In northern Myanmar’s Sagaing Region, deep inside the 531,000-acre Htamanthi Wildlife Sanctuary, a handful of rangers are preparing to install 72 camera traps. The devices will blink through fog and monsoon rain, each one a small act of witness in a country that barely allows its people to speak. In the Htamanthi forests, the Ministry of Information claims, nearly twenty-two Bengal tigers were recorded last year. That figure, like everything else that emerges from Myanmar’s military state, is both hope and question.
The government’s announcement sounds routine: camera traps, tiger census, ASEAN heritage pride. But behind the official optimism lies a national tragedy—the near-collapse of conservation transparency. Since the 2021 coup, Myanmar’s forests have become as silent as its streets. International NGOs were forced out or restricted. Field scientists work under surveillance, some in exile. And yet, in the remote sanctuaries of Htamanthi and Taninthayi, tigers still move—ghosts tracked by people who can no longer publish freely.
Htamanthi – where courage replaces policy
Htamanthi was established in 1974, long before the current regime. Once part of the northern frontier of tiger range, it became one of the last strongholds of the Bengal subspecies in mainland Southeast Asia. The sanctuary’s streams—Nanpilin, Naneisu, Nanbugun, and Nanyanyin—still hold prey, but barely. Poaching networks, deforestation, and cross-border trade have carved through its safety. The new seventy-two camera traps will stretch from Nanbugun to Nanyanyin, yet even this small expansion is fragile. Equipment has to be smuggled in through military checkpoints. Batteries are ordered months in advance.
What the warden’s office calls “research” is, in practice, resistance. The data it gathers could expose how much the government has failed to control wildlife crime. But those numbers will never reach the public unfiltered. They travel up a chain of command that edits science into propaganda. In official statements, tigers symbolize stability and “national pride.” In reality, they survive on the edges of a country consumed by conflict.
The sanctuary’s field staff—underpaid, overwatched—continue because the alternative is extinction. For every camera installed, there’s another story of ambushes, landmines, and rangers trapped between militias and the army. Their courage stands against the deliberate neglect of a regime that prizes mineral extraction over biodiversity.
From research to rhetoric
Myanmar’s Ministry of Information lists thirteen tiger range countries (actual: 10) and insists that national laws protect big cats under Section 19(a) of its biodiversity act. On paper, that sounds progressive. On the ground, enforcement has collapsed. Gold mining and illegal logging now fund factions aligned with both the junta and resistance militias. Protected forests are barter zones for loyalty. The few patrols that still exist work without vehicles or ammunition, relying on community scouts who risk their lives without recognition.
It’s this hypocrisy—celebrating Htamanthi while ignoring its suffering—that defines the current era of conservation in Myanmar. The state has learned to perform environmental virtue for ASEAN meetings and international forums. Htamanthi’s 2019 designation as an ASEAN Heritage Park was treated as proof of progress, even as satellite images showed accelerating forest loss along its borders. Bureaucratic pride replaced ecological reality.
This pattern is not unique to Myanmar. Across the region, political systems exploit conservation for image management. In our own analysis of political failure and corruption, tiger conservation becomes a mirror of state dysfunction: grand plans at the top, invisible work at the bottom. Myanmar’s generals are simply the most extreme example—turning a sanctuary into a stage set for legitimacy.
The silence after the coup
Before the 2021 coup, joint research with the Wildlife Conservation Society and Panthera was producing credible data. That flow of information stopped almost overnight. Internet restrictions, travel bans, and military control over research permits turned field science into contraband. Today, conservation updates reach the outside world mostly through leaked documents or rare official bulletins like this one. Even satellite monitoring teams are afraid to publish images that might reveal troop movements or conflict zones.
The result is a conservation blackout. No one knows how many tigers truly remain in Myanmar. The “twenty-two” cited from last year’s census could be accurate—or a rounding error. Verification is impossible when transparency itself is forbidden. Conservation has become an act of faith, not evidence.
Still, the forest remembers. Locals along the Chindwin River report occasional tracks, livestock kills, and faint roars at night. These testimonies, dismissed by urban officials, are the last grassroots data Myanmar has left. In Htamanthi, tigers are more than numbers; they’re symbols of endurance in a nation that has lost almost everything else.
Heritage and hypocrisy
Htamanthi’s ASEAN heritage status was supposed to guarantee regional support, but ASEAN’s environmental mechanisms are as toothless as its political ones. Member states exchange plaques, not patrols. Funding pledges rarely materialize. Myanmar’s leaders use the label to project normalcy—proof that despite sanctions and international isolation, the nation still belongs to a regional community. But heritage without governance is theater.
Conservation law in Myanmar remains Section 19(a) of the 2018 Biodiversity and Protected Areas Act. On paper, it mandates heavy penalties for hunting tigers. In practice, prosecutions are rare. Wildlife traders operate openly in border markets like Mong La and Muse, selling bones, teeth, and skins to Chinese buyers. Military convoys move past without interference. The government’s enforcement budget shrank after 2021; most field stations rely on donor leftovers from pre-coup projects.
Even the “tiger census” itself has become a political instrument. Official numbers rise or fall depending on the message the regime wants to send. A slight increase becomes proof of stability; a decline can be blamed on Western NGOs. Meanwhile, scientists who question data risk detention.
Between war and wilderness
Sagaing Region, where Htamanthi lies, is now a battlefield. Airstrikes, village burnings, and displacement have driven tens of thousands into the forest. Some flee into sanctuary territory, cutting trees for shelter and food. It’s not a choice; it’s survival. For tigers, that means more snares, more livestock baiting, more encounters that end in bullets.
Yet within this chaos, the tiger census continues. Rangers set traps near streams where villagers fetch water. They carry no firearms—only notebooks and GPS tags. These people embody the paradox of Myanmar’s conservation: a state collapsing, but individuals still protecting what little remains.
Outside Myanmar, conservation agencies tread cautiously. Publicly criticizing the junta risks losing access to data; staying silent feels like complicity. It’s the same moral paralysis that keeps multinational donors funding “neutral projects” in occupied regions. Environmental neutrality, in this context, is a form of surrender.
Counting tigers, counting silence
Htamanthi’s 72 new cameras will soon blink to life. Each will photograph what’s left of the country’s ecological truth. Some may catch tigers. Many will record nothing but darkness and rain. But their real function is deeper—they document the state’s absence. When a nation falls apart, even a camera trap becomes a political act.
Myanmar’s generals will likely claim success from this census, presenting images of tigers as proof of order. The outside world will share those pictures, relieved to see beauty amid brutality. Few will ask how many rangers disappeared, or how many forests were lost while the cameras clicked.
Htamanthi stands today as both sanctuary and symbol—a place where courage outlasts governance, where nature survives in spite of the state meant to protect it. Whether those seventy-two cameras capture tigers or only the emptiness left by power, they will tell the same story: that wildlife, like truth, resists extinction longer than most governments expect.
Source: Ministry of Information Myanmar
Photo: Ministry of Information Myanmar
