Wa opium ban’s staying power questioned

No.08 - 10/2007
19 October 2007
Drugs
 
Wa opium ban’s staying power questioned
 
A study recently published by the Washington-based East-West Center (EWC) has called into question the sustainability of the opium ban imposed since two years earlier at the behest of the UN, China and Burma’s ruling junta.
 
The monograph titled The United Wa State Party: Narco-Army or Ethnic Nationalist Party? by Tom Kramer has traced several hurdles facing the Wa, whose homeland is tucked away in the remote eastern corner of Burma’s biggest domains, Shan State:
 
The first is the universal opposition in the Wa region against the ban. “Frankly speaking, if you say to the farmers, ‘Raise your hands if you agree with the poppy ban,’ none of them will,” said the United Wa State Party (UWSP) vice chairman Xiao Minliang. Those who resist face a fine of 500 yuan ($67) per every mu of poppy field (6 mu=1 acre)  and can be sentenced to six months in prison.
 
The second is the isolation of the region from the rest of Burma and even within the region itself, in spite of infrastructural development projects launched by the leadership. (In early 2004 it reported that 1,800 km of roads in the northern Wa region had been constructed along the Sino-Burma border and another 600km in the Southern Command along the Thai-Burma border.)
 
The third is the UWSP’s development approach which lacks community participation. “It is very difficult to make them understand community development,” according to an international aid worker.
 
Under the system, few dare to take their own initiative. Asked as to their roles and responsibilities, the answer from the local administrative units was always the same: follow orders, report on accomplishment of orders, and collect taxes.
 
The fourth, which is connected to the third, is the poverty of education. The Wa leadership says it had established 5 middle schools and 240 primary schools by the year 2000, but education beyond middle school is nonexistent in the Wa region. One international observer estimates that half of the UWSP Central Committee members are illiterate.
 
The fifth is that no more than 10% of the population of Northern Wa region had food and economic security without being dependent on opium. A number of its business ventures have not been success stories. Import taxes by the Chinese government and trade restrictions by the Burmese authorities have also contributed to business failures.
 
Moreover, the Wa’s biggest commercial firm the Hong Pang Group that is investing in a wide range of legal businesses in Burma does not belong to the UWSP’s Central Treasury, according to one of its Polit Buro member Bo Lai Kham. “Its shareholders are individual businessmen, people from Taiwan and Thailand,” he said.
 

_{Bo Lai Kham}

As a result, the local communities have no say and do not profit from the leadership’s business activities.
 
What most galls the population appear to be the upsurge of opium production in areas surrounding the Wa region where the production has stopped since 2005.
 
According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crimes (UNODC), opium output in Burma has increased 46% despite successful bans in Kokang and Wa regions.
 
Last but not least is the shortfall of funds and assistance to support the ex-poppy farmers. According toUNODC, development assistance to the Wa region since 1999 is less than $20 million, or less than $ 3 per person per year.
 
The UNODC estimated in December 2005 that 350,000 households or about two million people in Shan State alone lost their primary income as a result of bans on cultivation of opium. An assessment of the Kokang region, another major opium producer, one year after the ban found some 60,000 people out of the original population of 200,000 people had left the area.

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