Myanmar the global hub of organised crime, says report

Myanmar now has the world’s highest levels of organised criminal activity following its 2021 military coup, a new report finds.

Transnational drug networks have flourished in Myanmar since a military coup in 2021, a new report says. Picture: AFP

Myanmar has the highest levels of organised criminal activity in the world thanks to soaring lawlessness since the 2021 military coup that has allowed transnational drug, cybercrime and people-smuggling networks to flourish, with serious implications for regional security, a report warns.

Findings from the US government-funded Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime come as ASEAN leaders meet in Australia for a regional summit in which the ongoing security crisis in Myanmar will again top the agenda behind closed doors.

The Southeast Asia nation ranked No. 1 out of 193 countries in the latest Global Index on Organised Crime on the back of a surge in human trafficking for cyber scam factories, synthetic drug manufacturing centres and illegal rare earth mining since the coup, prompting calls for urgent international intervention as the country plunges deeper into civil war.

ASEAN’s failure to effectively address the February 2021 coup – and the international community’s preoccupation with the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza – has led to a spiralling catastrophe on our doorstep in which a bloody civil war between junta and anti-junta forces is escalating with no end in sight. At least 4500 people have been killed since the military ousted the democratic government of Aung San Suu Kyi, some 26,000 have been arrested and more than two million have been displaced by the fighting.

A series of humiliating losses by the junta, leading many hundreds of soldiers to surrender to rebel forces, prompted the military to reintroduce conscriptions last month that have allegedly led to forced recruitment from cities and even abductions of fighting-aged youth from internal displacement camps.

East Timor Prime Minister Xanana Gusmao, whose nation will soon be admitted as the 11th ASEAN member state, told an event on the sidelines of the ASEAN summit in Melbourne that the people of Timor Leste understood the loneliness of the Myanmar people’s democratic struggle and called for the international community to show greater solidarity with the National Unity Government, the parallel civilian administration made up of ousted MPs and ethnic leaders.

Thailand’s former foreign minister Kasit Piromya, now a member of ASEAN Parliamentarians for Human Rights, also urged ASEAN dialogue partner nations such as Australia to do more to help resolve the crisis, and called for the UN to begin planning for the deployment of a peacekeeping force and a UN interim administration similar to that which governed Cambodia after the withdrawal of Vietnamese forces.

“We can no longer continue to place the responsibility (for resolving the crisis) solely on the shoulders of the ASEAN community,” he told the Myanmar People’s Summit in Melbourne.

“The ASEAN community needs the support and co-operation of the international community, especially its dialogue partners.”

The latest Global Index on Organised Crime report underscores the significant spill-over effect the escalating crisis inside Myanmar is having on the entire region, warning the conflict has not only increased the country’s vulnerability to organised crime but “the resulting lawlessness has fuelled crime and enabled new illicit markets to consolidate”.

“Absence of scrutiny in Myanmar has … been instrumental in allowing rising criminality to have reach and impact far beyond its borders,” it warned, noting cyberscam centres had sprung up across the country facilitated by state-embedded and Chinese actors.

The UN says hundreds of thousands of people have been trafficked by criminal gangs in recent years to work in Southeast Asian scam centres, while a recent University of Texas report estimated crime networks had moved more than $US75bn to crypto exchanges via online scams between January 2020 and February 2024.

Last November, Myanmar authorities handed over 31,000 telecom fraud suspects to China in a joint crackdown against online scams in Myanmar.