Word: burma
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Last year, the Chinese came. The villagers living in western Burma's remote Arakan state couldn't quite fathom what the Chinese told them, that below their rice fields might lie a vast reserve of oil. For three months the Chinese drilled the earth near the muddy Kaladan River in search of black gold. Then, just as suddenly, they left. In December, the Indians arrived. Through Burmese intermediaries, they took the village's paddies as their own, depriving locals of their main source of income. Compensation was promised, villagers tell me, but none has been paid...
...Western dialogue over what to do about Burma's repressive military regime is often framed as a single dilemma: whether or not to impose international sanctions. The debate is polarizing. The pro-sanctions crowd claims the moral high ground, deploring the enrichment of a clutch of ethnocentric Burmese generals whose impulses are most brutal against the roughly 40% of the population that, like the villages of Arakan state, is composed of ethnic minorities. The engagement side preaches practicality, arguing that some investment will trickle down to the populace and that cultural exchange is better than imposed isolationism. When U.S. Secretary...
...truth about Burma, renamed as Myanmar by its generals, is that the sanctions debate is immaterial. While American and European foreign policy thinkers ponder how to financially strangle an army government that has ruled since 1962, Burma's regional neighbors are embarking on a new Great Game, scrambling to outdo each other for access to this resource-rich land. "Sanctions don't work if most countries ignore them," says Naw La, an exiled environmentalist with the Kachin Development Networking Group in Thailand. "The military is selling our natural heritage without any concern for our people...
...Mosquito Coast In return for oil, natural gas, timber, hydropower, gemstones, cash crops and a periodic table's worth of minerals, countries like China, India, Thailand, Malaysia and South Korea are propping up - and massively enriching - Burma's top brass. In the first nine months of 2008, foreign investment in Burma almost doubled year on year to nearly $1 billion, according to government figures that don't even take into account significant underground economic activity. Burma today is estimated to produce 90% of the world's rubies by value, 80% of its teak, and is home to one of Asia...
...resource-hungry countries cozy up to the junta, they are discovering that Burma's natural wealth is most bountiful in areas where ethnic minorities simmer under the rule of the ethnic Burmese generals. Officially, the Burmese junta recognizes that the country is a union of at least 135 distinct groups. Yet the top ranks of the military are practically devoid of any non-Burmese presence. Army persecution of Burma's diverse tribes has festered for decades, and the proliferation of junta-controlled mines and concessions in the minority regions only exacerbates the tensions. Hundreds of thousands of ethnic villagers have...