Too Big to Fail

Last week I was invited to Aceh, along with several other colleagues with whom I worked in 2005 in the early days of reconstruction, to a commemorative celebration honoring the 10 year anniversary of the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami. I am not the only one who is too disgusted to go.
 

I know what I will hear.  I know I will be expected to smile, and thank the current Governor for inviting me, and look down demurely when he praises the work the NGOs did to bring the province back from the brink of disaster and make it the vibrant, positive, humane and safe place it is today. . . I am not going because if I have to hear that drivel I fear I will vomit.  My colleagues agree; most are declining the invitation.  It is, so sadly, all a farce.

Shortly after this invitation I received an email from our Australian colleague Michael Bachelard, who met and traveled with JMD this past April when covering the legislative elections.  I’d first gotten in touch with him because of all the international journalists reporting on the ravages and dire global consequences of palm oil’s destruction of the Aceh rainforest, he was by far the most eloquent, thorough, and passionate.  His beat isn’t just palm oil, however, and the Sydney Morning Herald has pulled him in many directions this past year.

I knew he was returning to Aceh this month to do a story on the 10-year anniversary of the tsunami, which happened on Boxing Day (December 26) 2004.  If you’ve been reading this blog you know that I’ve been urging any and all media outlets to take an honest look at Aceh and examine whether, 10 years later, the province is truly “better” than it was before the tsunami, in terms of quality of life, equal access, and economic prosperity for more than just the wealthy and the multi-national corporations.

Michael’s email included an apology for not being able to spend any time in his articles discussing palm oil, or how cocoa was “relevant,” although he was astute enough to cover topics such as “empty housing and personal stories of the wave, misgovernance, sharia law, environmental doom and electoral misbehavior.”

I think that Michael’s email was the final missile in a depressing barrage I’d been receiving all week that has me convinced, sadly, that the entitles responsible for the most horrific things on the planet these days, are, in the final analysis, to big to fail.

Take four seemingly separate events:

There is new focus on the continuing horror story of jade mining in Myanmar and how corporate interests trump the rights of marginalized groups.  I read this (and blogged about it a few days ago) and was struck by the sheer enormity of the problem—not the HIV/AIDS epidemic that will soon spread all over the country, but the seemingly insurmountable issue that is the profitability of the Jade market in China.

Freeport, the world’s largest copper mine in Paupua, Indonesia, is “sponsoring” an exhibit of sculpture and jewelry by the Kamoro, a tribe the company basically wiped out in what is seen as one of the world' worst examples of environmental destruction and genocide.  But a significant number of southeast Asia’s wealthy elites are attending the show, to ooh and ahh over the “exquisitely made” handcrafted pieces available. Those little brown people.  So clever.  Much is made over the “champion” of the Komoro, Mr Kal Muller, a transplant who’s acted not necessarily as humanitarian advocate but as PR marketing firm for those Komoro who are still living.  He’s an employee of Freeport (A US firm), after all.  I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and imagine him as painfully torn between the irreversible damage his company has done to this group’s culture and homeland, and his need to keep his job so that he can at least squeeze a couple of bucks (and permission) from this lumbering behemoth of a company in order to preserve what little space they have left in this now-wasteland.

Searching the database of donors, including USAID, who are  funding large projects in and around Aceh, I notice that international subcontractors are being awarded mega-sums to establish either “sustainable palm oil practices” or assist with “palm oil biofuel projects.” Nowhere is it ever mentioned that any significant funding is to be spent to reduce or control palm oil plantation expansion, or to seriously look at ways to limit the environmental catastrophes that are being caused due to plantations’ current methods of operation.  This would make sense, considering President Jokowi’s interpretation of his own energy policy to mean “capitalize on every natural resource we have and increase production.” (Interestingly, he hasn’t yet noticed the disparity between his “let’s stop deforestation, save the peat bogs, and control palm oil in Aceh” rhetoric and his “economic expansion at any cost” battle cry.  Or else he doesn’t care.)

A recent Bloomberg report on “palm oil futures” criticizing the new Indonesian regulations for mixing palm biodiesel with other fuels wept that this would severely hurt the price of palm oil.

Indonesia plans to increase biodiesel blending to 20 percent in 2016, requiring more than 8 million tons of palm oil, according to the Energy Ministry. . . .  The government is committed to expanding palm biodiesel, Hari Priyono, secretary general at Agriculture Ministry, told reporters yesterday. . . . "If Indonesia ignores its (biodiesel) mandate completely, the palm oil industry will face a crisis in the last half of 2015," Mistry said. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-11-28/indonesia-s-toothless-mandate-for-biofuel-seen-hurting-palm.html

Most of the articles I read regarding palm oil are, in fact, from the commodities side.  Palm oil is so huge, so important in the international market with respect to making people money, that it is no longer pertinent to even allude to its horrific effects. That just isn’t important to anyone except the “activists.”  And what do they know anyway?  Buncha spoiled little punks.

But all these things: the invitation, the jade mining, the Komoro, Big Palm . . . they got me thinking . . . about what good people do when their backs are against a wall. How do concerned and committed individuals and groups respond to entities that are “too big to fail?”

What would the Komoro do if Kal Muller did not convince Freeport to be interested in their culture and sponsor at least a tiny way for what’s left of them to make money? If we are realists we will see that Freeport is not going away and the Komoro are not coming back.  So is it bad to try and provide some type of compensation to those remaining even if it is “blood money?”

If the world’s large donors are staffed by people who truly understand that carbon emissions and deforestation are vitally important, then they have to develop plans that can address this in pragmatic ways—and that means catering to the interests of the extraordinarily immoral entities that got us into this mess in the first place.  When fighting a war for your freedom, said Marx, use the tools of the oppressor. They will eventually wear him down.

I’m not so sure.

So once there is a mess (Freeport, palm oil, HIV jade) what is the best thing to do about it?  “Go away” is not working.  Can we make it smaller?  Maybe, but how much smaller is smaller enough?  Should we just be addressing the fallout?  Like in the Kachin state, what is needed is a methadone program and street outreach for IV drug users to learn how to clean their needles.  But in a way, that just reinforces the strength of the jade industry that sucked them into this vortex in the first place.

All over the world, what we are doing to the enormous creatures that have harmed us, altered our food, poisoned our water, screwed around with our oxygen, eliminated animal species, and displaced people with no voice, what we are doing is helping them survive.  Because they have created a different physical, social and economic reality from the one we knew before they came, and now much of our survival depends on theirs.  So we become complicit, and talk about “sustainable” palm oil and “area-sensitive expansion” and fair labor standards and artisanal marketing and eco-tourism.  And we sugar-coat the mismanagement of billions of dollars that could have been the salvation of a province but instead plunged it further into poverty and pseudo-religious extremism.

I know it’s a reality but I still want to vomit.  Good thing I won’t be going to Aceh.

The Rohingya are not alone: no comfort for any of the poor or marginalized in Myanmar

 “Hpakant is where Satan slowly called me to hell.”

               --La Htoi, 34-year-old jade broker and recovering heroin addict

 

On Sunday the New York Times published this harrowing story and accompanying video.  

Searching for Burmese Jade, and Finding Misery

Video Feature: Jade’s Journey Marked by Drugs and Death

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/02/world/searching-for-burmese-jade-and-finding-misery.html?_r=1

There are other incredibly good (and disturbing articles on the Myanmar/Chinese jade trade, and the Hpakant mines in the northern Kachin state; this is not a new issue.  I try to stay focused on Aceh and Indonesia, and look towards Myanmar only when I’m alerted to some new and hideous thing the government (or group of monks bent on ethnic cleansing) does to further imperil the Rohingya.  But this article convinced me that justice for the Rohingya is far, far in the distance.  Again, another minority is abused and abandoned.  Miners are encouraged to use heroin to work multiple shifts and steel themselves to the backbreaking labor, and of course become addicted, losing all their income.  Government officials turn a blind eye to the overt drug trade in and near the mines—the price of jade, after all, has skyrocketed in recent months due to increased demand by China’s middle class.  The article quotes a Myanmar health professional as reporting that there is no technology to manufacture heroin in Myanmar; it is coming directly from China, which has the most to gain from the mines’ jade production. 

                                                          Reuters

The article reports that the majority of profits, which should be making the Myanmar government wealthy, “remain in control of elite members of the military, the rebel leaders fighting them for greater autonomy, and the Chinese financiers with whom both sides collude to smuggle billions of dollars’ worth of the gem into China . . . . Such rampant corruption has not only robbed the government of billions in tax revenue for rebuilding after decades of military rule, it has also helped finance a bloody ethnic conflict and unleashed an epidemic of heroin use and H.I.V. infection among the Kachin minority who work the mines.”

Myanmar has no viable substance abuse treatment or methadone programs and no street outreach for IV drug users.

 

“At a time when Myanmar is experimenting with democratic governance after nearly 50 years of military dictatorship, its handling of the jade industry has become a test of the new civilian leaders and their commitment to supporting human rights and rooting out corruption, as well as an early check on whether they will reject the former junta’s kleptocratic dealings with China.

So far, experts say, they have failed.”

So, how do we think the Rohingya will fare, with Myanmar’s treatment of the Kachin as an example?

“The government says it keeps [Mitkyia, the capital of Kachin] closed because of sporadic fighting with the Kachin rebel army, but activists see a darker purpose: to hide the illegal jade and drug trades flourishing there. The only foreigners allowed past the military checkpoints, they say, are the Chinese who run the mines or go there to buy gems.”

And not to get sidetracked, but doesn’t this sound eerily like Big Palm as well as the subject of a future blog, the Freeport copper mine in Papua?

As the article concedes, no one smells completely like a rose in the Kachin state. The Kachin rebels (K.I.A.) extract a 50% payoff from companies to run the mines, and as far as I know do little to ease the suffering of their fellow countrymen working there. They also  work with Chinese companies to smuggle jade through the jungle into China.  “Yet the fighters’ spoils pale in comparison to those enjoyed by the powerful Burmese military elite, whose companies receive the choicest tracts of mining land from the government, according to miners and international rights groups. Like the K.I.A., some military officers are also involved in smuggling, extracting bribes to allow the illicit practice, activists say.

“The top dogs are the Burmese military,” a representative of Global Witness, reports.

So now, in Myanmar, the government, eager to be seen as pro-democratic, pro-little guy (except of course for the Rohingya) as possible, is now denying that smuggling is a major problem, or that heroin use is widespread, even condoned, at mine sites, even though it is losing billions a year in revenue and “a sizable majority of Kachin youths are addicts. The World Health Organization has said about 30 percent of injecting drug users in Myitkyina have contracted H.I.V.”

Some anti-drug activists believe the government is distributing heroin to weaken the ethnic insurgency, with the military allowing pushers past their checkpoints. “Heroin is their weapon,” he said.

The article lays most of the blame at the doorstep of China, with its unquenchable thirst for jade and the greed of its businessmen invested in the mines.  Much as I would like to join the party, I cannot see why this tragedy does not need to be addressed by the Myanmar government itself.  It sure hasn’t shown that it cares about protecting its citizens.  It’s losing money on the mine so the continuous flow of wealth isn’t the issue.  I’m beginning to think that even with this new, hopeful government, no one really gives a crap.  I wonder if they will change their tune when Myanmar has a higher HIV rate than southern Africa. By then it will be too late.  HIV will not stop at ethnic borders.  The country is in peril.