Myanmar Update-December 2025

The almost invisible war in Myanmar got more press attention at the end of 2025 because of the first elections to be held in the country since the 2020 election that was won by Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD). Her victory prompted the military coup on the day the new government was due to be sworn in—1 February 2021. Aung San Suu Kyi has been incarcerated since then. The election is being held in three phases between 28 December 2025 and the end of January 2026.

The junta’s forces have made significant gains during 2025, largely due to Chinese pressure on Ethnic Armed Organizations in Northern Myanmar to withdraw from some of the territory they had gained in a coordinated Opposition attack beginning on 27 October 2023.

Startup Parami University’s enrollment grew from 200 in the 2024-25 academic year to 300 in the current academic year. This is the first year its online 4-year B.A. program has students in all four classes. Ninety percent of these students are living within the borders of Myanmar. Most of the rest are in Thailand and Laos.

On the Battlefield

A year-end analysis reported that there was fighting during 2025 in all seven regions and all seven states of Myanmar, and in 153 of the 330 townships in the country. In the wake of the unprecedented Opposition attacks on 27 October 2023, the junta forces were on the defensive, steadily losing control of territory during 2024.

The tide turned early in 2025 when the Chinese government forced Opposition groups in Northern Myanmar to withdraw from key towns they had captured on the main trade routes between Myanmar and China. The Chinese seemed especially alarmed by progress the Opposition was making to capture the town of Lashio, a gateway to the key city of Mandalay.

Junta bomb and drone attacks on the civilian population, especially in Sagaing and Magway regions, proceeded at a brisk pace during 2025, mostly to terrorize the population and not for any obvious strategic purpose. There were especially fierce battles on the Myanmar-Thailand border, with the junta gaining greater control of the two main roads leading to border crossings into Thailand.

The only part of the country where the opposition made substantial gains during 2025 was in Rakhine State on the Indian Ocean coast and bordering Bangladesh. Here the Arakan Army (AA) became well established across the State, while holding back on the Kyaukphyu area where the Chinese oil and gas pipeline terminals are located, and on the state capital of Sittwe where junta forces are concentrated. Significantly, the AA made inroads into the neighboring Magway and Irrawaddy Regions. In the former, the AA was advancing on a collection of junta armament factories that are vital to the junta’s military effectiveness. A major complication here is fighting between the Buddhist Rakhine population and the Muslim Rohingya population, most of which fled to Bangladesh in a massive ethnic cleansing operation in 2017. Small Rohingya groups are reportedly getting arms and other support both from the Myanmar military and the Bangladesh military.

In February 2024, having suffered significant casualties on the battlefield and having great difficulty recruiting new soldiers, the junta activated a law to conscript men from 18-35 and women from 18 to 27. The initial goal was to conscript at the rate of around 60,000 per year. There is no reliable data on how many have been conscripted since then, but the number of women conscripted seems to be relatively small. The conscripts are provided with only a few weeks of training and then sent to the front lines where their casualty rates are probably quite high. The conscription process, naturally, has led to an exodus of young men and women leaving the country. It has also created a big source of corruption as wealthy families pay bribes to postpone the conscription of their children.

Scam Centers on the Myanmar-Thailand Border

The evils of scam centers inside Myanmar along its border with Thailand gained global media attention during 2025. These centers emerged in the past ten years, established by well-known Chinese criminal groups. They are able to lure men and women from around the world but mostly from Southeast Asia by offering well-paid IT employment. After arriving in a scam center, these recruits are treated like prisoners, sometimes being tortured.

These scam centers are collecting many billions of dollars from victims to the point where the Trump Administration has established a Scam Center Strike Force to shut down these operations. Complicit in the scam center mess are the armed forces, police, and politicians of Thailand, and the Myanmar junta. The Thai side has permitted construction materials and personnel to cross into Myanmar from Thai territory and has even supplied electricity to some of them. The Myanmar junta has been providing “protection” for the scam centers via the ethnic Border Guard Forces it has been supporting for more than a decade.

In 2025, the Chinese government became so concerned with the reputational damage it was suffering from the scam centers that it forced the junta to demolish some of the scam centers and free their workers. Some of the Chinese operators have been arrested, but it’s a “whack-a-mole” situation. As one scam center is shut down another one opens at a new location on the Myanmar-Thai border, or in Cambodia, or some other location. The scamming business is so profitable that new centers are popping up all over the world. Successful scamming requires excellent internet access, which has often been provided inside Myanmar and elsewhere by Starlink terminals. Starlink says it is blocking access to its system by scam centers, but it seems to be technically impossible to block all of them.

The Elections

The Myanmar junta declared at the outset of its coup in 2021 that its goal was to hold new elections in order to produce a government more capable of governing the country than another NLD-led government. It repeatedly postponed holding these elections but apparently decided in early 2025 that the tide had turned in its favor and the time was ripe.

A first step in preparing for elections was dissolving the regime created after the coup, which had called itself the State Administrative Council (SAC). In its place, the junta established on 31 July 2025 the State Security and Peace Commission (SSPC). Many of the ministers in this new government retired from the army to function as civilians. The Commander-in-Chief of the Myanmar military since 2011, Min Aung Hlaing, directed the coup and now rules as the Chairman of the SSPC.

The election is being carried out in three phases with the first two happening on 28 December 2025 and 11 January 2026. Voting will be held in only 102 of Myanmar’s 330 townships in the first phase. The date of the third phase has not been confirmed but is expected to take place on 25 January.

This election now in progress is almost as far from being “free and fair” as one can get. Only parties approved by the military have been allowed to nominate candidates. Campaigning has been greatly restricted and closely monitored. The military-approved party, the Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) has been favored at every stage of the election process and is certain to win a majority of the seats being contested.

The biggest problem, however, is that many of Myanmar’s 330 townships are in the hands of Opposition forces that have rejected the election from the outset. Advance voting at Myanmar embassies around the world was very light. In townships under the control of the SSPC, however, there could be a significant turnout because the voters risk being punished by the military if they stay home or don’t vote “correctly”.

As expected, the SSPC has been unable to persuade any of the reputable global election monitoring organizations to send observers to this election. The members of the ASEAN community have struggled with this issue because there is no consensus on formally recognizing the post-coup regime. Thailand has announced it will send observers but without any mandate from ASEAN.

The Opposition

The anti-military Opposition has been on its back foot since the beginning of 2025. The most prominent Opposition group remains the National Unity Government (NUG) formed mostly by members of the NLD who won parliament seats in the 2020 election and were able to escape Myanmar after the coup. One problem with the NUG is that its leadership is underwhelming; it lacks charisma and few of its ministers have impressed with their competence. Another problem is that the NUG is not trusted by most of the Ethnic Armed Organizations (EAOs) because of decades of conflict between the majority Bamar ethnic group (which dominates the NUG) and the disparate minority EAOs.

On the battlefield, by far the most successful Opposition forces are those of the EAOs. Many Peoples Defense Forces (PDFs) have been spontaneously formed in ethnic Bamar communities and are being supported and directed by the NUG. There are also PDFs that operate independently of the NUG, including in the junta-controlled main cities of Yangon and Mandalay. Since the coup in 2021, there has been a perceptible trend of increasing coordination in military operations between the PDFs and units of the EAOs, but the PDFs and some of the EAOs are now handicapped because China took steps in 2025 to slow the flow of weapons to them from neighboring countries.

Reacting to skepticism of the NUG from the Myanmar diaspora and the (mostly Western) countries wanting to end military rule in Myanmar, the NUG undertook a major reorganization in mid-2025. This reorganization, however, has not yet reduced the skepticism measurably.

Perhaps the most significant development among the Opposition in 2025, is the formation in December 2025 of the Spring Revolution Alliance (SRA), a coalition of 19 resistance groups. While none of the main EAOs (like the AA and the Kachin Independence Army) are members of the SRA, it aims to include them and to create a bottom-up approach to military success and federal government in contrast to the NUG’s top-down approach.

The Humanitarian Situation

A recent report predicted that 12 million people in Myanmar will experience acute hunger in 2026. This is one quarter of Myanmar’s  roughly 50 million population.

Myanmar’s path to the bottom since independence in 1948 has been matched by very few other countries. The contrast with Korea is especially striking. As peace was restored in East Asia at the end of World War II, Burma appeared to have brighter economic prospects than any other country. It was producing world class doctors and leaders like U Thant, who became the third Secretary-General of the United Nations in 1961. Korea was viewed as “the basket case” of East Asia. In the 1980s, Burma was added to the list of Least-Developed Nations as South Korea became a rapidly growing middle-income country. Myanmar now stands alone as the basket case of East Asia.

Burma’s parliamentary government adopted at independence and modeled on that of its colonial master lasted only ten years. It was done in by factional infighting, ethnic rebellions, and a communist insurgency. Burma’s military rulers from 1962 to 2011only succeeded in enriching themselves as the population grew from 20 million to 50 million and poverty deepened. What emerged over the decades was exceptional resilience as households across the countries honed their survival strategies.

Surprisingly, an election held by Myanmar’s military rulers in 2010 led to a ten-year period of economic and political blossoming. Aung San Suu Kyi was freed from house arrest and entered the parliament. In a remarkably free election in 2015, her NLD party won by a landslide and she became the head of government. Political and economic sanctions were removed. There was a veritable tsunami of foreign aid and investment. One of the world’s fastest mobile phone rollouts quickly gave a majority of the population easy internet access.

Crucially, a generation of youth tasted freedom during this decade that was unknown to their parents and grandparents, and they were able to get a decent education. As a result, when the coup happened in 2021, resistance across the country quickly materialized including in the majority ethnic Bamar communities that mostly hunkered down during previous uprisings.  As the economy sank under new sanctions and armed conflict spread to every township in the country, the survival strategies of decades earlier were recalled. In some sense, however, the situation was worse than ever before because doctors and teachers are striking and students are boycotting the schools administered by the military regime.

Not all of the suffering in Myanmar is man-made. Myanmar is one of the countries in the world most vulnerable to natural disasters. The earthquake in central Myanmar in March 2025 was not an isolated event. Parts of Myanmar are regularly devasted by cyclones out of the Indian Ocean. Other parts experience long-term droughts and periodic flooding. Adding to the misery is severe environmental damage enabled by the military regime since the coup, from unregulated logging and mining, palm oil and banana plantations, and warfare.

The Rest of the World Reacts

China is the main supporter of the military regime, diplomatically, financially, and as a supplier of weapons and technology. But there is no evidence that China respects the regime. It is mostly acting to protect and improve its access to the Indian Ocean and to avoid the annoyance of having a thriving democratic country on its border. The next best friends of the regime are Russia and North Korea, both of which are selling military hardware to the SSPC. Their motivation is clear: weakening democratic rule everywhere. Why India is supporting the SSPC is far from obvious. It seems there would be more to gain from supporting the Opposition.

The original six members of the ASEAN Community clearly regret their decision to admit Myanmar as a member in 1997. The mess in Myanmar is an embarrassment to ASEAN because it is violating most of the basic principles of the organization. Shortly after the 2021coup, ASEAN adopted a Five-Point Consensus for de-escalating the conflict in Myanmar. The military regime has failed to take any meaningful steps toward implementing the five points. Because the 11-member community acts by consensus, because one of its core principles is non-interference in the domestic affairs of its members, and because of pressure exerted by China on a few members, the boldest action so far taken by ASEAN to reflect its disappointment with the military regime is to ban its leaders from attending the annual ASEAN Summit meetings. There was some hope that ASEAN would be able to deliver humanitarian assistance to the Myanmar population broadly, but the amounts actually delivered are miniscule in relation to the need and focused on townships controlled by the SSPC.

The Western powers have chosen to focus on other countries, with one exception. Japan, is constantly seeking low-profile ways of helping the population without formally recognizing the SSPC. The EU, Australia, and New Zealand all support the Opposition diplomatically but have been reluctant to support it militarily and have been unable to deliver meaningful amounts of humanitarian assistance.

In 2025, the United States acted irrationally and inhumanely toward Myanmar in several ways. First, in June, it banned entry into the USA passport holders from Myanmar and 18 other countries. Second, in November it ended Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for citizens of Myanmar residing in the United States. Third, in December it halted the processing of immigrant applications and petitions for citizens of the original 19 countries including Myanmar. The argument for including Myanmar in the November action was blatantly specious: that it was safe for the TPS holders to return to Myanmar and that progress there included “free and fair elections”. These actions are likely to produce thousands of stateless Myanmar people who came to the USA to study or work or escape imprisonment or worse in their homeland. They will be unable to renew their passports or get new ones and will be at risk of being deported. Other actions such as withdrawing sanctions against several supports of the military regime were also taken. In addition, the shutting down of USAID eliminated a potential flow of humanitarian assistance, and indirect support of the Opposition was ended when the Trump Administration withdrew funding from the Voice of America, the US Institute of Peace, the Asia Foundations and other organizations.

There was more bad news in 2025 for the population of Myanmar, but this should be enough to show how miserable life has become in this godforsaken country.

I did have a recent experience showing that Myanmar not been totally forgotten. On December 21, I attended the 11am mass at St. Matthew’s Cathedral, where President Kennedy’s funeral mass was held. It’s a short walk from my apartment. At the end of a long list of separate prayers for people suffering at home and abroad, the priest said a prayer for people living in war torn countries. He singled out four of them: Ukraine, Middle East (Gaza), Sudan, and Myanmar. I always say to my friends in and from Myanmar: “I always pray for your country; please pray for mine”.

The Miracle of Parami University Continues

Parami University was formally established in 2020 to become Myanmar’s first private, nonprofit, residential liberal arts college, modeled on Bard College in Upstate New York. A few months later, the 1 February 2021 military coup forced the suspension of construction on a campus an hour north of Yangon a few short weeks from breaking ground. Its founder/president Kyaw Moe Tun had to flee for his life and happily was able to settle in New York City two months later.

As a member of Parami University’s inaugural Board of Trustees, I have been deeply involved in the miraculous reinvention of Parami U as an online B.A. degree-granting higher education institution licensed in Washington DC and having a formal partnership with Bard College. Parami’s first Freshman class matriculated in August 2021and its members will be receiving their B.A. degrees on 9 June 2026. In the 2025-26 academic year, total enrollment is around 300, with students in all four Freshman-to-Senior classes for the first time.

As Parami’s enrollment jumped from 200 in the last academic year to 300 in this year, a third major in Environmental and Sustainability Studies was added to the initial majors of Philosophy, Politics and Economics, and Statistics and Data Science.

Because of the funding cuts and visa bans implemented by the Trump Administration, Parami was only able to get two students into the USA for 8-week summer internships in Washington DC compared to the 9 we brought in mid-2024.

To provide another outlet for student travel between academic years, Parami initiated a 2-week “cultural exchange” with National Sun Yat Sen University in Taiwan for 14 students. There is a commitment to continue this program in the years ahead. Parami also signed an MOU with International Christian University in Tokyo to launch a similar program in mid-2026. In addition, Parami’s membership in the Global Higher Education Alliance for the 21st Century (GHEA21, formerly the Open Society University Network) opened up many opportunities for Parami students to travel to other countries including Austria, Hungary, Colombia, and Kenya, and to participate in experiential learning programs.

Parami has been fortunate in getting just enough funding to keep growing. Success in this area is expected to make it possible to add a fourth major in Public Health to its curriculum. Any reader inspired to make a donation can find all the ways to do it on the Parami website: https://www.parami.edu.mm

Parami’s hiring and retention of faculty and administrative staff (and students) has been remarkably successful. It prides itself on going to extra length to support its students who often find themselves in extremely difficult circumstances. Two of our students were arrested for failing to respond to conscription notices and were incarcerated at the end of December. One had his sentenced reduced to one year with some friendly help. The other’s sentence was unknown.

Part of Parami’s success has been due to the creation of “learning hubs”, where a small group of students are provided with housing, a generator to maintain their online access in blackouts, internet access, and food stipends. At the end of 2025, Parami had five learning hubs, two inside Myanmar, two in Thailand, and one in Laos. Eleven Parami students are living in Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh.