Euro-Burmanet, stories

[cd@xxxxxxxxxx]

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Dear Burma readers, 

Here are two stories, from The Economist, on life on the border edge, and the IHT Sept 10 story, on Heroin production booming in Burma. Dawn Star, Euro-Burmanet (Paris)
Headline: The Economist: Life on China's edge (Sept 14 1996)
Keywords: China, Ruili, gems, precious stones, jade, NLD ban,  National League for Democracy (NLD), Aung San Suu Kyi, human rights, political prisoners, torture, murder, execution, rape, Slorc abuses, forced labor, forced relocation, 
Date: Sept 14, 1996
Source: The Economist, http:/www.economist.com
Section: ebn
Rubrique: main

Ruili -- Remote frontier towns are a magnet for the adventurous and the desperate: entrepreneurs and runaways, traders and lowlife. In Ruili, on the old "southern silk road" between China and Myanmar (Burma), border trade has generated a spectacular local boom. It has also created a town as seedy and sinister as any in China. Many commodoties are bought and sold in Ruili, but it is best known for three - gems, heroin and sex. 

The area sprang to an unwelcome prominence in early 1990, when official statistics revealed an abrupt increase in the number of Chinese carrying the HIV virus, from six to 152. All the new carriers were in Ruili. Almost all were heroin addicts, who had contracted the virus through sharing needles. By the end of 1995, China had 3,341 confirmed HIV cases (a figure widely believed to be a drastic underestimate), more than 70% of them in the province that includes RUILI. 

In northern Myanmar, part of the "Golden Triangle" of poppy cultivation, heroin use is endemic. So, too, is HIV infection. Ruili county, which is a finger of Chinese territory that sticks into Myanmar, is populated in part by members of the same Shan ethnic group who live over the porous border. Drugs and AIDS spread in the early 19990s as heroin traffickers from the Golden Triangle began to rely ever more heavily on the overland route through China.

Meanwhile, the governments of China and Myanmar made efforts to boost border trade. In 1992, Ruili was listed by China as one of 13 "border cities" dotted along the frontier from Siberia to Vietnam, able to ofer special privileges to investors. In 1994, China completed an improved highway to bring visitors through a region of misty tree-covered mountains, lush rice paddy-fields and rubber and tea plantations.

Ruili has grown like a fungus. New hotels have shot up, catering for traders from all over China and Myanmar, as well as a few from elsewhere in Asia. The main street throbs until midnight with the blast of open-air karaoke stalls; side-alleys are lined with brothels advertised as "shampoo and massage" shops; around the town's central statue of a peacock, young girls from Myanmar try to sell themselves to Chinese men with dilated pupils.

Chinese residents of Ruili are a cross-section of the footlose, rootless migrants found across southern China; a former schoolteacher who fled south after the political turmoil of 1989; a 31-year old 'masseuse' from Sichuèan province with a husband and son to support back home; a farmer flooded out of Jiangsu in the east, now making ends meet by running a small shop; a businessman from Guangdong in the south-east who came to Ruili because "its the wildest place in China, and the girls are even more liberatd than Americans."

By the border fence itself, a shanty-town of bamboo and corrugated iron is being bulldozed to make way for skyscrapers and factories. In the lorry park, Chinese goods are unloaded for export. So too are Chinese guns for the Myanmar army. The border is harder to reach from the Myanmar side -- two days' drive over a poor road from the city of Mandalay. For well-off Myanmar gem traders, however, there is now a thrice weekly helicopter service from Mandalay to the border.

This is a backward part of China. But compared with Myanmar, it is advanced. Money is to be made processing raw materials from across the border. Even some cotton from Myanmar is sold to mills in Ruili and re-exported.

Or take a more harrowing example -- bears. Just outside Ruili, beside a sceneic new resevoir, a factory houses 300 Asian brown bears from Myanmar. The hapless beasts are kept in cages about one cubic metre big, and further confined in metal harnesses used to collect the bile from their gall-bladders. This is highly prized in Chinese medicine, and exported to Hong Kong and South Korea.

Even with Myanmar's precious stones, value is added in local workshops. In the market at Ruili, Myanmar traders wearing 'longhis' - Myanmar sarongs - hawk sapphires, rubies and emeralds, and enough jade to sink several battleships.  Some is cut; some is in the form of 100kg boulders. All very cheap, say Chinese buyers.

At any one time as many as a third of the people in Ruili are from Myanmar. One, who has lived there for twqo years, says he is afraid to leave the city center at night because of the robbers.  But fear is relative. At home, one of his brothers lost a leg in 1984. He trod on a landmine when forced into a porterage for the army in a campaign against an ethnic rebellion. He became a heroin addict, and died. Another brother slaves away in a jade mine, barely earning a living.

To a western visitor, Ruili is a place where there seem to be few rules. It is rather frightening. But for some people from Myanmar it is a glimpse of progress of a sort, and for that resident, at least, a haven of comparative safety.


Headline: Burma's Opium Production Booming (AFP, Sept 10 1996)
Keywords: drugs, heroin production,Khun Sa, Col.Kyaw Thein, UN, NLD ban,  National League for Democracy (NLD), Office of Strategic Studies (Slorc),Aung San Suu Kyi, human rights, political prisoners, torture, murder, execution, rape, Slorc abuses, forced labor, forced relocation, 
Date: Sept 10 1996
Source: International Herald Tribune, AFP
Section: ebn
Rubrique: drug

Rangoon -- The Burmese government says it stemmed the tide of narcotics with the surrender of the drug lord Khun Sa nine months ago, but analysts and diplomats say that opium trade is still flourishing in Burma. 

Colonel Kyaw Thein, who is the country's third-ranked intelligence oficer as head of the Office of Strategic Studies and is involved in Burma's drug eradication program, said in an interview that the government was doubling its efforts to curtail the trade. "Snce January we have been able to get out troops into areas fromerly controlled by Khun Sa, and because of that we have been able to stop all drug trafficing in those areas," Colonel Kyaw Thein said.

But he conceded that Burmes military operations in Shan state culminating in Khun Sa's surrender in January may have pushed drug-related operations into less accssible parts of the country along the Thai border.

"There are some areas near the border where new refineries may be working, but it is not true that poppy cultivation is increasing in Myanamar," said Colonel Kyaw Thein. Myanmar is the government's name for Burma.

He added that through a plan incorporating enforcement with crop substitution in border areas, "we hope to solve the poppy cultivation problem within 14-15 years."

The junta last week proudly unveiled one of its biggest heroin seizures in recent years, a 143-kilogram (314-pound) haul in northern Shan state.

But experts say there has been a drug explosiion in Burma as other durg lords fill the void left by Khun Sa. The heroin seizures routinely reported in the official press pale in comparison with total output: Burma produced 2,340 metric tons of opium in th 1994-5 growing seasons, the UN reported.

The United States say that figure will jump to more than 2,500 tons for the 1995-6 season, which when converted to heroin, will constitute half the global supply of the drug.

One Rangoon-based expert, speaking on condition of anonymity, says the junta has given up on enforcement in favor of keeping the peace with many of the ethnic groups with which they have signed cease-fires in recent years and who are dependent on poppy cultivation.

"The cease-fires have contributed to increased production because esentially they have created no-go areas for the government," he said. "As a result, the government is making no effort to undertake enforcement and eradication." 



Metta, thank you, peace, happiness and long life, 

Dawn Star  (Paris)
cd@xxxxxxx

Burmanet / TOTAL Coordinator 
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