The Burmese are no strangers to dealing with natural disasters amid military dictatorships. While cyclones, floods, and diseases have ravaged the country, the trend has been that army men have sat, watched, and collected international assistance for their own benefit. The powerful earthquake that hit the country on March 28 has exemplified this pattern, arguably in an even more devastating way, as news of air strikes on civilian villages emerged just hours after nature did its damage. Myanmar’s experience offers a way of answering an important question: when people can’t trust the government, who ends up taking charge of nationwide rescue and relief operations? The answer, unfortunately, is under-trained and under-equipped civilians, with desperate coordination provided by a few concerned government and non-governmental organizations.
As of April 19, the ASEAN Coordinating Centre for Humanitarian Assistance on Disaster Management (AHA Centre) reported a death toll of 3,726 from the earthquake, with 5,105 injured and nearly 130 missing. Nominally, the military positioned itself at the forefront of relief efforts, announcing a temporary ceasefire and calling for international aid. While staggering casualties underscore the urgency of relief, the junta’s actions reflect a familiar authoritarian pattern. Myanmar’s military has repeatedly used crises – from Cyclone Nargis in 2008 to the COVID-19 pandemic – to monopolize aid, suppress dissent, and reinforce its grip on power. During the pandemic, health workers were persecuted, vaccines were hoarded for regime-aligned elites, and humanitarian access was denied to ethnic minority areas. Now, aid is once again being funneled through military channels, raising alarm among many non-state actors, who report being sidelined from relief efforts.
The behavior of Myanmar’s military is particularly deviant, given that militaries have often played an active role in disaster relief elsewhere. For instance, in Nepal, after the 2015 quake, the army – under the ethos “Mission first, people always” – mobilized troops within days, despite many soldiers themselves being directly affected by the disaster. The following relief operations demonstrated a civilian-led national response eagerly supported by the military.
Myanmar’s junta, by contrast, has been mostly missing in action in rescue operations, leaving most of the work to scattered government departments, and more often, ordinary civilians, while choosing to direct the bulk of its energy to the ongoing war. At the same time, it is reportedly weaponizing aid distribution to reward loyalists and punish opposition-held areas, relying on the usual authoritarian tools of “resource capture” and “ecological marginalization.” For the Tatmadaw, natural disasters equal political opportunities, crises to be exploited, not resolved.
The Weaponization of Aid
When disaster strikes, international aid often flows through state actors. This is a system built by diplomatic norms, sovereignty, and logistics. For Myanmar, the problem has never been the lack of help; the problem is who’s in charge of delivering it. After the earthquake, foreign aid organizations struggled to get resources to where they were needed most. Donations lagged, geographic access was limited, and unnecessary deaths from overwhelmed services were common. This evoked painful memories from 2008, when Cyclone Nargis killed over 140,000 people, many of whom died after the junta blocked foreign aid, fearing it would threaten their grip on power. Even after international pressure forced them to allow some assistance in, the military tightly controlled and redirected much of it. In 2025, history is again repeating itself.
While the immediate aftermath of the earthquakes led to some sort of openness, this atmosphere did not last long. Once the first tallies of the casualties appeared, the authorities banned the entry of the foreign press into Myanmar. The world was effectively forced to rely on scant reports from mainstream media, who themselves have to settle on official death tolls from the junta.
Luckily for the Burmese, social media – one of the fruits of democratization – gave them new avenues through which to spread awareness of the country’s situation, both to each other and to the world. However, language barriers and algorithms naturally worked to prevent the mainstreaming of this grassroots media platform, underscoring the need to shed light on some of the recurring themes among the blizzard of posts, videos, and pictures.
The main theme – even from posts by the national fire services – was the marked lack of men in military fatigues in rescue operations. Apart from propaganda photos of generals touring the damaged capital, soldiers and the police have been largely absent from social media posts in the immediate aftermath. Much more common were pictures of ordinary people in their everyday clothes digging rubble and pulling victims out with their bare hands or primitive equipment. Under-equipped firemen and social workers were also frequently seen, undertaking rescue operations with little apart from their uniforms and hard hats. The arrival of well-prepared foreign rescue services only highlighted the rudimentary nature of these rescue efforts.
The foreign presence did increase the military’s online activities; it was soon represented by a translator here, an officer there. Ironically, the military only turned up en masse once the foreign teams started leaving and commemorative pictures were taken – an unsurprising propaganda move. Afterwards, pictures of police officers handing out recovered belongings to victims or removing bricks from damaged buildings also occasionally appeared – but never on the scale expected of a national institution that claims a role as the nation’s guardian. This lack of government effort only became clearer once we talked to several Burmese involved in earthquake relief efforts.
What the People Are Saying
“If we don’t help each other, who can we rely on?” Those were the words of Nyein, a student from Mandalay who experienced the worst of the devastation with her family. The only interviewee we had from inside the country who saw the rescue operations firsthand, Nyein expressed a lot of disappointment at the current situation, especially at how necessary aid is mostly coming from fellow civilians instead of the government.
“There are many donors for food and water…to areas that are less accessible,” she said. “These donations are not things the government is doing. We, as citizens, are helping each other.” Referring to the slow reconstruction process, Nyein simply said, “nothing is going well.”
Reinforcing the widespread skepticism on the junta’s distribution of foreign aid, she said, news reports on foreign donations overlooked the fact that this “goes directly to the government” and that it was unclear how it would be used. She did refer to the junta’s promised compensation of 1 million kyats (approximately $400) for each victim, but lamented that the amount is “very little, compared to the donations from abroad.”
Keeping in mind the critical role played by the Burmese diaspora in terms of donations and advocacy, we were also able to talk to Julie, a hospitality intern working in New Zealand and Naing and Myat, two students from Canada who organized a community fundraising activity for earthquake relief, to learn more of their contributions and thoughts on the situation. All three emphasized the urgent need for international donations, especially for resources, equipment, and funds for rescue teams on the ground. They were also similarly frustrated at a lack of government support for the operations. As Julie put it, “only the government [has] the full equipment, manpower, and control …but now we don’t have that support, so the rescue operations are not as effective.”
Naing and Myat, meanwhile, recalled that the military’s inaction is leading to unnecessary deaths, saying “the rescue team wants to help those in need, but there are lots of barriers to go through.” While some affected areas have seen soldiers preventing crime or helping remove rubble, they said, the military “as a whole is not doing much.”
Access to information has become a primary source of anxiety for everyone, given that official media remain restricted, with the junta still barring the entry of foreign journalists into the country. While Julie relies on grassroots, non-state outlets such as Myanmar Now to get more formal insights, she looks more toward social media as an everyday source of “firsthand” news. Naing and Myat also emphasized the need for constant advocacy on social media, sharing similar anxieties about the military’s news censorship.
On a positive note, there is some hope for support from Burmese communities abroad. Naing and Myat said that Burmese students abroad were “willing to help,” reflecting on the unexpected success of their fundraising event at a Canadian university. Julie said the diaspora “have more power to do campaigns more freely abroad than people [inside] Myanmar, and that “even if we contribute only a little, it means a lot in Myanmar.”
Julie added that many people in Myanmar are now “financially, emotionally, and physically tired,” yet these talks prove how ordinary people, from students to workers, continue to help each other and remain resilient in the face of an oppressive and negligent military whose already thin legitimacy has been further eroded since the military coup of 2021. The coordination of energies between the Burmese both inside the country and out has created a mostly civilian-centered relief effort, one that may be missed if the world continues to be informed by official news and statistics.