More than 10,000 members of minorities in Burma on the run again – China's growing energy appetite fuels war in Burma

On the occasion of World Refugee Day (June 20) the Society for Threatened Peoples (STP) draws attention to a refugee drama in eastern Burma that is being largely ignored. In the current week, more than 10,000 members of the Kachin people are fleeing the battles going on between Burmese soldiers and the Kachin liberation movement. Many civilians are also afraid they will be forced to work as bearers for the army. The bloody conflicts were set off by the construction of two dams intended to produce energy for China. The Kachin reject the dam project because it would entail forced resettlement of thousands of people. Roughly 480,000 members of ethnic minorities in eastern Burma are on the run due to war and grievous human rights violations.

"China treats Burma like a colony for commodities, systematically plundering its resources," criticized Ulrich Delius of the STP's Asia section. "Beijing is fomenting war with its ruthless exploitation of energy and raw material deposits in this neighboring multiethnic state." The civil war with the Kachin liberation movement had reached a cease-fire in 1994, but the new civil government in Burma has sent troops to the Kachin nation to secure construction of these two dams for China.

Some 15,000 Kachin will lose their land and their houses to the construction project, which will build two dams on tributaries of the Irrawaddy Delta. A total of 60 Kachin villages are slated for forced relocation. Ever since news of the mega-project broke in 2004, members of the minority have been protesting by sending appeals to the Chinese and Burmese governments against the forced relocation. But both governments have ignored the resistance. Today there are more than one hundred Chinese engineers working on the two construction sites in the Kachin nation. Chinese state leaders are gravely concerned about the safety of the sites, as well as about the continuation of numerous investments in the neighboring country.

China is the largest investor in Burma. They are planning construction of more than 40 dams in Burma by 2020, and are laying oil and gas pipelines, building ports, operating mines and controlling trade and industry especially in the peripheral regions populated by non-Burmese, such as the Kachin nation. There are tens of thousands of Chinese dealers, industrialists and engineers operating in the state of Kachin alone. As recently as May 2011 Beijing reaffirmed its "strategic partnership" with Burma. "But the only "partner" China sees in Burma is its all-powerful military," reported Delius. "The ethnic minorities affected by China's investments had no say at all in the planning of the project, nor in its execution. For Burma's ethnic minorities, China's insatiable hunger for raw materials has long since become a curse."