Recently Published

My story on controversial hydropower in Laos ran in the San Francisco Chronicle on Dec. 17. Have a look at that story and photos by clicking here.

And the story about Jackie Pullinger and her life with Hong Kong's heroin addicts, gang members and prostitutes ran in the Chronicle on Dec. 14.

Also, for a feature and photos from the New Year's celebration in Shan State, take a look at the travel section of the San Antonio Express-News in the first week of January.

And keep an eye out for the next issue of Wend Magazine, due to hit the racks in Barnes and Noble and REI in January. My story and photos on traveling Afghanistan's remote Wakhan Corrdior will be published in that issue.

With the Rebels

Follow this link to see a slideshow and descriptions of the lunar New Year's celebration of a dying culture and the rebel army that vows to protect it.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/14504395@N07/sets/72157603457593751/

Clean energy, messy consequences in Laos

In dense tropical jungle, the playground of wild elephants and endangered animals, the spirit lands of 28 distinct ethnic groups, one mountain of Laos' remote Nakai Plateau is groaning from within.

Deep inside it, teams of workers in threadbare shirts, hard hats and rubber boots clang hammers on steel as they gauge a three-kilometer hole through the earth that will serve as the drain pipe for the reservoir of Laos' biggest development project ever. Machinery shudders from the depths. Shrieks of steel on steel and distant thuds sound like an advancing army of orcs.

It's called the Nam Theun 2; a $1.45 billion, 1,070 megawatt dam that is projected to bring $2 billion into Laos over the next 25 years. Over 90 percent of the electricity it generates will be sold to Thailand. For the first 25 years, the revenue will be split between four investing companies from France, Thailand Laos and Italy. After that, all the profit belongs to Laos.

The Communist Lao government hopes the Nam Theun will help turn the country into the “battery” of Southeast Asia. Laos doesn't have oil or an ocean, but it does have the Mekong and its tributaries. Currently 10 dams are being built, and 70 are being considered. The Nam Theun 2 is the biggest.

“This is a commercial project and a development project,” says Vilaphone Vilavong, Director General of Energy in the Ministry of Energy and Mining. “It’s a good thing for Laos. One hundred percent of Laos supports it. Ask anyone you like.”

The World Bank, which has put $130 million into the project, says it will alleviate the poverty of Laos, where 80 percent of the population lives off the land and the average income is less than $2 per day. A doctor in a state hospital earns a monthly salary of about $40.

But the dam has its detractors. Activist groups say it will flood one of the most biologically and ethnically diverse regions in the world, and destroy the fisheries and fields of over 120,000 people living in two river basins.

Among them is the Berkeley-based International Rivers, a social and environmental group that documents the impacts of large hydroelectric projects around the world. Their program director for Laos, Shannon Lawrence, has been visiting the Nam Theun 2 project site for four years and remains skeptical.

“This is not going to be the panacea to Laos’ development woes, the one golden ticket that gets them off foreign aid and makes them a self-sustaining economy,” she said.

Lawrence said Laos’ history of corruption doesn’t lend credibility to the government’s claim that the dam’s revenue will be used to “eradicate poverty by 2020.”

“In a country that does not have a track record of using central government revenue to really deliver those benefits… it’s a very risky proposition,” Lawrence said.

The reservoir will also flood one of the most bio-diverse regions in Asia. The jungles of the Nakai Plateau are home to 400 species of birds – 50 of which are endangered, and 35 percent of which are found nowhere else in the world. Of the last five large mammals to be discovered or rediscovered by scientists have been found in the Nakai Plateau. Among them was the Laotian Rock Rat, rediscovered last year. Scientists thought it had been extinct for 11 million years.

The Lao government has said that $1 million of the dam’s annual revenue will be set aside for conservation efforts to protect the remaining jungle from illegal poaching. Many villagers have forraged in these jungles to supplement their meager diets for generations.

With the reservoir slated to be filled in 2008 and electricity to be produced by 2009, Lawrence admits there’s little chance of stopping the project now. But she said International Rivers is still working on easing the consequences of the dam.

“We want to see that the commitments made to [resettled] villagers are met,” she said. “It’s important to keep a close watch and make sure villagers get what they were promised.”

The Nam Theun 2 Dam will relocate 6,200 villagers when it floods two-thirds of the Nakai Plateau – an area three times the size of Sacramento. Anthropologists have identified 28 distinct ethnic groups in the area, some of them which have not yet been classified. The relocated villagers are now transitioning into different livelihoods on less land.

Som Vang, 41, is the headman of one village that was relocated four years ago.

“Life is different,” he said. “Before I was a farmer, now I am a gardener. I sell vegetables to buy rice.”

Vang said living conditions are better for his village, they now have running water and electricity, but their buffalo are not adjusting easily.

“Now there’s not enough food for them to eat,” he said. “They’re all thin now.”

Before, Vang’s village survived on the highland rice they grew the livestock they raised, and the food they foraged in the forest. In their new location things are different. Forest food is harder to come by with the increased competition. And with no place to grow rice, they have now been told they should grow vegetables to sell in the market, a kilometer away. Their first introduction to the market economy has not been easy.

“Some days are good for selling, some are not so good,” Vang said. Down the road three ethnic women are walking back from the market, where they made “10 or 20,000 kip” selling their vegetables – about one or two dollars.

Nanda Gasparini, the World Bank’s media representative for Nam Theun 2, is nonplussed.

“They probably would have come into the market economy on their own,” she said.

Gasparini said in impoverished Laos, which has no oil or access to an ocean, options for development are few. Moreover, in a country where the hammer and sickle still flies fringe to fringe with the national flag, the Communist government ultimately calls the shots.

“The fact is, in this country, [the dam] is going to happen. The government is going to do it,” Gasparini said. She said the World Bank is involved to ensure that the project is carried through consultatively, transparently, and with minimal negative impacts.

The project has generated “6,000 to 8,000 jobs” for Lao nationals as well, she said. At the worksite, there were employees from Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam and the Philippines as well. Despite the dust-covered signs on the project site saying “Our Target is Zero Accidents,” International Rivers has been told of 11 workers dying, mostly in dynamiting accidents.

Gasparini said in a country with a small workforce of which very few are highly educated, “hydropower and mining are the most surefire options” for development.

But at least one Lao employee of the Nam Theun 2 Power Company, the consortium of companies building the dam, isn’t convinced.

“This is not development,” he said, asking that his name not be used to protect his job. “The government says it’s development, but it’s not. Development is bottom up. This is all top down.”

The employee made a funnel with a piece of paper.

“A lot of money goes in at the top, but not much comes out for the people at the bottom.”

The Colors of the Revolution

It was the end of September and the Burmese military had just used guns, sticks and tear gas to smother nationwide democracy protests, when Surrinder Singh Karkar, 43, knew he had to leave Rangoon.

While other activists lay low, changed their appearance, or went underground, Karkar faced a few setbacks. There was his dark skin and prominent nose, his long beard and sorbet-orange turban.

Karkar is a Sikh, of Indian parentage, but born in Burma. As one of the organizers of the uprisings, he says he was the only Sikh activist in the streets, pumping his fist for a revolution.

“Everyone knew me, I was there from start to finish,” he said. “The government wanted me, dead or alive, they didn’t care.”

On Oct. 4, Karkar, a used car salesman and father of three, made his escape. In a four-day journey to the Thai border, Karkar walked on the road, caught lifts on busses and slipped through the jungle to avoid checkpoints. He stayed a night in a village controlled by a pro-government militia, telling them he was a trader, and then snuck across the border by what he calls the “water road” – across the Moei River.

Now in Thailand, Karkar stays inside the compound of an exiled Burmese political group in Mae Sot. He came to escape the police roundup of protest leaders and to tell the international media what is happening in his country. He’s also waiting to have a doctor look at his back, where he was hit by a policeman’s bamboo stick. More than a month later, it’s still giving him pain.

But Karkar is not a broken man. Sitting down for a recent interview, he smiles broadly and sports a yellow shirt that says “Free Aung San Suu Kyi.” Karkar says he was the only Sikh but not the only ethnic Indian to join the protests – thousands of Muslims and Hindus did as well. There were many different colors in Burma’s Saffron Revolution.

The ethnic Indians of Burma, which make up two percent of the population according to the latest official census in 1983, have long been discriminated against and denied citizenship. They are likely a much larger population than the junta will acknowledge. Karkar said the Indian religious minorities saw the democracy protests as a chance to change their long history of persecution.

“They don’t give us Indians a chance,” he said of the military junta. “In Burma, the government has no interest in Indians. For this reason, we were happy to protest.”

Karkar, a veteran of the 1988 student uprisings, said many thousands of Hindus and Muslims participated in the protests in Rangoon and Mandalay. He said the deteriorating economic situation and the lack of rights pushed many into the streets.

“We live there, we work there, it is our home, but the military makes it difficult to eat and drink, to come and go,” he said. “We have no money to drink tea. What more can you say? If we Indians can’t buy tea, what can we buy?”

Many Indians are denied a passport in Burma, even if they were born there. Karkar says it takes a “black money” bribe of 100,000 to 300,000 kyat ($70 to $214) for an Indian to get one. In a country where the majority of the population lives on less than a dollar a day, to most, this is simply unaffordable.

Karkar describes the city he left in bleak terms.

“There are so many poor people, so many beggars,” he said. “It’s very difficult to live. There’s no food, it’s not safe. Daily we see the police take people away.”

Karkar said the situation is bad enough that people will not stay silent for long.

“For sure, more protests are coming,” he said. “Before the end of December, for sure they’re coming.”

Karkar’s wife and child are on their way out of Burma to meet him in Thailand. They will stay until his back is healed and they can safely return to their home. He said he’s not worried about finding his way back to Rangoon safely.

“This is in the hands of the man upstairs,” he said, looking skywards. “There are many roads in Burma, and many jungles. I will get back.”

Karkar said the diverse population of Burma will remain united against the government as they were in the September protests.

“In Burma, Hindus, Christians, Muslims, Sikhs and Buddhists, they all mix,” he said. “There is no problem. But the government is a problem for everyone. They make the chaos, they make the confusion.”
The fighting peacock - symbol of the democracy struggle in Burma.

A Day in Burma

I crossed the bridge to Burma two days ago, to renew my Thai visa. A bored official took my passport on the Burmese side - you have to leave by 5 p.m. - and told me to enjoy the sights.

It's amazing how much can change in 200 meters. On the Burmese side of the bridge, the roads are dusty and pot-holed, the noodle bowls cheaper to remain affordable for a much-poorer country. There are spies and pro-government militia soldiers walking the streets. Instead of the big diesel 18-wheelers you see in Thailand, there are cheap Chinese contraptions - a sputtering engine strapped to a steel-frame with wheels - for transporting goods.

I visited several monestaries and a school. Here is a slideshow of some of the pictures. It's as far as I can get into Burma right now: http://www.flickr.com/photos/14504395@N07/sets/72157603161362268/

The Artist

Maung Maung Tinn is an unlikely philanthropist.

He fled his village in eastern Burma 13 years ago; after his parents died and when, as he tells it, he could no longer handle the sadness. He wandered into the jungle. Some KNU rebel soldiers found him there, crying and singing, alone.

“Singing doesn’t always mean you’re happy,” he says.

The KNU soldiers helped him cross the border into Thailand where he worked in a clinic for refugees and started devoting himself to painting.

Now 39, Maung Maung finishes a painting about every month. He has a style of his own, soft, understated watercolors, always of people, always precise in expression. He sells some of them, to NGO workers or travelers, and uses others for exhibitions.

He puts together calendars and just printed a book. He uses the money he earns to pay for schools for Burma’s displaced children, to fund orphanages or to pay the rent for H.I.V. patients who can no longer work.

“I try to help wherever I can,” he said. “I can’t run a big project, I’m not an NGO, but if someone needs something and I can help, I help.”

Maung Maung’s next exhibition will be in Italy. But the artist won’t be attending. Maung Maung has no passport, and with the reputation he’s earned with his work, has little hope of the Burmese government issuing him one. At this point it’s too risky for him even to go back into the country.

“I am not political,” he told me. But his paintings – of displaced Burmese villagers, deported migrant workers and children sleeping on the streets – would beg to differ.

Maung Maung led me into his sparse home yesterday, on the side of the highway to Burma. We sat on the floor, and he told me pieces of his life.

He looked a fragile man.

His face was thin, his skin sallow and his eyes pained with history – his, and that of his homeland. Sometimes they misted over when he stared into space. Sometimes they flashed with color when he talked about his home. Sometimes they drained of feeling entirely.

He gets homesick. Mostly at night, he says, when he’s alone. Sometimes at big parties when everyone is with their families and happy.

He’s been encouraged by various NGO workers and friends to resettle as a refugee in a third country. But he probably never will. He says he couldn’t stand to put any more distance between his heart and his home.

Instead he will stay to try to paint a better future for his country. His goal is to spread awareness, he says, so that the world will know and be shocked by the realities of life in today’s Burma.

But more immediately, Maung Maung’s aim is to help the refugees coming daily across the border, to whom life has been anything but fair.

He boils it down to a concentrate of kindness.

“I want to do something good – it doesn’t matter, big or small – before I die.”

Click here to see a gallery of Maung Maung Tinn’s work: http://www.burmesepaintings.org/index.htm
Maung Maung Tinn

Made in Thailand (with some help)

Last week I plucked up the courage to pay a visit to a small sewing factory in town. I’d been directed to it by Lwin, a Burmese man who has spent the last 12 years quietly working to organize the 100,000 or so illegal Burmese laborers in Mae Sot.

In my interview with Lwin, I had asked him if he could arrange for me to visit a factory and meet some of Thailand’s 2 million illegal Burmese immigrant workers.

“There’s one near your guest house,” he told me. “Why don’t you go yourself?”

It was a challenge.

So one quiet day at noon, I did. I approached a man sitting outside the small, gated room that was chattering with sewing machines, and asked him in Thai if the owner was in. He looked uncomfortable, even more so when the young manager came out. They spoke to each other in Burmese. Then the driver turned to me and pointed to a rusted Chevy pickup.

“Get in,” he said.

I piled in with the driver and the manager jumped in the back. We rattled off along a road that led us to the outskirts of town. Half of me was still wondering if they were going to take my camera and wallet and dump me in a rice field, when the driver pulled into an unmarked drive.

A guard opened the gate, and we drove up to a long building humming with the zip of sewing machines.

There was a pile of sandals at the door. Inside were their owners – about a hundred of them, mostly young girls, and all Burmese working in Thailand illegally. Their fingers were moving at a fevered pace, flying under machines that stitched together baby skirts, frilly brown blouses and pinstriped designer shirts with labels that read ‘Christian Dior.’ The manager told me they were knockoffs.

I started taking photos. I learned the workers made $3.80 a day, for a nine-hour shift, less than half Thailand’s minimum wage for their class of labor. They worked six days a week. The clothes that they made would be trucked to Thailand and then shipped around the world to be sold for many multiples of their wages. The labels on the clothes said ‘Made in Thailand,’ but the truth was a lot more complex.

Aung Baing Soe, 23, was one of the few men in the room. He didn’t have much time to talk between hemming shirts.

“The work’s good,” he said. “We work from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. and on Sundays we rest.”

Compared to what Aung Baing left behind in Burma, the work’s certainly better.

In Burma the majority of the population lives on less than a dollar a day. Currently, 12 percent of the population has malaria. Only half of the country’s children finish primary school, and a third of them are malnourished.

It seems the Burmese that flee their homeland for the opportunity of Thailand are less interested in just wages and humane working conditions than they are about survival.

But working illegally in Thailand has its price. To go outside is to risk arrest, fines and deportation back to Burma, a country in which it is considered treachery to leave. Instead, most of the workers stay inside, locked into an economy where businessmen turn a profit on the relativity of suffering.

They work in the sweatshop, they eat in the sweatshop and they sleep in the sweatshop’s garage; 10 per tin-partitioned room, right next to the owner’s tinted windowed BMW sedan.

“Thai employers, they like the Burmese,” Lwin had told me in our interview. “Burmese workers are oppressed already and seldom demand their rights.”

There are about 400 factories operating in and around Mae Sot, tapping into a continual supply of cheap and quiet labor fleeing the dictatorship next door. They make everything from Maidenform bras to Marlboro jackets to Walt Disney apparel.

Many in Thailand realize the country’s economy needs Burmese labor. Some say this is why the Thai government offered to build the Friendship Bridge to Burma at its own expense.

I spoke to the Mae Sot police and the Ministry of Labor, and the number of illegal workers in town is no secret. But it’s a tenuous system, where timely bribes keep authorities’ heads turned until a publicized crackdown proves even timelier. The driver told me the owner of the sweatshop I visited paid 20,000 baht ($570) a month to keep the police from prying.

But even when workers are caught and sent back to Burma, they find a way to return.

“We cannot control it,” the local police captain told me. “If you send them away one day, tomorrow they’re back.” He denied any police involvement in the illegal labor economy.

“The police’s duty is to keep security,” he told me. “Their duty is not to check on workers.”

But raids are still common. The captain told me the police had sent 5,000 illegal workers back to Burma this year. Still, each year the number of Burmese crossing the border increases.

Millions have already fled the abuses and economic mismanagement of Burma ruling junta by crossing into Bangladesh, India, China and Thailand.

Before human rights or justice or peace, the majority of these evacuees are looking for the most basic thing they can no longer find in their homeland: a livelihood.

Click here to see a slideshow of images from the sweatshop: http://www.flickr.com/photos/14504395@N07/sets/72157602999644422/