Asia-Pacific, Development & Aid, Headlines, Human Rights, Indigenous Rights

BURMA: Poppy Ban Signals Start of Humanitarian Challenges

Larry Jagan

BANGKOK, Jun 28 2005 (IPS) - Burma’s notorious drug barons, former rebels from the ethnic Wa group, have announced an end to poppy cultivation in the areas they control, but United Nations officials say it is only a first step to rehabilitating Wa villagers.

Wa leaders declared their areas in northern Burma free from poppy at a recent low-key ceremony to coincide with the U.N. day against drugs.

A few low-level officers from the country’s ruling military regime and Chinese provincial officials attended, but a planned international event with foreign journalists, diplomats and U.N. representatives was cancelled by the junta.

“The opium ban is an excellent first step in the right direction, but as in a marathon we have only covered the first 10 km. The next 30 km will be even harder,” according to Jean-Luc Lemahieu, head of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) in Rangoon.

“The crucial question is whether the ban can be sustained through tackling the underlying problems of poverty and effectively dealing with the other important issue – the production of metamphetamines,” he added.

Opium production has fallen dramatically over the past few years in Shan State, where the Wa and another ethnic rebel group, the Kokang, have controlled growing for the past decade. Both groups signed ceasefire agreements with Rangoon in 1989 and were given a measure of economic autonomy in return.

Some 10 years ago they also agreed to stop poppy production, as a result of pressure from the Burmese military regime and the U.N., which offered to provide them with alternative crops and other forms of development assistance. The target of mid-2005 was agreed upon, and pressure from neighbouring China in the last few years convinced the Wa and Kokang leaders to take their promises seriously.

But in the past two years aid workers in the region have been warning that poppy farmers in the isolated, mountainous regions of northern Burma face a humanitarian crisis as opium production is curtailed since growing the crop has been their sole source of income for centuries.

In that time thousands of villagers have died of disease and malnutrition, according to senior Wa leaders.

Several villages have been wiped out by malaria that could easily have been prevented, after locals were forced to move from higher areas free from mosquitoes to malaria-affected areas without doctors or medical treatment.

The villagers now fear for their future – the poppy resin that they harvest provides cash for their hedge fund against food shortages and disease for the future. But when the small income they have put aside from this year’s poppy cultivation runs out, they will have no such reserve.

Experts say this situation is only going to worsen now that the Wa ban on poppy has come into force. But even the danger of famine and starvation has not daunted the Wa leaders’ determination to keep their promise and to end poppy cultivation.

U.N. officials are also worried about the consequences of the Wa ban. After the Kokang ended poppy production two years ago because of strong pressure from Rangoon and Beijing, the global body had to mount an emergency food programme in the area, which continues today with the help of a few international aid agencies.

The officials fear a humanitarian crisis among the Wa could lead to instability.

“The first demands more international support to avoid a humanitarian crisis and the second demands concrete action against criminal cross-border organisations, which have no interest in seeing stability, good governance and political reform implemented soon,” warned Lemahieu in an interview.

More than 350,000 Kokang and Wa have already lost their main source of cash income, with no alternative in sight, added the U.N.’s anti-drug chief.

“This will increase to more than two million people this year,” he said.

Lemahieu believes the effects of the Kokang’s ban on opium production in 2003 are a harbinger of things to come for the Wa.

“The population fell by 60,000, or more than 25 percent, with most people heading inland in search of a better living. Two out of three private Chinese clinics and pharmacies closed their doors and one in three community schools stopped operating.”

“About 6,000 children were forced to leave school, effectively halving the enrolment rate compared to the previous year,” added Lemahieu.

Over the past few years, the Wa have taken draconian measures to implement their plans. Instructions were passed from the top down – following the Chinese model in which the Wa leaders were trained, in the days when they belonged to the Burmese Communist Party.

But countless villagers interviewed earlier could not recount the reasons the Wa leaders gave for banning poppy cultivation – though they did know the consequences of disobeying orders.

“We will have to stop growing poppy,” said Nang Yee Noon. “If we don’t, we’ll be carted off to jail.”

Apart from issuing the edict, the Wa leaders’ strategy to eliminate poppy has included shifting huge numbers of people living in the areas under their control – ostensibly from infertile highland areas where poppy is one of the few crops that can be grown successfully, to lower more fertile ground where rice and fruit trees flourish.

The most notable relocation was the movement of some 50 thousand people from the northern Wa areas to the southern command near the border with Thailand more than four years ago.

In Namteet, on the Chinese border, some 20 thousand villagers have been shifted from the highlands – where all they knew was how to grow poppy – to the lowlands, where new villages have been built for them. There the Wa now grow rice and work in plantations of substitute crops like rubber and fruit, developed by the Wa administration.

“We had no choice but to move,” said farmer Nyi Meng, who had been recently relocated. “We knew we would not be allowed to grow poppy soon so we moved. But since then we have hardly been able to eke out a living and many of us have become ill with malaria.”

Wa leaders concede that shifting the farmers and banning poppy growing will cause extreme hardship for their people, at least in the short run.

“It will take three to five years to recover from the crisis,” according to senior leader Shao Ming Liang.

But leaders say the bottom line is that they have to give up poppy cultivation if they are to preserve their political ambitions and economic autonomy – their primary concerns – and establish a Wa state within the Union of Burma.

While the Wa leaders have banned opium cultivation in their areas, the production of metamphetamines has continued to increase. If the Wa are to gain the international acceptance they crave, the former ethnic rebels must now turn their attention to tackling these synthetic drugs.