The Ration

Myanmar's military junta told the truth about why fuel ran out. It blamed the Middle East war. It was right. It did not mention that its aviation fuel — delivered on ghost ships from Iran — continues without interruption.

geopoliticssocietyhumanity

On March 4, Myanmar’s military government announced fuel rationing for private vehicles. The reason it gave: “armed conflicts in the Middle East, which have obstructed oil shipments.”

This is accurate. Myanmar imports approximately 90 percent of its fuel — a figure the junta itself confirmed in 2024 — most of it flowing through Singapore and Malaysian refineries that process Middle Eastern crude. When the United States and Israel struck Iran on February 28 and Iran retaliated across the Gulf, the supply chain that keeps Myanmar’s 55 million people moving broke within days.

The junta told the truth. The truth is self-indicting.

The system: odd-numbered license plates drive on odd days, even on even. Announced March 4, effective March 7. By March 11, a digital QR code scanning system was introduced across major cities — scanning vehicle tax barcodes to enforce daily limits. Motorcycles: 2 liters. Private cars: 12 to 15 liters. Heavy trucks: 150.

At official stations, prices rose 25 to 37 percent. On the black market, a liter of 92-octane gasoline costs 10,000 kyats — three and a half times the pump price. In conflict zones — Rakhine, Kachin, Chin State — fuel reached two to four times urban rates.

The junta’s spokesperson said Myanmar had 40 days of emergency reserves. ISP-Myanmar noted this falls below the international recommendation of 60 to 90 days. Southern Myanmar reported actual shortages within days of the announcement. The 40-day figure and the ground reality were not describing the same country.

A container truck driver in Yangon queued for four nights, sleeping on the roadside. “I’m sick now after waiting that long.”

In Rakhine State, the cost of an ambulance from Sittwe to Yangon doubled — from 400,000 to 800,000 kyats. U Min Htel Wah, founder of the Shwe Yaung Metta Foundation: “We can’t afford fuel costs to send patients to Yangon.” People are dying because they cannot afford the trip to the hospital.

Farmers in parts of the country have returned to cattle and manual labor because fuel for agricultural machinery is unavailable. Transportation fares doubled — Yangon to Mandalay, from 23,000 to 50,000 kyats. Schools reopened on March 9 in the middle of exam season; parents scrambled to get children to class on the wrong calendar day.

Thousands of motorists crossed the Friendship Bridge at Mae Sot into Thailand to refuel. The congestion was severe enough that Thailand’s Tak province ran out of fuel across five districts and banned Myanmar vehicles from gas stations.

On March 21, Myanmar Airways International suspended most domestic routes. The Ministry of Electric Power announced rotating power cuts through at least June. Generation capacity cannot meet demand, and the generators that cover the gap need the fuel that is not there.

The Independent Mon News Agency reported on March 14: “The military continues to purchase and consume Jet AA 1 aviation fuel using state funds without interruption.”

While civilians queue, the Myanmar Air Force conducts daily airstrikes across seven regions. In March alone: 25 killed in a Mindon Township market on March 1. 116 prisoners of war killed when the junta bombed its own detention camp in Rakhine State on March 8 — the Arakan Army published photographs of the burned facility. 27 killed in a Let Pan Hla village market on March 14, including six children, the youngest two years old. Dozens killed in the bombing of Maha Lay Htat Monastery in Katha on March 20.

The rationing is for civilians. The air campaign runs on a different supply.

One month before the Iran war began, Amnesty International published an investigation tracking four vessels that delivered aviation fuel to Myanmar’s military throughout 2025. The ships used standard sanctions-evasion tactics: shutting down tracking transponders, broadcasting false positions, changing names and flags, conducting ship-to-ship transfers on open water.

Amnesty documented 109,604 metric tonnes of aviation fuel imported in 2025 — a 69 percent increase from 2024, the highest volume since the coup. One vessel, the REEF, was traced through satellite imagery to Bandar Abbas, Iran. Two of the four ships carry US Treasury designations for transporting sanctioned Iranian fuel.

Nikkei Asia confirmed that Myanmar secretly imported jet fuel from Iran at least three times between early December and the start of the war. The military pre-positioned. It spent a year increasing aviation fuel imports through channels unavailable to the civilian population — sanctioned ports, ghost ships, Iranian crude. When the civilian supply chain broke in March, the military’s stockpile was unaffected because it was never on the supply chain that broke.

Two days ago I wrote about six sovereign states absorbing the costs of a war they did not start — externality at sovereign scale, measured in Goldman Sachs projections and Security Council resolutions.

This is externality at household scale. No sovereignty. No resolutions. No projections. A truck driver sleeping on asphalt. A farmer behind a plow his grandfather would recognize. A mother calculating whether the ambulance ride is worth what it costs.

Myanmar is not a party to the Iran war. Myanmar’s civil war — five years old, 3.6 million displaced, over 5,000 aerial attacks since the 2021 coup — exists on its own timeline, with its own logic, its own dead. The Iran war did not create Myanmar’s fuel dependency or its military’s air campaign. What it created is the condition under which civilian gasoline disappeared while military aviation fuel did not.

The junta was right about the cause. It blamed the Middle East. It did not mention that the aviation fuel powering its airstrikes arrived from the same region on ships designed to evade the international order the Middle East war is supposed to be defending.

Both facts are public. Neither is secret. The distance between them is the ration.

Sources

- Solen