Guest contributor
Seán Barry
Myanmar’s strongest earthquake in a century struggled to spur international support in any meaningful way. Nor did it inspire any let up in the military’s violence – and in the second largest city of Mandalay, oppression is only intensifying. What followed March 28 stands as a crystal-clear case study of the military’s priorities — a crucial reminder as it seeks to normalise its rule and gain international legitimacy with end-of-year elections.
From a busy tea house on the banks of the Irrawaddy River, a man points to the other side. “My family lives there,” he says, scanning the room in front of him. For three years, he’s been unable to go home. He doesn’t explain why.
A few metres away, armed officers in grey shirts sit on little plastic stools, peering over. Under the military, open discussion about what is happening, what has happened, increasingly comes at great cost.
On the other side of the river lies Sagaing Region — six months ago the epicentre of Myanmar’s most powerful earthquake since 1912, and a centre of resistance for some time.
Its towns were largely cut off from aid, isolated by the military. For the man in the tea house, returning is impossible, earthquake or no earthquake. Even after a historic disaster, repression against the people of Myanmar did not ease.
Six months on from March 28, the world has irrefutable evidence of how the Myanmar military operates: aid throttled, no ceasefire, no compassion. Meanwhile, earthquake ravaged Mandalay offers a surreal portrait of life under quietly oppressive authoritarian rule.
The aftermath
“What country has a major earthquake and starts doing airstrikes everywhere?” asked David Eubank, the director and founder of the humanitarian group Free Burma Rangers, who witnessed jets roar overhead within hours of the quake from an undisclosed location in southern Shan State.
Following the lead of several resistance groups, the military declared a ceasefire on April 1 — a date dripping with irony, given how seriously the commitment was taken. Talk of national mourning in the immediate aftermath quickly proved disingenuous.
The Centre for Information Resilience (CIS) recorded 67 military airstrikes in the 20 days following April 1 with 50 documented in the 20 days preceding it. Just three days after the quake, on March 31, 12 separate attacks were recorded.
Sagaing and Mandalay regions — where the quake caused the most devastation — saw the highest share of the military’s air attacks after April 1, according to CIS.
It wasn’t just violence that would hamper relief efforts. It quickly became apparent that the military were blocking access to affected areas, as it has done on a number of occasions previously, most notoriously after Cyclone Nargis in 2008.
“It took many days before international groups — that were ready to go the first day — were allowed even close to the earthquake zones. The Burma military arrested rescue workers in Mandalay. Delayed searches of buildings for three to five days. People die of thirst by then, if they’re still alive,” said Eubank.
The earthquake highlighted the limits of an international humanitarian system bound by bureaucracy and political access. The U.N. and major non-governmental organizations typically depend on cooperation from whoever they deem the central authority in the affected area.
In Myanmar, that meant working through the military. Many warned it would achieve little, and their fears proved justified. That being said, those who attempt to bypass the military are usually shot at.
Shortly after the quake, doctors working in Mandalay said many aid supplies never reached survivors. In some places, the military allegedly confiscated trucks at checkpoints.
Human Rights Watch demanded “unfettered access” for aid groups, warning that restrictions and internet blackouts were already hampering the response.
There is never a good time for an earthquake, but this one arrived as global aid commitments were being scaled back drastically. The dismantling of USAID had come only weeks previous.
It became the first significant natural disaster to unfold in the growing vacuum of international humanitarian assistance.
The consequences of all of this combined are, according to the U.N., extremely serious. Nearly 20 million people in Myanmar require urgent humanitarian aid, yet the U.N.’s 2025 response plan — adjusted after the quake — is only 22 percent funded out of a required $1.4 billion USD.
Visiting affected communities earlier this month, U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi called for increased aid access, describing the suffering as “immense” and warned of aerial bombardments, forced recruitment, and communities “displaced again and again in search of safety”.
That nearly six months on he was still calling for wider humanitarian access speaks volumes.
Six months later
High in the Mandalay sky, the city’s soundscape tells its story. Under midday sun, jackhammers rattle and a chorus of construction blurs with beeps and revs from traffic as Myanmar’s cultural capital slowly rebuilds — a 360-degree panorama of its people getting on with it.
When the sun falls west towards Sagaing it casts a haze back across the Irrawaddy. Buddhist recitations float from golden pagodas until they are masked by a sound system that has begun to crank out rap louder than necessary.
At this rooftop bar, there is no customer noise to compete with. Likewise, the grand hotel upon which it sits is eerily quiet.
On one particular evening, a power cut silences the music, giving way to the prolonged drone of a jet engine coming from somewhere in the skies over Sagaing.
From a layer of monsoon cloud cover on the western horizon, a single smoke trail slices down through the sky towards land. Nearby waiters show mild interest.
The power comes back on and, minutes later, as the music blares louder than before, something burns in the distance. The trail fades from view.
Ahead of its planned end-of-year elections, widely expected to be a sham, the military is working to project a visage of normalcy in its cities, as conflict rages in almost every direction.
The more territory the military holds by the time polls open, and the more subdued its urban population, the greater the optics victory. And so the incentive is there for it to ramp up violence and utilise the full weight of its superior resources.
In the month of August, DVB recorded 204 airstrikes nationwide, killing at least 235 civilians. Mandalay and Sagaing regions were once again the focus of the military’s air attacks—Mandalay suffering the highest toll, with 73 deaths in 41 strikes; followed by Sagaing with 43 deaths in 34 strikes.
At ground level, the effects of the earthquake are visible everywhere: in the many plots of red and grey rubble, in the countless voids where buildings once stood, in the cracked temples under scaffolding.
Yet more striking is the tension simmering just below the surface of a society under intensified authoritarian rule.
Audibly absent from the city’s soundscape is open discussion about what is happening all around. Within regime-controlled territory, the military is using violence, fear, and surveillance to suppress dissent.
The Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (AAPP) counts 29,711 arrests since the 2021 coup, with more than 22,000 still detained and at least 7200 verified killed.
The military’s new General Election Protection Law promises punishments ranging from three years in prison to death for anyone accused of criticising or obstructing its planned election performance. So far at least 12 people have fallen victim to it.
The other disaster
In Mandalay’s downtown, once popular backpacker hostels decay. Queues of yellow tuktuks sit idle as their drivers, with no passengers forthcoming, share a smoke or nap in the heat.
On a busy four-lane road, young children dodge between oncoming traffic as they beg for money, some of them cradling babies.
For residents who avoided the immediate impact of the March 28 earthquake, among those willing to talk, the economic crisis brought on by the 2021 coup and subsequent civil war is often the disaster most on their minds.
“I want to go to other countries. But they [the military] don’t allow new passports to citizens like me,” said a bespectacled young man from a small town near Mandalay. He, like most others in Myanmar, speaks on the condition of anonymity.
Among his generation, leaving to work abroad has been a common and often idealised post-coup path. Due to a conscription law implemented in February 2024, the young man missed the boat.
“In South Korea, I could earn in a month what I earn in a year here for the same job,” he added–a skilled young professional.
Holding up a small bottled energy drink in one hand, he says it now costs four times what it did four years ago. Post-coup, Myanmar has been under an isolated war economy and inflation has hovered around 30 percent year-on-year since, according to the World Bank.
Import restrictions on drinks and other consumer goods have pushed prices for some goods even higher.
With his other hand, the man counts as he lists, year by year, compounding disasters that the country has struggled to recover from: “2020, covid. 2021, coup. 2022, fires. 2023, cyclone. 2025, earthquake.”
In order for anything to improve, he says, his hopes lie not in the forthcoming elections but in the People’s Defence Forces. “The military has ruined the country,” he said quietly.
The earthquake revealed the military’s number one priority — holding on to power. Six months later, Mandalay offers a glimpse of a society at a high-water mark of repression, where arrests, intimidation and surveillance have subdued dissent, and where even to speak of politics is perilous.
It is also a reminder that the generals are not only fighting a war but performing for the world.
Once again, the spectre of decades more of this looms, only 10 years after Myanmar’s first truly free elections in generations brought about optimism. The lesson for the outside world is clear: when repression goes unchecked, it rarely stays contained.
Seán Barry is a Chiang Mai-based freelance journalist and audio producer, with a focus on authoritarianism, human rights, and humanitarian aid. He first visited Myanmar in 2015.
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