Had he lived, he would turn 85 today. To his virtues, let me quote Sartre:
Fanon is the first since Engels to bring the process of history to the clear light of day… [he constitutes] step by step, the dialectic which liberal hypocrisy hides from you and which is as much responsible for our existence as for his.
There are many empires, uncountable hundreds, vying for the patriotic mind. (more…)
This week an international meeting on trafficking of people has been occurring in the Burmese town of Bagan. It is rare to hear a UN staffer congratulate the Burmese government. It is not so much their violent nature but their incompetence which seems often to hold them back.
But one Mr. Parajuli was found to be congratulating the Burmese government of six good years of fighting human trafficking in what is known as the COMMIT process, a grouping dedicated to combatting this trade amongst the six nations of the greater Mekong sub region.
Mr. Parajuli stated a number of measures that the junta had taken to fight trafficking all of them punitive or legal. He did however briefly mention the phrase ‘route causes’. A term which is almost always followed or preceded by ‘tackle’ and is usually as hollow as the greetings at the beginning of such speeches.
But in Burma this is a big question, why is trafficking in persons such a big issue?
I have met quite a few people who have been ‘trafficked’ they are as you’d imagine are usually poor, hard working individuals but on the whole they had not a bad word about the ‘trafficker’ or any more of a bad word than you or I would have for an over priced travel agent. And that’s exactly how I was shot down last time I was quizzing someone on ‘trafficking’ in Malaysia (a big destination), “to you they are traffickers, to us they are travel agents.”
The route causes are however undoubtedly years of economic mismanagement. In Burma cars, phones or pretty much anything useful including gas for cooking is expensive. The only things that are cheap are cigarettes, alcohol, illegal drugs and people’s labour. The irony with the gas is that Burma is a massive exporter of the stuff, with pipelines going, or being built to all of her rapidly developing neighbours. Burma has been labelled by Nobel Laureate, Joseph Stiglitz as suffering from the ‘mineral curse’. A curse more commonly associated with African nations than those at the apex of the future powerhouses of the world. But it seems that trafficking in Burma will only increase as the economy in Burma shows no sign of shaking its dubious status as ‘failed’.
Corruption is endemic in Burma in a manner which makes most other south Asian nations seem relatively uncorrupted or the corrupters petty criminals. Some of the most shocking corruption is very much government orchestrated for in Burma everything with value has some pay off for the army; the most remarkable scam is the way in which the gas is sold, where by the government accounts show the gas being sold on the ‘offiicial’ exchange rate which puts the ‘kyat’ at around 6 to the dollar whilst the ‘unofficial’ rate is closer to a thousand. So while they give 6 ‘kyat’ for every dollar they earn selling gas into the nations coffers, roughly 990 ‘kyat’ is ferreted away into a Singaporean bank account for the junta and their own ends.
I could go on, but the sad fact is that people will continue to be exported along with the minerals for as long as Burma is kept in a state of under development and backwardness by the ‘route cause’ in chief; the military government.
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