The Burmese Labyrinth. Carlos Sardiña Galache
presence in Kachin State but, more crucially, its economic stakes in that land rich in natural resources, most importantly timber and jade. The jewel in its crown is its vast complex of jadeite mines at Hpakant, in the west of the state, most of which were gradually snatched from the KIO by the government after the ceasefire. This reduced one of the Kachin guerrillas’ main sources of revenue. The jade business was greatly expanded during the ceasefire years, and it is now in the hands of military-owned conglomerates; a few generals, including the family of the former junta supremo, senior General Than Shwe; a few cronies; and an assortment of drug lords associated with the latter.
The financial rewards of the jade business in Hpakant are astonishingly high. According to a report published in 2015 by Global Witness, the value of jade production may have amounted in 2014 to as much as US$31 billion, of which the Burmese state received only US$374 million in official revenues – less than 2 per cent of the total. To put things in perspective, the jade business amounted to 48 per cent of the country’s official GDP and forty-six times the government’s expenditure on healthcare.17 It goes without saying that the wider Kachin population does not receive any benefit from this massive economic plunder, which is also resulting in enormous environmental devastation in Kachin State. The jade mines have also attracted many workers from all over the country, lured by the prospect of making a fortune – albeit unlikely. The big money is made by others. Instead, the workers are often given heroin or methamphetamine, at first to endure the harsh working conditions. Eventually, when they have become addicted, many of them are paid only with drugs.
It is the Kachin population that has suffered most acutely from the conflict. Since the war was reignited in 2011, the Burmese government has for most of the time blocked any access to humanitarian agencies to the tens of thousands of displaced people sheltered in KIO-controlled areas. The conditions in the camps for internally displaced persons (IDPs) in those areas are far from perfect, but the KIO and several Kachin civil society groups have been able to organize them with remarkable efficiency, all the more impressive given the harsh circumstances.
Knowing well that its survival depends on popular support, the KIO has made an effort to protect the IDPs in its territory, whereas those in government-controlled areas live in fear of the Burmese authorities. Since the resumption of the war, dozens of people have been accused of being members of the KIO or having links with the organization. Most have been charged with violating Article 17.1 of the Unlawful Association Act, which makes punishable any link with a clandestine organization. A prominent case has been that of Lahtaw Brang Shawng, a young farmer and father of two who was arrested in June 2012 by Military Affairs Security (MAS) agents and accused of being part of a KIO bomb plot. Brang Shawng and his family had escaped from the fighting around their village a few months before, and were IDPs living in a camp in Myitkyina.
A few weeks after Brang Shawng’s arrest, I interviewed his wife, Ze Nyoi, and his lawyer, Mar Khar. Ze Nyoi, a soft-spoken woman whose sad expression bore the emotional scars of her ordeal, had led protests against the detention of her husband, of whose innocence she was convinced. ‘They claim he holds a university degree, but that’s not true. He’s a very simple man who speaks very little Burmese and had to provide for all his family. He couldn’t go anywhere and join the KIA, as they claim’, she told me, pointing to the fact that many Kachin in rural areas do not speak the language of the majority. She had visited her husband three or four times when he was under detention – short visits of no more than five minutes, always in the presence of the police. ‘He couldn’t talk much, but I could see clearly he was injured, and they didn’t provide any medical treatment for him, they only gave him paracetamol’, she said. The authorities wanted to make an example for other IDPs, so one week after his detention they paraded a dishevelled Brang Shawng in the IDP camp, ostensibly to re-enact the crime, but most likely to intimidate the other displaced people in the camp.
It was so evident that Brang Shawng had been tortured to extract a confession that the first judge who heard his case asked him to remove his shirt, his lawyer told me. What he discovered, apart from bruises all over his torso, was an audio recorder taped to his chest by the police, to make sure he repeated the confession they had dictated to him. In a rare example of judicial independence, the judge refused to accept his confession; but he was quickly replaced by a more compliant judge. ‘They didn’t have any evidence against him, only his confession, extracted after weeks of torture’, Mar Khar told me. Eventually, on July 2013, Brang Shawng was sentenced to three years in jail – but President Thein Sein pardoned him one week later with another dozen Kachin serving time for similar offences.
In 2014, I met Brang Shawng in the camp. He was a man broken by the torture he had suffered for months on end. Covered with scars, he was unable to move properly and work for his family, and he suffered constant headaches and memory loss as a consequence of the many blows he had received to his head.
In the Kachin war, as in many others, allegiances are complex affairs, and opportunities for profit often trump military or ideological considerations. The story of a man I met in Myitkyina on December 2017 is instructive about these grey zones and the economy of the war. Let us call him Hkun Lah; a Kachin man in his fifties, he was the son of a distinguished soldier who had fought in World War II with the US army, and then had joined the Burmese army after independence. When I met him, he was working in one of the camps for IDPs in the state’s capital. He had joined the Burmese army in the mid 1980s, ‘as it gave me the chance to play football’, he explained half-jokingly. As a Kachin, he was always under suspicion in the military. He could join the army, but he had little chance of being promoted to a high-ranking position, and he was confined to administrative duties.
He had relatives in the KIO and secretly sympathized with them. For years, he passed secret documents and ammunition to the enemy, until he was caught in 2009. He was arrested and sentenced to seven years in jail, but he was released only two years later, in an amnesty ordered by the president. If the sentence was not very long, that was due to the fact that he was only charged with passing secret documents, not for giving ammunition to the KIA. He explained that the army simply did not want to dig into the issue too much, because investigating it would have led to uncovering the embarrassing fact that many in the Burmese military were involved in selling ammunition for a considerable profit to the KIA and other groups. ‘Many people were involved [in] that, including high-ranking officers who were Burmans; it was better not to stir that’, he explained.
The Tatmadaw is not the only enemy that the KIO and the Kachin are fighting. They are also waging a war against a faceless foe – drug addiction – that has been undermining communities throughout the state for years. Drugs are widely available in Burma, and the country is the second-largest producer of opium in the world after Afghanistan. According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, in 2015 there were around 55,500 hectares of opium poppy plantations in the country. Most were in Shan State, the southern neighbour of Kachin State, but around 4,200 were in Kachin.18 Shan State is also the biggest source of methamphetamine in Southeast Asia. Many of these narcotics make their way into both government- and KIA-controlled areas.
To combat the use of drugs, the KIO established the Drug Eradication Committee in 2010. As well as dealing with drug users, the KIO is also waging a war on drug producers. When an opium poppy field is discovered in its territory, soldiers destroy the harvest and attempt to persuade the owners to plant different crops. If a farmer is discovered planting poppies again, he is sent to jail. In 2014, I interviewed the secretary of the Committee, Hpaudau Gam Ba, a burly man who had been a member of the KIO since 1988, and who also ran a rehabilitation centre in Laiza. Many Kachin believe that the drug scourge in his community is part of a well-planned conspiracy by the Tatmadaw to weaken the Kachin. This notion is so widely spread and accepted that it is virtually impossible to find any Kachin who does not subscribe to it.19 ‘Some people from the government even distribute the drugs themselves and then jail the Kachin addicts. This is part of their strategy to divide and rule’, Gam Ba told me.
Nobody has conclusively demonstrated that there is a master plan to flood Kachin with drugs, and other explanations are perfectly plausible: since Kachin neighbours areas with high production of narcotics, it is natural that so many of them find their way there; law enforcement is often arbitrary not only in Kachin, but throughout Burma, and corrupt policemen, generals and civil