• Burma: Forests for Export to China
• Laos: US war on drugs is leading to increased poverty
• Vietnam: Government repression of Indigenous Peoples

LOCAL STRUGGLES AND NEWS

- Burma: Forests for Export to China

Asia's forests are being destroyed at a staggering rate. China, which has become, virtually overnight, the second largest importer of logs in the world, trailing only the United States, has a lot to do with it. (The volume of uncut logs arriving in China has more than tripled since 1998 to over 15 million cubic meters.).

Domestic consumption is growing fast, as China's burgeoning middle class buys new homes and Beijing undertakes huge civil-construction projects. China's entry into the World Trade Organization has also driven tariffs for most timber imports down to zero, fueling imports as well as a rapidly expanding export industry in everything from pulp and paper to furniture and decorations, most of it destined for the United States and Europe.

In 1998, after the People's Republic was hit by devastating floods caused by deforestation, Beijing banned logging along the upper reaches of the Yangtze and Yellow rivers and called for a drastic reduction in other provinces. But there is growing evidence that it has merely exported this problem. To make up for the shortfall in timber, and to meet the consumption needs of its booming economy, China is devouring the forests of neighbouring countries, much of it in the form of illegal logging leading to the destruction of huge swathes of pristine old-growth forests.

As its extraordinary economic boom gains momentum, China is now the world's fastest-growing market for tropical timber. Its forest-product imports soared by 75 per cent last year, reaching $11.2 billion (U.S.). Its furniture factories are expanding by as much as 40 per cent a year.

The timber trade to China is so massive that it is provoking remorse even among those who are doing the selling. "It's the biggest mistake we've made," said Bao Youxiang, head of the United Wa State Army, a former guerrilla army that has become a regional authority in northeastern Burma. "We've destroyed our environment," he said. "Because of a lack of income, the local authorities were forced to sell this resource to China. It's the only resource they had."

Until recently, Burma was one of the most thickly forested countries in the world. Its vast ancient forests were among the richest and most biodiverse in the world. It still contains more than 80 per cent of the world's teak trees, along with many other rare hardwoods. But its old-growth forests, which used to cover 60 per cent of the country as recently as 1960, now cover less than 30 per cent. And the percentage is falling fast.

When economic sanctions were imposed on Burma's military dictatorship in the 1990s, the regime responded with a dramatic increase in logging concessions and timber exports to bolster its revenue and maintain its power. Today it has one of the world's highest rates of deforestation.

More than 9 per cent of Burma's legal foreign earnings came from logging in 2002, according to official data. But the actual amount of timber revenue is believed to be more than twice the official figure, with huge amounts of the logging trade illegal or unrecorded.

Even as a ban was supposedly being imposed in the Wa territory, Burma's forestry ministry was giving new logging concessions to the Wa and other regional authorities on its northern and eastern borders. According to local media reports, the Burma authorities are aiming to double their earnings from timber exports.

The problem is compounded by the heavy involvement of Burma's drug lords and military authorities in the timber business. Drug traffickers have often invested in logging companies as a way of laundering their profits. And the military regime has awarded valuable logging concessions to its business cronies and political allies in exchange for their support.

According to a detailed report on the booming trade published by Global Witness, "The local population has benefited little in economic terms, but the powerful have enriched themselves."

Article based on information from: “Myanmar mired in a deforestation crisis”, Geoffrey York, Globe and Mail, http://www.globeandmail.ca/servlet/story/RTGAM.20040513.wmyanmar0513/BNStory/International/ ; “A Conflict of Interest: The uncertain future of Burma's forests", Global Witness (October 2003), http://www.globalwitness.org/reports/show.php/en.00046.html ; “A reckless harvest”, Geoffrey York, Newsweek, http://bulletin.ninemsn.com.au/bulletin/eddesk.nsf/All/017D7A2BB842501ECA256CB400071927

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- Laos: US war on drugs is leading to increased poverty

When Secretary of State Colin Powell presented the US State Department’s 2003 human rights country reports earlier this year, he obviously hoped that the scandal of US forces’ systematic torture of Iraqi prisoners would never see the light of day. “President Bush regards the defense and advancement of human rights as America’s special calling,” Powell said.

Putting aside the Bush regime’s staggering hypocrisy, the US 2003 report on human rights in Laos makes disturbing reading. The Lao government’s “human rights record remained poor, and it continued to commit serious abuses”, the report states.

For more than a decade, the Lao government has been carrying out a programme to remove Indigenous Peoples from their ancestral homes in the mountains to lowland areas of the country. In its report, the US State Department notes that during 2003, the Lao government “accelerated efforts” to relocate upland farmers to lowland areas, “in keeping with the Government’s plan to end opium production by 2005 and slash-and-burn agriculture by 2010.”

The Lao government’s resettlement programme amounts to a complete restructuring of rural society in Laos. Hundreds of villages, many of them of Indigenous Peoples, have been moved from the mountains down to lowland areas. In theory, the government provides services such as roads, schools and health care at a series of “focal zones” in lowland areas and “encourages” people to move. In reality, “District and provincial officials used persuasion and, in some cases, verbal orders to encourage villages to relocate, especially in the northern provinces,” according to the US human rights report.

A foreign development worker in Laos, speaking on condition of anonymity, describes the reality of life in the focal zones: “In too many cases the economic alternatives for those relocated are nothing more than modern indentured servitude. Young girls end up in brothels and the men end up exploited as illegal immigrant labourers in neighbouring Thailand.”

The US report confirms that “The result was that in some districts relocated villagers experienced increased poverty, hunger, malnourishment, susceptibility to disease, and increased mortality.”

Yet, in the north of Laos, much of the relocation is carried out with support from the US government, in the name of its “war on drugs”. Since 1989, the US government has handed over US$38 million for drug control to the Lao government.

Many villagers in northern Laos, including Indigenous Peoples, produce opium as a cash crop. Selling opium is often their only source of income to buy food and medicine.

Although Laos is the third largest opium producer in the world, its production is far below that of Afghanistan and Burma and it exports little. Even if opium production in Laos was completely stopped it would have no impact on the availability of heroin in the US or Europe. Yet the US Bureau for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs commented in a March 2004 report that the “trafficked heroin is the reason for international concern about the opium/heroin situation in Laos.”

The war on drugs in Laos started in 1989 with a “Lao–American integrated development project” in Houa Phan province in north-eastern Laos. The project aimed to decrease opium cultivation and involved road building and irrigation, supposedly to provide alternative livelihoods for opium growers. The project was mired in allegations of corruption, badly implemented infrastructure projects and enormous waste. A road built under the project had to be rebuilt last year at a cost, to US taxpayers, of US$500,000. Some of the people resettled have returned to the uplands.

Despite the problems, the US has expanded its anti-drug “aid” to projects in Phonsaly and Luang Prabang provinces. Other governments, including Germany, have joined in with integrated development or detoxification projects in opium growing areas.

In an attempt to meet the 2005 deadline of eradicating opium production, provincial and district level officials have started implementing draconian measures to eliminate opium growing. Officials have sent the army, youth brigades, student groups and the Women’s Union to opium growing areas to cut down poppies.

As a result, many upland communities have seen their only cash crop destroyed, with no help to find alternatives to opium production.

Opium can have devastating effects on communities, families and individuals, especially when opium use becomes widespread in a village. But when opium addicts lose their home-grown supply, they are forced to buy it from neighbouring villages. They are often tempted to buy cheaper and more dangerous alternatives such as methamphetamine derivatives. “This has had consequences far worse for local communities than opium has ever had and is leading to severe impoverishment and cultural disruption,” says the anonymous development worker.

The US-Lao anti-drug programme is so far not even helping to reduce the amount of opium in Laos. In 2003, according to the US government, potential opium production was 200 tons, an increase of 11 per cent over the previous year. The US Bureau for International Narcotics explains in its March 2004 report that eradication of poppies in accessible areas is leading to traffickers contracting farmers to grow poppies in more remote areas.

The Lao government hopes to get more funding for its anti-drug activities. It has made a formal request for a US$10 million loan from the World Bank for a project which would be carried out by the UN Office of Drugs and Crime.

Through the mechanism of opium eradication and “development”, the Lao government, with the willing backing of the US and other Northern governments, is handing over Indigenous Peoples’ land to be logged, converted to industrial tree plantations, flooded by hydropower dams, dug up for mineral extraction or “protected” in the name of nature conservation.

By supporting the Lao government’s resettlement programme, the foreign development worker concludes, the US government’s war on drugs is “impoverishing thousands, promoting cultural disruption, and strengthening the hands of the repressive elements in the Lao government who were already unsympathetic to the needs, rights, and livelihood systems of ethnic minority people in the country.”

By: Chris Lang, e-mail: http://chrislang.org

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- Vietnam: Government repression of Indigenous Peoples

The Vietnamese government responded brutally to peaceful demonstrations by Indigenous Peoples in the Central Highlands of Vietnam in April. Police used tear gas, electric truncheons and water cannons to prevent demonstrators from entering Buon Ma Thuot, the capital city of Dak Lak province. The police were helped by men armed with metal bars, shovels, and machetes. At least 10 people were killed and hundreds of people were wounded. Many people did not return to their villages after the protests and are still missing.

The Indigenous Peoples, collectively known as Montagnards in Vietnam’s Central Highlands, are demanding religious freedom and the return of their ancestral land.

In the last decade hundreds of thousands of ethnic Vietnamese have moved to the Central Highlands, either on their own initiative or through state-sponsored transmigration programmes. The Montagnards have seen vast areas of their farmland, swiddens and forests converted to rubber, coffee and fast-growing tree plantations or flooded to make way for hydropower and irrigation dams.

In February 2001, Montagnards staged peaceful demonstrations in provincial capitals in the highlands. Vietnamese authorities brought in thousands of police and soldiers who violently broke up the protests.

Since then police have arrested hundreds of people, sometimes torturing them to extract confessions. Several hundred Montagnards have gone into hiding, living in camouflaged hideouts in forests or coffee plantations, in holes under people’s houses or in mountain caves.

Many more tried to flee to safety in Cambodia but in 2002, under pressure from Vietnam, the Cambodian government closed refugee camps on the border with Vietnam. Cambodian security forces now deport any Montagnards who try to cross the border from Vietnam. They are forced back to Vietnam and on returning many have been beaten, detained or put in prison.

A total of 124 Montagnards have been imprisoned for periods of up to 13 years, charged with crimes like “destabilising security”, “distributing propaganda”, or “organising illegal migrations” of Montagnards to Cambodia.

The government has placed restrictions on travel in the Central Highlands, closing off the area to journalists and diplomats. Montagnards attempting to communicate with the outside world run the risk of arrest. Meetings of more than two people are banned, as is “Dega Protestantism”, a form of Christianity which the government claims is linked to demands for separatism by the Montagnards.

New York-based Human Rights Watch reports that police have surrounded villages, farms and forests where they suspect that Montagnard activists or church leaders are hiding. In the process of searching for people, security forces have often beaten people and destroyed their homes.

To make matters worse, the government has plans for a series of hydropower dams in the Se San and Sre Pok River basins, two tributaries of the Mekong River which flow from the Central Highlands into Cambodia.

The Yali Falls dam on the Se San River in Vietnam was completed in 1999. The dam has caused serious problems for downstream communities in Cambodia. Several people drowned in flash floods caused by sudden releases of water from the dam and poor water quality has caused skin rashes and stomach problems. Fisheries in the Se San River have declined dramatically.

If built, the proposed dams in the Se San and Sre Pok River basins would result in the eviction of at least 12,500 people, many of them Montagnards, and would worsen problems downstream.

In 2002, the consulting firms SWECO, Statkraft Engineering and Norplan completed stage 1 of a National Hydropower Plan Study in Vietnam, funded by the governments of Sweden and Norway.

Stage 1 of the study is full of the language of stakeholder consultation and participation. Yet the study proposes several dams for the Se San River, without any mention of government repression in the Central Highlands.

SWECO, Statkraft Engineering and Norplan’s experts explain that “To promote development” in the Se San basin “the Government has launched programs for reforestation, hunger elimination and poverty reduction as well as development of infrastructure.” The Vietnamese government’s policies for the Se San basin are “aimed at improving the socio-economic development”, they add.

The reality of the government’s policies in the Central Highlands is starkly different.

A woman from the Ede indigenous group described to Human Rights Watch what happened to Montagnards near Ban Ma Thuot on 10 April 2004: “A thousand people tried to get away from the slaughter by the police and civilians. They were beating us with metal bars and sticks. People were bleeding from their throats, noses, mouths, and eyes. Those who tried to hide in the coffee plantation were caught, beaten and killed on the spot.”

Of course, consultants from dam-building firms are unlikely to risk upsetting their clients in the Vietnamese government by mentioning anything unpleasant like repression, particularly when there is the possibility of winning future contracts. SWECO won a contract from Electricity of Vietnam to produce the technical design of the Se San 3 dam, after recommending that the dam should go ahead in stage 1 of the National Hydropower Plan Study.

To Human Rights Watch’s Brad Adams it is clear that Vietnam is escalating its repression of the Montagnards. He calls on the UN and governments, such as Sweden and Norway, who are providing aid to Vietnam to “take a more active role in protesting and preventing such serious human rights violations.”

Through their support to Vietnam’s dam-building industry, which will lead to more evictions and the flooding of large areas of agricultural land, the governments of Sweden and Norway are helping to make a human rights crisis worse.

By: Chris Lang, e-mail: http://chrislang.org