A Prosperous Burma Would Benefit China
covering burma and southeast asia
Thursday, March 28, 2024
Magazine

COVER STORY

A Prosperous Burma Would Benefit China


By David Arnott JULY, 2004 - VOLUME 12 NO.7


RECOMMEND (242)
FACEBOOK
TWITTER
PLUSONE
 
MORE
E-MAIL
PRINT
(Page 3 of 4)

In the meantime, Burma has been exporting its troubles to its neighbors.

Non-traditional Security Problems

The non-traditional security problems entering China from Burma (including a crime wave led by drug-trafficking, more than a million heroin addicts and the spread of HIV/AIDS) will not be substantially reduced without political reform in Rangoon and an economic revival in northern Burma.

The bulk of Burmese heroin is consumed in Asia, primarily in China. Addiction rates are climbing as heroin becomes cheaper and China more urbanized. “The domestic consumption of narcotics is growing, and the kinds of drugs that are consumed have diversified,” said Luo Feng, vice minister of Public Security, quoted in the San Jose Mercury News on March 4 this year.

Luo claimed that expanding problems with narcotics abuse impose “heavy losses” to China’s economy amounting to billions of dollars a year and that crime rates climb with drug use. In an annual report, the country’s National Narcotics Control Commission said the number of drug addicts rose from about 900,000 people in 2002 to 1.05 million people in 2003, 740,000 of them heroin users.

“In China, 10 million people may be infected with HIV by 2010 unless effective action is urgently taken,” according to the UNAIDS Global Report. According to papers delivered at the recent Bangkok conference on HIV/AIDS, “HIV/AIDS was identified in China in 1989 in intravenous drug-users in Ruili … bordering Myanmar [Burma]. Ruili has Yunnan’s highest HIV prevalence [province with highest prevalence in China]” and “the epidemic in Yunnan is being driven by injecting drug users.”

The principal vector of HIV/AIDS transmission is needles shared by intravenous drug users, as documented along the drug trafficking routes from the Burmese border to Kunming and beyond.

These are some of the trans-border issues whose causes cannot be claimed to be the “internal affairs” of Burma, and which cannot be solved unilaterally but must be combated at the regional level. The Chinese have tried tackling the symptoms—helping Burma with crop substitution programs, training Burma’s police in drug control—but they are aware that these only touch the surface and that the drug economy of Burma’s northeast is unlikely to decline markedly until the underlying issues are dealt with.

To be effective, crop-substitution programs, for instance, require a substantial road-building effort to allow the alternative crops to be taken to market, within the large-scale economic development schemes needed to address the poverty most of the poppy farmers endure. In addition, the narco-lords (most have non-hostility arrangements with Rangoon) are unlikely to abandon their careers unless they are challenged by a political leadership working with authentic local representatives, based on political agreements which meet local needs and aspirations.



« previous  1  |  2  |  3  |  4  next page »

more articles in this section