Word: arakan
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Last year, the Chinese came. The villagers living in western Burma's remote Arakan state couldn't quite fathom what the Chinese told them, that below their rice fields might lie a vast reserve of oil. For three months the Chinese drilled the earth near the muddy Kaladan River in search of black gold. Then, just as suddenly, they left. In December, the Indians arrived. Through Burmese intermediaries, they took the village's paddies as their own, depriving locals of their main source of income. Compensation was promised, villagers tell me, but none has been paid...
...single dilemma: whether or not to impose international sanctions. The debate is polarizing. The pro-sanctions crowd claims the moral high ground, deploring the enrichment of a clutch of ethnocentric Burmese generals whose impulses are most brutal against the roughly 40% of the population that, like the villages of Arakan state, is composed of ethnic minorities. The engagement side preaches practicality, arguing that some investment will trickle down to the populace and that cultural exchange is better than imposed isolationism. When U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited Asia on her inaugural foreign trip last month, she weighed...
...Minority Report Arakan's capital, Sittwe, is a sleepy port near the Bay of Bengal where the pace of life inches along at the speed of a pedicab. But nearby, the rush for oil and gas is intense; last year, Russian, Thai and Vietnamese companies signed exploration deals with the junta. In late December, a consortium of four foreign companies, led by South Korea's Daewoo, inked an agreement with the junta and China National Petroleum Corp. to extract natural gas from Arakan's offshore Shwe fields and pipe it northeast through Burma to China's Yunnan province. The pipeline...
...forced labor and made them pay prohibitive taxes or buy expensive business licenses that robbed them of any chance at economic mobility. Because they are not considered citizens of Burma, they cannot work in the public sector as teachers or soldiers or doctors. Nor can they attend university in Arakan's capital, Sittwe, where communal violence between Buddhists and Muslims flared eight years ago. The villagers' tone when describing their plight was matter-of-fact, as if they were complaining of a rainstorm or a bad case of influenza. To marry, some Rohingya must sign a document promising...
...years ago on a crowded wooden boat filled with wannabe migrants. Eventually, the vessel drifted to India's Andaman Islands, from which he and others were repatriated. Would he try his luck abroad again, I asked? The news of the recent boatpeople's experiences in Thailand had reached Arakan. He nodded, bouncing a child on his lap. Then, village elder O Lam Myit spoke. "I am old, so I cannot go," he said. "But for the young, it's worth risking death to go abroad. What's the point of staying here, in a place where we can do nothing...