YANGON, Myanmar — The dance music thundered through a crowd of thousands of drunken fans, past the pavilions where skinny women in impossibly high heels gyrated around metal poles and into the streets filled with taxis that ferried partygoers to this free, whiskey-soaked concert in the park.

“Our parents don’t allow it, but we do it anyway,” said Zun Pwint Phyu, one of the dancers who endured hours of lascivious stares.

Myanmar is a country where owning a fax machine without a permit is illegal, where even spontaneous gatherings of more than five people are technically banned and where critics of the government are regularly locked away for decades in tiny prison cells.

Yet despite this repression, or perhaps partly because of it, young people here are pushing the limits of what the military government, let alone their parents, considers acceptable art and entertainment.

Art exhibitions, some featuring risky hidden political messages, open nearly every week in Yangon, Myanmar’s main city. Yangon has a festival of underground music, including punk bands, twice a year. Fans of the most popular musical genres, hip-hop and electronic dance music, wear low-slung baggy pants to regularly held concerts here.

U Thxa Soe, a popular artist who mixes traditional “spirit dances” with something resembling techno music, said he believed that the government tolerated wild concerts in recent years partly because it suited its strategy of control. “You need to squeeze and release, squeeze and release,” he said.

“We live in fear,” he said. “We live under a dictatorship. People need fresh air. They release their anger, their energy.”

The success of artists like Mr. Thxa Soe undermines Myanmar’s often monochromatic image as a place of zero freedoms. This country, formerly known as Burma, is by many measures a brutally authoritarian place — human rights groups count 2,100 political prisoners.

But even if the generals willed it, people here say, the government would probably not be able to pull off North Korean-style totalitarianism. Society here is too unruly, disorganized and corrupt; people are too creative, the climate too hot for 24-hour repression.

The police are famously brutal, but they, too, suffer from tropical torpor: a common scene is a group of police officers napping in the back of a truck.

Over the past two years, entertainment options have rapidly expanded for residents of the country’s largest cities.

The government has nurtured the creation of a soccer league after years without any organized matches. Soccer games are famously raucous, with fans spewing invective toward the opposing side, ignoring government exhortations to be “polite.”

The number of FM radio stations in Yangon, formerly Rangoon, has gone from just one a few years ago to a handful that play both Burmese and Western-style music. Last year, a private company started up the country’s first television channel dedicated to music videos.

“The government is trying to distract people from politics,” said a Western-educated Burmese businessman who declined to be identified because he thought it might jeopardize his business. “There’s not enough bread, but there’s a lot of circus.”

The contrast between the military government’s heavy-handed authoritarianism and the surprisingly uninhibited entertainment scene can be jarring.

Early this month the leader of the ruling junta, Senior Gen. Than Shwe, observed Peasants Day, a national holiday honoring farmers, with a message addressed to the “Esteemed Peasantry.”

“I wish you, the peasantry, physical and mental well-being and greater success in agricultural farming,” the message said.

By contrast, as night fell at a lakeside fairground in Yangon, security guards had trouble holding back the thousands of fans, who clambered over one another like peasants in revolt. Police officers at times raised their nightsticks menacingly but were largely ignored by the crowd, who had come to see a bill of popular artists playing music that ranged from heavy metal to pop.

One longtime analyst of Myanmar said the government tolerated politics with a small p — gatherings of intellectuals and members of smaller political groups. But it cracks down on Politics, with a capital P, which the analyst defined as anyone who questioned the legitimacy of the military rulers, like groups that support Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the opposition leader and Nobel laureate.
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Human Trafficking Increases on Sino-Burma Border
By ALEX ELLGEE       Friday, March 26, 2010
http://www.irrawaddy.org/article.php?art_id=18124&page=2

A Burmese woman who worked in a Chinese brothel on the Sino-Burma border in 2009. (Photo: Than Aung/The Irrawaddy)

RUILI, China —Thi Thi Win reminisces about a time when she wore traditional Burmese clothes and walked around her village at sunset. For the best part of her childhood, she considered herself to be lucky—she had two loving parents and food was plentiful.

Until one day when her family was pushed out of their farm by the Burmese army to make way for a highway. One of eight siblings, she knew she had to find work to help her family.

While she was selling some of her families clothes in the local bus station, a man approached her saying he could find her a “factory job” in China. With high hopes, she packed her bags and left for Burma’s booming neighbor.

“He told me I would no longer have to sell my family’s belongings and could buy presents for them within a month,” said Thi Thi Win, who asked that The Irrawaddy not use her real name.

She said her trip to the border was full of excitement. As she looked out the bus window, paddy fields flew past ,and she dreamed of her new life in China. At the bus station, she was greeted by a Chinese man who took her to a teashop where she was given noodles, which she quickly ate.

“The next thing I remember I was in a small room with Burmese girls—they had drugged me,” she said.

“The next couple of hours I spent chatting with the other girls, and they all had the same story. Then they led us out into a room, in front of lot of Chinese men —one man pointed at me.”

That was the moment that the man “bought” her, and without delay or discussion, she was taken to his farm in rural China to be his wife. At first, she refused, and his family was furious. They beat her until she couldn’t take the suffering anymore, and finally gave in.

Like thousands of girls who are trafficked from Burma to China each year, what followed her forced marriage was a life of hardship. The family forbade her to leave the house, and her days were spent housekeeping and cooking, as a way to “repay” the fee they had paid for her.

One day, after a year with the family—what she says felt like a lifetime—the police came to the home and took her into custody. Treated as an illegal immigrant, she was thrown in prison for three months, without an interview or assessment.

Treatment of trafficking victims is a major concern for NGOs that work in the region. They say that China is not doing enough to identify foreign women who have been forced into marriage. Lacking interpreters and proper screening processes, many trafficking victims end up in jail.

Despite the lack of attention to foreign victims, more work has been done to curb domestic trafficking in China.

With most of the trafficking is related to urban migration, the government has spent large sums educating farmers about the dangers of trafficking. China has a total of 1,351 Relief Administrative Centers located at provincial, county and city levels which work with trafficking victims.

Various counter-trafficking training courses have been held for media, trainers, police and key government officials in collaboration with UN agencies and international NGOs. Legal aid for victims has increased with more centers being opened across the country, and China is attempting to improve its prosecution procedure.

Last year, the public security ministry launched a special crackdown. Police across the country rescued 3,455 children and 7,365 women from April to the end of December last year. A total of 1,684 human-trafficking groups were identified and 2,895 trafficking cases were solved with 19 out of 20 suspects arrested.

In March, China's police chief, Meng Jianzhu, called for greater effort in halting trafficking of women and children, saying the crime "grossly violates human rights." Meng vowed zero tolerance for trafficking cases, asking local governments to address economic and social problems that are at the root of rampant human trafficking.

Unfortunately, all this has done little to stop the flow of Burmese women being sold for between 10,000 and 40,000 yuan (US $1,500 to $6,000) into forced marriage. Local grassroots organizations working along the Sino-Burma border believe that more and more women are trafficked across the border each week.
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Burma's Gruesome Animal Trade
By SIMON ROUGHNEEN  Saturday, March 27, 2010
http://www.irrawaddy.org/article.php?art_id=18131

BANGKOK—Noted wildlife photographer and cameraman Karl Ammann has made numerous trips to the Golden Triangle region to document the illegal and destructive trade in wild animals. His trips have included the Shan Special Region 4 in Burma where a lucrative cross-border business has emerged in recent years, with tigers, bears, leopards and other animals hunted, caged and killed for food and medicinal products, mainly for consumption in China's Yunnan Province.

A stall in Central Market in Mong La, on the border between Burma and China, sells various dead wildlife, such as this bear (foreground), and skewers of unidentified meat in this undated photo. (Photo: Karl Ammann / National Geographic)

At a screening of his 2007 documentary on the Mong La animal trade in Bangkok earlier this week, Ammann lamented the apparent decline of the animal population in the region around Mong La, the revamped casino town in Shan State near the Chinese border. Once a haven for gambling, drug trafficking and prostitution, the people of Mong La and the surrounding area––for a time at least––have taken to hunting large, rare and exotic animals.

Ammann's documentary featured some gruesome exhibits, such as a group of around 80 black bears kept in small cages, having their bile “milked” via catheters. This so-called "liquid gold," is popular in traditional Chinese remedies, an apparent cure for eye and liver problems. Ammann highlighted the vast array of animal body parts used in traditional Chinese medicine––such as bear paws and gall bladders, big-cat teeth and tiger penis––which can be found at markets around the town.

Ammann believes that much of the economic motivation for the illicit animal trade comes from the reduced drug trade in Shan State in recent years. China closed its border post near Mong La in 2005, apparently after family members connected to the Communist Party leadership lost heavily while gambling at the casino there.

 

 

A large male tiger skin is offered for sale in a private backroom in Mvng La, a casino town near the border between Myanmar (Burma) and China, in this photograph taken in summer 2005. (Photo: Karl Ammann / National Geographic)

The Swiss-born photographer's images included cages stacked on top of each other, containing macaques, small primates, pangolins, rare birds and a wide variety of reptiles. Other pictures showed gore-laden tables covered with animal remains, including dogs and monkeys, some with bullet holes through their heads, their throats cut or beheaded. Many of the animals on display are listed as endangered species.

Ammann says the scale of the illicit trade he witnessed in Mong La outweighs anything he has seen, including the well-documented “bushmeat” trade in central and eastern Africa, adding that animal numbers have declined significantly due to hunting.

However, just as Ammann found a desolate Mong La in 2007, and a near traffic-free border post, he fears that the nearby hills and forest are now barren of much of the large wildlife that once roamed the region.

The border post has reportedly reopened from the Chinese side, enabling a return influx of Chinese gamblers and tourists, and a return to the older, bustling Mong La, once known as “Las Vegas in the Jungle.”

The border post apparently re-opened amid Burmese junta pressure on ethnic cease-fire groups, including the National Democratic Alliance Army (NDAA) and United Wa State Army (UWSA), to stand down and become part of the junta's border security forces. The re-opening appears to have taken place not long after the Burmese army offensive against the ethnic Chinese Kokang, which sent 37,000 refugees into China and caused consternation in Beijing.

The NDAA, UWSA and other cease-fire groups are thought to be stepping up drug production and selling off stocks to finance a possible war with the government forces, should Naypyidaw seek to enforce the border guard plan.

The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) gathering has just concluded in Doha, Qatar, and has been condemned as a failure by conservationists after member states vetoed protection measures proposed to reduce the hunting of various sharks, blue-fin tuna and bears.

“LDCs [lesser-developed countries] no longer want to be dictated to by the West. They say, 'You have consumed so much over the past century, but now you want to stop us doing the same,'” said Ammann.

Burma and China are both signatories to CITES, and the trade puts both countries in breach of their obligations under CITES. Burmese government officials protest that they cannot do anything about the illegal animal trade, as the ethnic area in question has local autonomy.

Ammann said he sought to interview Chinese officials in Geneva about the issue, but said he was “given the runaround,” with no opportunity to ask questions.

Asked about what can be done to reduce or stamp out the illicit trade in wild animals, Ammann says that while education and cultural awareness can help in the long term, “what is needed now is enforcement, as time is running out for some of the animals, as we have seen from Mong La.”

Elsewhere, years of war in eastern Congo have seen gorilla numbers reduced drastically, according to activists, with rebels hunting the animals for food and for re-sale into the bushmeat trade. Chinese demand for ivory has seen elephant numbers drop as China expands its diplomatic and commercial presence across Africa. Elephant poaching is on the rise across Africa, 21 years after the ivory trade was outlawed. Last year, China approved 37 new retail ivory stores. However, China says it is committed to the ban on the ivory trade, and officials say that ivory seizures by Chinese customs officials have almost doubled in recent years.

Experts say the illicit trade piggybacks on lawlessness, state failure and political conflict. According to the CITES Web site: “The illegal wildlife trade that takes place around the world is often highly organized and sophisticated and can involve criminal gangs, armed with automatic weapons, who don’t hesitate to murder the wardens, game scouts or forest guards whose daily job it is to protect our planet’s natural resources.”

In the past, all too often, the response to such criminals has not been equally organized or sophisticated,” said Willem Wijnstekers, the secretary-general of CITES.

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