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 so far. So the impoverished residents of Mee Laung Yaw village, who lack electricity and eat eggplant curry as a poor substitute for meat, spend their days gazing at their expropriated fields, now fenced in and dominated by an oil-exploration tower that dwarfs their bamboo shacks. Several villagers took lowly construction jobs on the site but they were never paid so they’ve stopped showing up for work. “I hope they don’t find any oil,” says village chief Aye Thein Tun. “Because even if they do, none of it will come to us. It will just go to other countries.”
The Western dialogue over what to do about Burma’s repressive military regime is often framed as a 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 in on the Burma question, acknowledging: “Clearly the path we have taken in imposing sanctions hasn’t influenced the Burmese junta … [which is] impervious to influence from anyone.”
