International environmentalists have praised Burma for its commitment to conservation, yet in reality the greening of the Burmese dictatorship is just another tool for military coercion and advancement.

By the year 2000, Burma had designated over 15,000 sq km of protected areas in 31 national parks and wildlife sanctuaries, covering 2.26 percent of the total area of the country, according to the Nature and Wilderness Conservation Division, or NWCD.

In addition to the protected areas already established, foreign conservationists are helping the Burmese regime to create the greater “Northern Forest Complex” in Kachin State, Burma.

STOPPING BY THE WOODS Logs from Kachin State make their way to China’s Yunnan Province.

 The first step was the establishment of the Hkakaborazi National Park in the far north of Kachin State, where neither the New York City-based international organization Wildlife Conservation Society, or WCS, nor the Burmese junta consulted with the Kachin Independence Organization, or KIO, which controlled the area.

Since the KIO ceasefire in 1994, at least 10 Burma Army bases have been established in the area, which was seen by the regime as an important national security zone.

The “Northern Forest Complex” took further shape at the end of 2002, when the WCS secured Burmese government approval for Hponkhan Razi, a reserve that links Hkakaborazi to the Hukaung Valley in Kachin State.

The complex would be completed by the incorporation of Bhumba Bum in southeastern Kachin State, a project now under review.  The establishment of this protected area may also serve national security needs, since it justifies a Burmese military presence in the area.

Most recently, Burma’s Ministry of Forestry recommended the expansion of the Hukaung Valley Wildlife Sanctuary in Kachin State to include much of the Hukaung Valley to be designated as the country’s first tiger reserve, the largest of its kind in the world.

Such developments prompted Alan Rabinowitz of the WCS, in a recent article in National Geographic, to praise Burma’s apparent commitment to conservation and to hail the country as the most cooperative he had ever worked with. So why the unexpected conservation-military alliance in Burma?

Burma provides a powerful example of the strength of environmental rhetoric when even a brutal military dictatorship can appear committed to conservation.

The government profits financially and politically from “environmentalism” to enable violent exploitation of natural resources, forced resettlement and the seizure of ethnic minority-populated land rich in biodiversity by the military.

These conservation-military tactics have already been documented in Karen State, where in 1996 Rangoon—in cooperation with WCS and multinational oil companies—created Myinmoletkat Nature Reserve. A few months later the Burma Army launched a military offensive that captured land controlled by the indigenous Karen to include it in the reserve and to grant logging concessions.

That action provides an idea of what could happen in the world’s largest tiger reserve in Kachin State, where the Burma Army, in cooperation with the WCS, has taken over KIO-controlled Kachin land, in the name of conservation.

In addition to the mining and logging concessions that followed the ceasefire in Kachin State, the Burmese government is using “conservation” as a tool to acquire territory and weaken ethnic-political organizations. At the same time, the regime is exploiting natural resources within park borders to fund state coffers.

The junta’s conservation policies at work in the Pegu Yoma.

The Burmese government uses international environmental organizations and treaties in order to gain “green money” and recognition as an “environmental steward”. However, a Burmese signature on an international environmental agreement does not commit the regime to specific actions. It is one thing to create new domestic laws under the provision of international treaties, but another matter altogether to democratically implement them.

International environmental organizations continue to endorse the protected area system in Burma, yet they are not allowed to discuss the political ramifications of establishing conservation parks under the control of the Burmese government. For these reasons, in 1997, Aung San Suu Kyi spoke out against doing conservation work in Burma.

A recent Global Witness report critical of the logging industry in northern Burma provoked numerous official Burmese government responses. An article in a 2003 issue of the New Light of Myanmar challenged the Global Witness report, saying, “The Myanmar Forest Policy has been formulated in a holistic and balanced manner…with the environment and sustainable development taking full cognizance of the forestry principles adopted at the United Nation Conference on Environment and Development, 1992.”

These remarks illustrate how the regime uses international environmental treaties to create an illusion of an environmentally responsible military administration, despite their politically and financially motivated clandestine resource extraction.

In one recent article in the journal Conservation Biology the authors admitted that six of twenty protected areas they reviewed had “military camps and/or insurgents indicating availability of firearms.” The six were named as Shwe U Daung, the Taunggyi Bird Sanctuary, Lamp Island Marine Park, the Shwesettaw Wildlife Sanctuary, the Pidaung Wildlife Sanctuary and Alaungdaw Kathapa National Park. In addition, numerous others have been found to have plantations, mining or logging operations within protected areas.

Among many suggestions for improvements, there is no mention in the article of how the contradictions of military bases and commercial extractive industries within protected areas might signal a problem with conservation in Burma.

Rangoon is not only using environmental rhetoric as a platform to enable state control to penetrate indigenous insurgent territory; it is using the adoption of international environmental treaties as a tool to gain political legitimacy.

Biodiversity conservation has been transformed by being adopted by the Burmese government. Their separate agendas become blurred, with a resulting hybrid of the Burma Army conducting politically sensitive conservation projects.

This “greening” of a military dictatorship creates contradictions as human rights abuses continue unchecked, civil society participation is ruled out and natural resources are exploited to earn foreign currency.

Zao Noam is a researcher on environmental politics in Burma.