tarp was all that remained.

Sagaing Region, northwest Myanmar, has become a laboratory for collective punishment. Since the February 2021 coup, the Tatmadaw — Myanmar's military — has burned more than 70,000 homes across the country. But in Sagaing, the strategy has evolved. Soldiers no longer simply destroy villages. They destroy food. They block the roads that carry it. They wait.

What is happening here is not famine. It is engineered starvation. The United Nations uses careful language. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations — ASEAN, the ten-country bloc that includes Myanmar — uses no language at all.

What the Soldiers Did

Sagaing is the heartland of resistance. After the coup, villages here formed People's Defence Forces — lightly armed militias that ambush military convoys and attack outposts. The junta's response has been systematic. Between January and March 2026, military units conducted operations in at least 127 villages across Sagaing's Kanbalu, Yinmabin, and Salingyi townships, according to data compiled by the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED).

The pattern is consistent. Troops arrive at dawn. They order villagers out. They burn homes — but first, they burn the rice. Community grain stores, individual family supplies, seed stock for the next planting. In Kin Ma, in nearby Tar Taung, in San Hlaing and Ah Pyin villages, witnesses reported soldiers pouring fuel on rice sacks before torching buildings. In some villages, they confiscated livestock. In others, they shot cattle in the fields.

After the burnings come the blockades. Highway 2, the main road linking Sagaing's townships to Mandalay and food markets, has been effectively closed to civilian traffic since February. Military checkpoints at Myinmu and Kanbalu turn back trucks carrying rice, cooking oil, and medicine. Aid convoys organised by local monasteries have been stopped at gunpoint. On March 12, soldiers at a checkpoint near Yinmabin confiscated 400 sacks of rice destined for displaced families. The rice was loaded onto military trucks and driven south.

By April, the camps at the edges of the combat zones had swelled. This correspondent visited three: makeshift settlements in the forests near Kanbalu, Salingyi, and along the Chindwin River. There were no tents, no latrines, no medical staff. Families slept under tarps strung between trees. Children had distended bellies. Diarrhoea was spreading.

The Architecture of Hunger

Starvation as a weapon is not new to Myanmar. The Tatmadaw used it in Rakhine State against the Rohingya, in Kachin and northern Shan states against ethnic militias. But Sagaing represents an escalation in scale and intent. This is not a siege of a single town. It is a regional campaign targeting the civilian population that supports the resistance.

The junta denies it. Brigadier General Zaw Min Tun, the military spokesman, told state media on March 22 that reports of village burnings were "exaggerated by terrorist groups" and that the military "provides security and humanitarian support to all civilians." He did not explain why those civilians were fleeing into the forest.

International humanitarian agencies have almost no access. The junta requires travel authorisation for all aid workers; since January, fewer than 15 percent of requests for Sagaing have been approved. The International Committee of the Red Cross has not been permitted to operate in the affected townships since December 2025. Médecins Sans Frontières withdrew its mobile clinics in February after junta forces detained three staff members at a checkpoint.

What ASEAN Will Not Say

ASEAN's response to Myanmar has been a masterclass in diplomatic paralysis. The bloc appointed a special envoy in 2021 — the position has cycled through five occupants, none of whom have been granted meaningful access to conflict zones or opposition leaders. The junta has ignored the Five-Point Consensus agreed in April 2021, which called for an immediate cessation of violence, dialogue, and humanitarian access. ASEAN has not enforced it.

In November 2025, ASEAN foreign ministers met in Vientiane, Laos. The final communiqué expressed "concern" about the humanitarian situation and called for "constructive dialogue." It did not mention village burnings. It did not mention starvation. It did not name the junta as responsible.

The reason is simple: ASEAN operates by consensus, and several members will not cross the junta. Thailand shares a 2,400-kilometre border with Myanmar and depends on natural gas from junta-controlled offshore fields; Bangkok has declined to sanction the regime. Laos and Cambodia, both reliant on Chinese investment and support, have echoed Beijing's line that Myanmar's crisis is an "internal matter." Vietnam, which holds the ASEAN chair in 2026, has prioritised "non-interference" over accountability.

At the United Nations, the picture is no better. The Security Council has not passed a resolution on Myanmar since the coup; China and Russia have vetoed or threatened to veto every meaningful proposal. The General Assembly passed a non-binding resolution in June 2025 calling for an arms embargo, but it has no enforcement mechanism. Arms continue to flow to the junta from Russia, China, and Serbia.

The Villages That Are Next

In early April, the Tatmadaw launched a new offensive in southern Sagaing, around Monywa and Budalin townships. Residents of at least thirty villages reported troops massing nearby. On April 5, soldiers entered Chaung Gyi village and ordered families to evacuate within twenty-four hours. By April 7, smoke was visible from the next township over.

The pattern will repeat. The junta controls the cities and the main roads, but it cannot pacify the countryside without destroying it. Resistance forces are too dispersed, too mobile, too locally rooted. So the strategy is depopulation. If the villagers flee, the PDF loses its base. If they stay, they starve.

The woman at Kin Ma had no politics. She did not speak about democracy or resistance. She said her husband had stayed in the village to guard their house. She had not heard from him in nine days. Her children asked when they could go home. She said she did not know. The tarp would have to be enough for now.

What the Law Says, and What It Means

Starvation of civilians as a method of warfare is a war crime under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, to which Myanmar is not a party. It is also prohibited under customary international humanitarian law, which binds all states and armed actors. The deliberate destruction of food supplies, the blocking of humanitarian aid, and the forced displacement of populations to deny support to combatants all meet the legal threshold.

The UN's Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar has been collecting evidence since 2018. It has documented patterns of conduct that amount to crimes against humanity and war crimes, including in Sagaing. But it has no power to prosecute. That requires political will from states with jurisdiction, or a Security Council referral to the ICC. Neither is forthcoming.

So the law exists, and it is being broken, and no one is enforcing it. The villages burn. The rice is destroyed. The children grow thinner. ASEAN meets and issues statements. The junta's senior officers—Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, Deputy Commander-in-Chief Soe Win, Brigadier General Zaw Min Tun—remain in their posts, unsanctioned, unindicted, untroubled.

What Happens Next

The planting season in Sagaing begins in May. Farmers need seed, tools, and access to their fields. Most have none of those things. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization projects that rice production in conflict-affected areas of Myanmar will fall by 40 percent in 2026. That means more hunger, more displacement, and more leverage for the junta.

Resistance forces cannot feed the villages they defend. Local monasteries and civil society groups are overwhelmed. Cross-border aid from Thailand and India is blocked by junta checkpoints or ambushed by military patrols. International agencies are not permitted in. The displaced will grow hungrier. Some will surrender. Some will die.

ASEAN will hold another summit. There will be another communiqué. It will call for dialogue and restraint. It will not name the crime being committed. It will not impose costs on those committing it. Myanmar's seat at the table will remain empty, a symbol of ASEAN's reluctance to acknowledge that one of its members is governed by men who burn villages and starve children as a matter of strategy.

The woman at Kin Ma is still there, or she has moved deeper into the forest, or she has returned to a village that no longer exists. By the time you read this, the camp at the edge of the town will have grown by another thousand people. That is how it works here.