New Mandala

9 responses so far ↓

• 1 Pig Latin // Feb 13, 2007 at 10:48 pm

  I have only travelled through northern Thailand briefly on a bus, however comparitive experience in southern Pakistan and western Nepal has led me to some conclusions.

  Firstly I think that the questions raised are legitimate only in the regards to what is acceptable for a western ethos. Not only would ‘we’ peoples be the ones unofficially encouraging poppy growth, but also it is our official Durkheimian imperitive to eradicate drug related disorders from our society.

  So to your first question…

  West of Badin (a town east of Karachi and south of Hydrabad) there are farmers growing papaver somniferum in vast quantaties. Before there was Poppy plantations, there was mostly dairy based farming. My friend said that before Poppy plantations being introduced, there were less people travelling through Badin, such is the extent of opium generated interest now. Furthermore from observing Badin and the surrounding villages it seemed to me to be quite a cohesive society. Not at all like Matli (closer to Hydrabad) whose economy is setup around textilee production. I have no factual evidence to back up my claims, however I remember quite clearly the difference between chaotic town and an orderly town.

  Therefore the focus and attention on the opium crops in the Shan province is more what could be the driving force behind Burma being regressive and volatile as the negative attention is making innocent farmers into our criminals. I make the analogy with a youth involved in crime. You don’t abuse the youth for his crimes for that would drive him to commit more, no? What do you do instead? Try and be a good example to show them another way… subsequently a solution to our problem is of course to offer better money to the Junta for farmers to grow something else… but we Australians don’t talk to tyrants *cough*

  Eradicating our ‘collective’ hypocrisy might be the driving force behind Burma being a prosperous and peaceful country. Or will Burmese selt determine their soveriegnty and join us in hypocrisy? That way precious resources and time are either saved or pooled together! ….

  More seriously, I would be very interested in knowing the circumstances under which Shan papaver is grown.

  Thankyou

• 2 Jon Fernquest // Feb 14, 2007 at 1:55 am

  I’ve lived in the Golden Triangle-Chiang Rai for a substantial fraction of my adult life, it is my permanent home, and my Thai family hails from Maesai. I work for an English language newspaper in Bangkok now, but I used to work in education in Chiang Rai, Maesai, and Tachileik. I also lived in Yangon for two years.

  * Without the opium crop in the Shan State would Burma have a better chance of being a peaceful, prosperous country?

  * Are efforts to eradicate opium from Burma a first step towards a better future or, simply, a waste of precious time and resources?

  It’s a step they have to take sooner or later, so they might as well take it now.

  Burma’s biggest bank, the only bank with ATM machines even in Yangon the capital, is/was Mayflower Bank headquartered in the little town of Tachileik across from Maesai.

  You can obviously infer that this bank made money from laundering drug money, although my Burmese ex-father-in-law, a long-term Tachileik resident and friends with the owners vehemently denied it and I didn’t want to be “culturally insensitive” and argue with him.

  For a region to live off of drug money is not long-term sustainable. One day it had to change and it did change. The Maesai-Tachileik economy deflated with the drug crackdown.

  There’s now a fairly quick highway to Kengtung, whereas it used to take three days. An itiphon meud economy of drugs, prostitution, and gambling that led to early deaths from AIDs and drug abuse has been replaced by duty free shopping and Thai tourism. They have a university nearby so more kids can get an education. I knew one family in Yangon that sent their son back to Tachileik to take care of their little apartment building. Living alone, he quickly became a heroin addict.

  Bangkok Thai tourists indundate the place on holidays. They can travel to another country there for cheap with the whole family. Remember most of them can’t afford foreign travel like westerners. Bangkok Thais are almost as foreign as Farang are in a place like Maesai.

  * What can be learned from the northern Thai experience of opium cultivation and its criminalisation?

  My answer only addresses the town.For the Akha hinterland ask Matthew MdDaniel. He knows this area like the back of his hand.

• 3 Jon Fernquest // Feb 14, 2007 at 2:33 am

  Check this depiction of Laos in a Thai opera controversy:

  http://www.nationmultimedia.com/2007/02/13/headlines/headlines_30026752.php

  This sort of thing already happened to the Akha, but of course the Akha have no public voice to object to it with.

• 4 Johpa // Feb 14, 2007 at 7:06 am

  Further up the road from our home in Amphoe Mae Rim is a Mong village that 20 years ago survived primarily upon opium cultivation. I was at one time pretty close to many in the village as I had one sister-in law married to a Mong man from that village. Over the years the opium has been completely replaced by numerous cash crops including cabbage, carrots, and some fruit trees.

  I can give no statistics or numbers, but my observations would be that the people are far better off now engaging in a much more open market economy then when they depended upon opium and the rather closed nature of that business. I don’t think the farmer ever received much profit from the opium. The clear improvement in living standards may very well have occurred due to infrastructure improvements and not due to crop replacement. But I don’t think anyone is looking back at the old days. The only major downside has been significantly increased pressure upon the local environment due to deforestation and the increased usage of biocides.

  A very negative dimension of the opium/heroin trade often overlooked is that little money transfers hands at the border, but is transferred from one bank account to another. The people who are employed in the menial tasks of productions and distribution are often paid in small amounts of end product, which they can then sell for cash. This leads to increased local usage of drugs, especially heroin, which is often injected with a shared needle by poor villagers. This of course then intersects with other vectors for HIV, and in my opinion was one of the factors for the horrific epidemic of HIV up north in the early 1990s.

  So my opinion, and just an opinion, (and look, I like to bite the clouds once a year or so too) is that Burma would be far better off without the opium as long as there are viable open markets for alternative crops.

• 5 aiontay // Feb 14, 2007 at 11:14 am

  I actually have had some direct, albeit brief, experience with the opium question since I actually worked in an interim position on crop substitution project in the Northern Shan State for 2 ½ months.

  I think your first question has the formulation wrong; opium isn’t the disease, it is the symptom. The problem is the military regime that has, in my opinion, driven the ethnic minorities into rebellion and effectively destroyed the economy. Years ago, a Kachin friend explained it to me like this: a bag of rice to feed your family for a month weighs something like thirty pounds. You could sell a viss of opium, roughly 3 ½ pounds if I remember correctly, and buy enough rice to feed your family for a month. The Burmese Army attacks your village. Would you rather be running through the mountains carrying thirty pounds or 3 pounds?

  Even if the actually fighting has died down, I still suspect people feel far from secure. When I was in the Northern Shan State, a Kachin worker took me to a hill outside the town I was working in, and pointed out all the places where fighting had taken place. As he said as he pointed to just about every side of the town, “There, fighting, fighting, fighting… now, no fighting. No peace, but no fighting.” Now that was ten years ago, but I doubt the situation has changed materially.

  This is not to say that if Aung San Suu Kyi were to come to power tomorrow, all opium cultivation would immediately cease and the Shan State would become an economic powerhouse. However, any long term eradication will only work when there is political stability and at least the chance of economic improvement. I think crop substitution projects can be valid, but by and large they are simply laying a foundation for the future. Also, what do you propose to take the place of opium production? It appears the answer is methamphetamine production, so I don’t think it can be characterized as a step forward.

  If there is anything to be learned from the Northern Thailand experience, it is drug production is a “dirty” industry, and as economic prosperity increases, it is tolerated much less and eventually has to move. Just like the US where as economic living standards improved, local smoke stack industries or junk car lots were forced to move, in some cases overseas. The Thais will use the drugs, and certainly take the money (just like my fellow Americans do) they just don’t want have the production, and the related problems, in their back yards.

• 6 Jon Fernquest // Feb 14, 2007 at 4:59 pm

  “The problem is the military regime that has, in my opinion, driven the ethnic minorities into rebellion and effectively destroyed the economy.”

  This statement may not be completely accurate since according to my understanding warfare in this region has never really ceased since the end of WWII. (See Thant Myint U’s recent book or Martin Smith’s)

  Putting aside the issue of blame for conflict for a moment, does opium cultivation and heroin production thrive in areas of indirect rule where the Burmese government has cut a deal with local political forces like the Wa or the Shan? It seems that indirect rule creates peace but also creates conditions favourable to drug production.

  Admittedly, I don’t know anything about the topic of drug production in the Shan States. Are there good surveys to gain a working knowledge of the situation?

• 7 anonymous // Feb 14, 2007 at 5:26 pm

  There’s gotta be some way we can blame this on Thaksin….

• 8 Jon Fernquest // Feb 14, 2007 at 6:20 pm

  I might add that from the perspective of someone living in Yangon (c. 2000) armed ethnic groups were rebels involved in insurgency. I’m not claiming that what follows is the full truth, just one perspective on the situation.

  For instance, Wa could often be found completely armed in Yangon since they were given permission to carry their weapons even in urban areas like Yangon by the government. I remember encountering a bunch of them loaded in the back of a pickup truck in the evening on the ring road that runs around the national stadium in Yangon while I was doing my daily running exercise. I was also downtown in China town when all hell broke loose down the block. People said that the Wa had got in gunfight. Also access to Moulmein or Ye (Byeik) even further south was cut off to foreigners after the supposedly supposedly cut off the monthly amount of money they were paying, I believe a Mon, “rebel” organisation to stop fighting. They had raided a gold shop in Moulmein supposedly which made it sound like banditry. In fact banditry seems to be quite common in Burma. I remember when I was staying in Taungyi in the Shan States, bandits had struck along the main road from Taung-gyi to Thazi.

  In Martin Smith’s book the list of acronyms of armed ethnic, religious, student, or political groups takes up a whole page I believe. Clearly, this is not sustainable in any modern nation state.

  On the other hand, the methods of the Burmese military have always exacerbated the situation, like pressganging people or basically kidnapping them and using them as porters. We had a Tamil clothes washer (Dobi) with three children whose husband had supposedly disappeared in this fashion. I knew someone else who was seized as they were crossing the Salween on a ferry boat.

  Also everytime we opened the curtains of our apartment in Yangon we peered into the bare cavernous unfinished floor of the next door apartment where the family of the contractor were camped out. The story ran that he had financed construction by taking money up front from buyers and from a Wa owned bank. One of the numerous sudden economic shocks that hit Yangon (for example Burma-Thailand border war shoots gas price up because of stockpiling, shooting the exchange rate up and sudden inflation, of course with jail threats to market vendors who raise their prices) an economic shock had apparently made the project unfeasible, he could not complete the building project, was arrested, tried, and imprisoned on fraud charges. Thus his family camping out in the hulk of the abandoned building waiting for him to return. Again, this is just one perspective. I knew someone with a small fertliser import business who was also caught in the middle when the oil price shock happened. The only one’s legally allowed to hold dollars were passport holders.

  The work of activists in documenting all the hideous rights atrocities is admirable, but you have to remember that Burma-Myanmar is essentially a little alternative universe sealed off from the world, an alternative universe that really hardly gets reported on at all in the media or books except for certain issues from a certain perspective, repeated over and over again. IMHO this mono-focus is not constructive and won’t help solve the near 20 year impasse. Thant Myint U seems to have a more nuanced persective on the situation and history.

• 9 aiontay // Feb 14, 2007 at 11:54 pm

  The area where I worked was pretty firmly under the control of the Burmese military, although there were several adjacent areas under ceasefire groups. I had to get passes from MI and the regular army just to move between points There were opium poppies everywhere. I never made it to the Wa area, so I can’t really compare differences in opium production between areas under indirect vs direct control.

  Having read Martin Smith, and Lintner, and a bunch of folks, and having done my thesis on the Kachins, I will agree that the fallout from WWII has a lot to do with opium cultivation, as does the KMT invasion of the Shan States, and the US’s secret wars in SE Asia. Let’s not forget British colonialism. However, the military has run things for forty years, so they’ve had a bit of time to improve things I would think. As I said, if ASSK were released tomorrow, I’d still expect it to take a long time for things to change, but I don’t see how you can blame the ravages of the “Burmese Way to Socialism” on anyone else but the military, and it is the economic collapse and the brutal campaigns against insurgents that have led to the current situation.

  My perspective on the Wa, and I have had Wa friends, is that they are the favorite whipping boy of the Burmese, and the Thais and US for that matter. Some of the stuff I’ve seen in the Bangkok Post, which is a paper I really like, verges on racists. Geez, you take a few heads and your people are branded forever. It is kind of like Sun Boy, Patagoodle, and all my other beloved Kiowa ancestors. Yeah, they scalped a lot of people and were consequently branded as savages. Of course the people they were scalping were scalping them too, in addition to trying to steal their land. Not that this justifies their cruelty or the current drug trafficking of the Wa, but I’d say you have to be careful of perceptions. Oh, I and while I was there a Wa soldier had just killed a Burmese police officer in Mandalay, and all the Kachins and Karens I knew, including some living in Rangoon/Yangon were pretty happy about it.

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