Word: shanlis
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...Staff writer Shan Wang can be reached at wang38@fas.harvard.edu...
...jade and timber to hydropower and natural gas - is concentrated in the tribal regions. The planned route for a Chinese-financed project of dual natural-gas and oil pipelines, for instance, begins in an ethnically troubled part of western Burma's Arakan state and runs past the part of Shan state where fighting raged last month in Kokang. Construction of the Shwe pipeline project, the biggest ever foreign investment commitment to Burma, was supposed to begin this month, but ethnic skirmishes may imperil that schedule. Reports are also trickling in from Kachin state, where dam projects funded by foreign investors...
...recent months, the decades of persistent discrimination have spawned an unusual alliance between four armed ethnic groups: the KIA, the United Wa State Army, the Eastern Shan State Army (also known as the Mongla army) and the Kokang Army. The junta's lightning strike on the Kokang capital Laogai, which is estimated to have caused some 200 civilian casualties, left the other alliance members ill-equipped to respond immediately. But exile groups in China and Thailand are reporting that the Wa - which, with some 25,000 foot soldiers and an arsenal of heavy artillery, is the strongest of the rebel...
...border force. By early August, the junta was accusing Peng of being behind an illegal arms-and-drugs factory. The illicit activity, claimed the regime, compelled it to invade Kokang turf, even though the warlord's business proclivities had been an open secret for years. Indeed, both the Eastern Shan and Wa are also believed to have financed themselves through such shady means; the latter's southern commander, Wei Hsueh-kang, has been singled out by the U.S. Treasury Department as a major drug trafficker. Indeed, one battle-avoiding option for the junta is luring corrupt ethnic elders...
...ethnic minorities. In the 1990 elections that the military disregarded, its proxy party was trounced by Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy. But what's often forgotten about those polls is that the parties that finished second and third in terms of parliamentary seats were ethnic ones from Shan and Arakan states, respectively. (The military party came in fourth.) Burma's generals surely want to avoid a repeat of that ethnic electoral success...