The mining of Myanmar’s vast jade resources has come under attack from the West with the United States banning the importation of the jadeite from the country. While the military government now presents a softer and gentler face to the world, a humanitarian catastrophe is unfolding in the country’s northern Kachin state. Hidden behind the world’s longest running civil war, tens of thousands of people are being exploited in hell-like conditions; heroin is being abused on an unprecedented scale, creating the world’s largest HIV infected community, and what was once a pristine wilderness is being turned into an environmental nightmare.
Local lore has it that some time in the 13th century, a trader from China’s Yunnan province travelling through what is now the Hpakant region in the Kachin state of northern Myanmar picked up a boulder to balance the load on his mule. When it was broken open, the rock revealed a centre of vivid green material. Since then, the Chinese have been captivated by jade and for several centuries the Yunnan government funded many unsuccessful expeditions to establish the origin of this fascinating green gemstone.
It wasn’t until 1784 when Emperor Qianlong extended the Chinese border to absorb what is now Northern Myanmar that Chinese miners discovered the source of jadeite and established a trade route that, up until World War II, saw enormous quantities of Imperial jade transported to Beijing.
Today, this trade route ends in Hong Kong, the Western interface with China, where record prices continue to be set for jadeite, an obscure silicate of aluminium, sodium and silicon.
Hong Kong auction houses attract the interest of not just jewellery collectors but also movie stars, drug barons and growing numbers of Chinese millionaires all frantically driving the price of Imperial jade to a level where it now competes with diamonds as the most precious stone in the world and is revered across the East as the Stone of Heaven.
A recent Hong Kong auction set a new record price of $HK106.2 million ($US13 million) for a necklace made of 23 flawless quality jadeite beads, the largest of which measured just 2 centimetres in diameter.
One stone at a time
Jadeite deposits are also found in Guatemala, Japan, Russia, Canada and California, but Myanmar remains the primary source of top-grade material and the mines of the Kachin state contain the most valuable deposits of jade in the world.
In some of the most inaccessible terrains on the planet, large clearings have been torn through the jungle to reveal the earth so that thousands of labourers can dig the compacted soil and smash apart boulders in a furious hunt for precious green stone. While there are some excavators and jack hammers, most of the work is done with pick and shovel by teams of men who dismantle entire mountains, one stone at a time. The work is dangerous and the environmental legacy of this largely unregulated activity is a brutalised landscape of mountains reduced to rubble. But this pales in comparison to the human cost of this activity and the treatment of Myanmar workers drawn to these mines in the hope their labour will bring them, and their families, wealth and a better life.
Ownership of the jade mines of Hpakant is opaque. Ostensibly they belong to Myanmar’s military rulers in Yangon. But Kachin is torn apart by a powerful independence movement, is home to criminal empires and sits close to the border with China, which has strong interests in the area.
Whoever the owners, for the workers the mines have been described as a medieval vision of hell, and for the hundreds of thousands of labourers lured into the back-breaking work of digging for jadeite, the reality is this is a place of poor fortune, terrible illness and ruined lives.
Dust and disease plague those exposed daily to harsh and unsafe conditions, often forced to work by ruthless and violent overlords. Disappearances and deaths are a common occurrence and serve as a deterrent to anyone who would think of stealing. For most, the futile situation becomes so unbearable that they take solace in the heroin shooting-galleries that exist alongside the lawless mining districts of north-east Myanmar.
Addicts paid with a daily fix
For less than the cost of a beer, an injectionist administers the Golden Triangle’s purist drug directly into the vein of a miner, with the shooting gallery delivering as many as 800 separate injections from the same dirty needle. Large quantities of heroin are provided by the mine owners, who pay their addicted miners with a daily fix from the shooting gallery, which is diligently administered by the injectionist upon the production of the miner’s identification card.
Some estimate that as many as 500,000 workers in Hpakant are paid this way, some consuming as much as 10 grams of pure heroin each day. For most, this routine proves to be lethally addictive. Compounding the problem is that the addicts are also having unsafe sex with prostitutes who are forced to work in nearby brothels, creating a catastrophic HIV problem.
As many as nine out of 10 addict workers in the mining district are HIV positive but few live long enough to develop AIDS, as the “jade disease” of backbreaking labour, chronic drug addiction and heroin overdose finally takes their lives before this otherwise preventable disease can take hold.
Myanmar has the highest rate of HIV infection among drug users in the world and this will continue as long as this terrifying practice exists on such an industrial scale.
The UN and World Health Organisation have declared the Myanmar jade mines a disaster zone, but are powerless to help as they and NGOs are denied the access that would allow a flow of humanitarian aid into this region. The Myanmar and Chinese governments, which stand in the way of assistance to the region, deny the extent of the human exploitation that exists solely to support the jade connoisseurship by China and the exploitation of this trade route that ultimately yields billions of dollars each year.
The international community is well aware of the magnitude of this horrific problem and is endeavouring to take steps to curb the distribution of jadeite in world markets. On August 7, US President Barack Obama issued an executive order prohibiting the importation into the United States of any jadeite mined or extracted from Myanmar.
While this will clearly bring further attention to the issue and dampen demand for Imperial Jade across the West, what is driving this humanitarian disaster is the insatiable appetite for jadeite from the East, especially China.
Opportunity for change
The mines of Kachin state have unleashed a curse on the people of Myanmar, subjecting them to appalling violations of human rights and exposing the land to environmental degradation. The mines also acts a source of fuel for a brutal war between the government and the 8000-strong rebel Kachin Independence Army (KIA), which relies on the jade mines, as well as timber, gold and heroin exports to fund its fight for independence for the remote state.
Despite a recent ceasefire, there is no genuine end in sight to the 60-year-old struggle for control of Kachin state; the rebel KIA is well funded through the heroin trade and jade sales to China. Powerful Chinese interests in the region have further complicated the conflict and added to the plight of Kachin’s people. The China Power Investment Corporation has so far invested $US20 billion in a dam project that will ultimately generate cheap hydropower for China’s Yunnan province just across the border.
Beijing, therefore, has a vested interest in ensuring that prying foreign eyes do not witness its exploitation of Myanmar’s natural resources or its people.
Meanwhile, the international community is eagerly awaiting permission and assistance in accessing this difficult and remote location to gauge the extent of the humanitarian disaster and to rapidly provide intervention to the thousands of affected persons who have been caught up in this vicious Dickensian nightmare.
As it remakes itself, the government of Myanmar has the opportunity to lay bare this dark heart and show its leadership can exercise values such as compassion, justice and wisdom; the very qualities that jade is said to represent in Confucian teachings.
The government must develop economic, legislative and social reforms to counteract Kachin’s inhumane work practices. Transparency is needed in all the country’s resource and energy projects – not just jadeite mining – so they’re regulated, governed and taxed to the benefit of all people in Myanmar.
Nigel Finch is an associate professor at the University of Sydney Business School and a member of the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre.
source: The Australian Financial Review
http://www.afr.com/p/lifestyle/review/myanmar_suffers_from_curse_of_the_yEBvn1gLsJ8cGXnYJEN6VI
No comments:
Post a Comment