Displaced civilians turn reluctant opium farmers in Myanmar
NewsFeed Displaced civilians turn reluctant opium farmers in Myanmar
Opium production is booming in Myanmar as displaced civilians reluctantly become poppy farmers to survive the country's civil war.
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Al Jazeera
7 hours ago
- Al Jazeera
More than four million people have fled Sudan amid war, UN says
More than four million people have fled Sudan since the start of its civil war in 2023, officials with the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) say. 'Now in its third year, the four million people is a devastating milestone in what is the world's most damaging displacement crisis at the moment,' agency spokesperson Eujin Byun said at a Geneva media briefing on Tuesday. 'If the conflict continues in Sudan, … we expect thousands more people will continue to flee, putting regional and global stability at stake.' Sudan shares a border with Chad, South Sudan, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, the Central African Republic and Libya. In addition to refugees who have left the country, about 10.5 million people have been displaced internally in Sudan, according to UN estimates. Patrice Dossou Ahouansou, a UNHCR official, said 800,000 of the refugees have arrived in Chad, where their shelter conditions are dire due to funding shortages with only 14 percent of funding appeals met. 'This is an unprecedented crisis that we are facing. This is a crisis of humanity. This is a crisis of … protection, based on the violence that refugees are reporting,' he said. The war has been raging in Sudan between its military and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) paramilitary group. In recent months, the violence has been intensifying in the western region of Darfur, where the RSF has been besieging the city of el-Fasher, compounding hunger in the area. A World Food Programme (WFP) and UNICEF aid convoy delivering food to el-Fasher came under attack this week, according to the UN's children's aid agency. 'We have received information about a convoy with WFP and UNICEF trucks being attacked last night while positioned in Al Koma, North Darfur, waiting for approval to proceed to el-Fasher,' UNICEF spokesperson Eva Hinds said on Tuesday. Sudan has seen growing instability since longtime President Omar al-Bashir was removed from power in 2019 after months of antigovernment protests. In October 2021, the Sudanese military staged a coup against the civilian government of Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok, leading to his resignation in early 2022. Sudan's army chief, Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and rival Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, who leads the RSF, had shared power after the coup but then started fighting for control of the state and its resources in April 2023.
Al Jazeera
2 days ago
- Al Jazeera
‘Everyone feels unsafe': Border panic as Indian forces kill Myanmar rebels
Flies hovered over the blackened and swollen bodies of men and boys, lying side-by-side on a piece of tarpaulin, in blood-soaked combat fatigues, amid preparations for a rushed cremation in the Tamu district of Myanmar's Sagaing region, bordering India. Quickly arranged wooden logs formed the base of the mass pyre, with several worn-out rubber tyres burning alongside to sustain the fire, the orange and green wreaths just out of reach of the flames. Among the 10 members of the Pa Ka Pha (PKP), part of the larger People's Defence Forces (PDF), killed by the Indian Army on May 14, three were teenagers. The PKP comes under the command of the National Unity Government (NUG), Myanmar's government-in-exile, comprising lawmakers removed in the 2021 coup, including legislators from Nobel Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy party. It mostly assists the PDF – a network of civilian militia groups against the military government – which serves, in effect, as the NUG's army. The Indian Army said that on May 14, a battalion of the country's Assam Rifles (AR) paramilitary force patrolling a border post in the northeast Indian state of Manipur, killed 10 men armed with 'war-like stores' who were 'suspected to be involved in cross-border insurgent activities'. The battalion, the Indian Army said, was 'acting on specific intelligence'. The Indian soldiers were stationed at the border in Chandel, a district contiguous with Tamu on the Myanmar side of the frontier. Manipur has been torn by a civil war between ethnic groups for the past two years, and Indian authorities have often accused migrants from Myanmar of stoking those tensions. However, disputing the Indian version of the May 14 events, the exiled NUG said its cadres were 'not killed in an armed encounter within Indian territory'. Instead, it said in a statement, they were 'captured, tortured and summarily executed by' Indian Army personnel. For nearly five years since the coup, political analysts and conflict observers say that resistance groups operating in Myanmar, along the 1,600km-long (994 miles) border with India, have shared an understanding with Indian forces, under which both sides effectively minded their own business. That has now changed with the killings in Tamu, sending shockwaves through the exiled NUG, dozens of rebel armed groups and thousands of refugees who fled the war in Myanmar to find shelter in northeastern Indian states. They now fear a spillover along the wider frontier. 'Fighters are in panic, but the refugees are more worried – they all feel unsafe now,' said Thida*, who works with the Tamu Pa Ah Pha, or the People's Administration Team, and organised the rebels' funeral on May 16. She requested to be identified by a pseudonym. Meanwhile, New Delhi has moved over the past year to fence the international border with Myanmar, dividing transnational ethnic communities who have enjoyed open-border movement for generations, before India and Myanmar gained freedom from British rule in the late 1940s. 'We felt safe [with India in our neighbourhood],' said Thida. 'But after this incident, we have become very worried, you know, that similar things may follow up from the Indian forces.' 'This never happened in four years [since the armed uprising against the coup], but now, it has happened,' she told Al Jazeera. 'So, once there is a first time, there could be a second or a third time, too. That is the biggest worry.' On May 12, the 10 cadres of the PKP arrived at their newly established camp in Tamu after their earlier position was exposed to the Myanmar military. A senior NUG official and two locals based in Tamu independently told Al Jazeera that they had alerted the Indian Army of their presence in advance. 'The AR personnel visited the new campsite [on May 12],' claimed Thida. 'They were informed of our every step.' What followed over the next four days could not be verified independently, with conflicting versions emerging from Indian officials and the NUG. There are also contradictions in the narratives put out by Indian officials. On May 14, the Indian Army's eastern command claimed that its troops acted on 'intelligence', but 'were fired upon by suspected cadres', and killed 10 cadres in a gunfight in the New Samtal area of the Chandel district. Two days later, on May 16, a spokesperson for India's Ministry of Defence said that 'a patrol of Assam Rifles' was fired upon. In retaliation, they killed '10 individuals, wearing camouflage fatigues', and recovered seven AK-47 rifles as well as a rocket-propelled grenade launcher. Five days later, on May 21, the Defence Ministry identified the killed men as cadres of the PKP. The ministry spokesperson further noted that 'a patrol out to sanitise the area, where fence construction is under way along the [border], came under intense automatic fire', with the intent 'to cause severe harm to construction workers or troops of Assam Rifles to deter the fencing work'. Speaking with Al Jazeera, a retired Indian government official, who has advised New Delhi on its Myanmar policy for a decade, pointed out the dissonance in the Indian versions: Did Indian soldiers respond proactively to intelligence alerts, or were they reacting to an attack from the rebels from Myanmar? 'It is difficult to make sense of these killings. This is something that has happened against the run of play,' the retired official, who requested anonymity to speak, said. The contradictions, he said, suggested that 'a mistake happened, perhaps in the fog of war'. 'It cannot be both a proactive operation and retaliation.' Al Jazeera requested comments from the Indian Army on questions around the operation, first on May 26, and then again on May 30, but has yet to receive a response. Thura, an officer with the PDF in Sagaing, the northwest Myanmar region where Tamu is too, said, 'The [PKP cadres] are not combat trained, or even armed enough to imagine taking on a professional army'. When they were informed by the Indian Army of the deaths on May 16, local Tamu authorities rushed to the Indian side. 'Assam Rifles had already prepared a docket of documents,' said a Tamu official, who was coordinating the bodies' handover, and requested anonymity. 'We were forced to sign the false documents, or they threatened not to give the corpses of martyrs.' Al Jazeera has reviewed three documents from the docket, which imply consent to the border fencing and underline that the PDF cadres were killed in a gunfight in Indian territory. Thida, from the Tamu's People's Administration Team, and NUG officials, told Al Jazeera that they have repeatedly asked Indian officials to reconsider the border fencing. 'For the last month, we have been requesting the Indian Army to speak with our ministry [referring to the exiled NUG] and have a meeting. Until then, stop the border fencing process,' she said. Bewildered by the killings, Thida said, 'It is easy to take advantage while our country is in such a crisis. And, to be honest, we cannot do anything about it. We are the rebels in our own country — how can we pick fights with the large Indian Army?' Above all, Thida said she was heartbroken. 'The state of corpses was horrific. Insects were growing inside the body,' she recalled. 'If nothing, Indian forces should have respect for our dead.' Angshuman Choudhury, a researcher focused on Myanmar and northeast India, said that conflict observers 'are befuddled by these killings in Tamu'. 'It is counterintuitive and should not have happened by any measure,' he said. The main point of dispute, the border fencing, is an age-old issue, noted Choudhary. 'It has always caused friction along the border. And very violent fiction in the sense of intense territorial misunderstandings from groups on either side,' he said. When New Delhi first moved last year to end the free movement regime, which allows cross-border movement to inhabitants, Indigenous communities across India's northeastern states of Mizoram, Nagaland, Manipur and Arunachal Pradesh were left stunned. Members of these communities live on both sides of the border with Myanmar – and have for centuries. Political analysts and academics note that the border communities on either side reconciled with the idea of India and Myanmar because of the freedom to travel back and forth. Erecting physical infrastructure triggers a kind of anxiety in these transnational communities that demarcation on maps does not, argued Choudhary. 'By fencing, India is creating a completely new form of anxieties that did not even exist in the 1940s, the immediate post-colonial period,' Choudhary said. 'It is going to create absolutely unnecessary forms of instability, ugliness, and widen the existing fault lines.' Last year, the Indian home minister, Amit Shah, said that border fencing would ensure India's 'internal security' and 'maintain the demographic structure' of the regions bordering Myanmar, in a move widely seen as a response to the conflict in Manipur. Since May 2023, ongoing ethnic violence between the Meitei majority and the Kuki and Naga minority communities has killed more than 250 people and displaced thousands. The state administration has faced allegations of exacerbating the unrest to strengthen its support among the Meitei population, which the government has denied. Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government and the Manipur state government, also under the BJP, have blamed the crisis in Manipur in part on undocumented migrants from Myanmar, whom they accuse of deepening ethnic tensions. Now, with the killings in Tamu, Choudhary said that Indian security forces had a new frontier of discontent, along a border where numerous armed groups opposed to Myanmar's ruling military have operated — until now, in relative peace with Indian troops. The deaths, he said, could change the rules of engagement between Indian forces and those groups. 'Remember, other rebel groups [in Myanmar] are also watching this closely,' he said. 'These issues can spiral quickly.'
Al Jazeera
4 days ago
- Al Jazeera
How two Africans became trapped in a cyber-scam operation in Laos
Bokeo province, Laos – Khobby was living in Dubai last year when he received an intriguing message about a well-paying job working online in a far-flung corner of Southeast Asia. The salary was good, he was told. He would be working on computers in an office. The company would even foot the bill for his relocation to join the firm in Laos – a country of 7.6 million people nestled between China, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam and Myanmar. With the company paying for his flights, Khobby decided to take the plunge. But his landing in Laos was anything but smooth. Khobby discovered that the promised dream job was rapidly becoming a nightmare when his Ghanaian passport was taken on arrival by his new employers. With his passport confiscated and threats of physical harm ever present, he endured months working inside a compound which he could not leave. The 21-year-old had become the latest victim of booming online cyber-scam operations in Southeast Asia – an industry that is believed to have enslaved tens of thousands of workers lured with the promise of decently paid jobs in online sales and the information technology industry. 'When I got there, I saw a lot of Africans in the office, with a lot of phones,' Khobby told Al Jazeera, recounting his arrival in Laos. 'Each person had 10 phones, 15 phones. That was when I realised this was a scamming job,' he said. The operation Khobby found himself working for was in a remote area in northwest Laos, where a casino city has been carved out of a patch of jungle in the infamous 'Golden Triangle' region – the lawless border zone between Myanmar, Laos and Thailand that has long been a centre for global drug production and trafficking. He said he was forced to work long days and sleep in a dormitory with five other African workers at night during the months he spent at the scam centre in the Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone. Khobby recounted the original message he received from an acquaintance encouraging him to take the job in Laos. 'My company is hiring new staff', he said, adding that he was told the salary was $1,200 per month. 'He told me it was data entry.' The Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone (GTSEZ) where Khobby was lured to for work operates as an autonomous territory within Laos. Leased from Laotian authorities by Chinese national Zhao Wei, whom the US government has designated the leader of a transnational criminal organisation, life in the GTSEZ is monitored by a myriad of security cameras and protected by its own private security force. Clocks are set to Beijing time. Signage is predominantly in Chinese, and China's yuan is the dominant and preferred currency. Central to the GTSEZ city-state is Zhao Wei's Kings Romans casino, which the United States Treasury also described as a hub for criminal activity such as money laundering, narcotics and wildlife trafficking. During a recent visit to the zone by Al Jazeera, Rolls Royce limousines ferried gamblers to some of the city's casinos while workers toiled on the construction of an elaborate and expansive Venice-style waterway just a stone's throw from the Mekong river. While luxury construction projects – including the recently completed Bokeo International Airport – speak to the vast amounts of money flowing through this mini casino city, it is inside the grey, nondescript tower blocks dotted around the economic zone where the lucrative online scam trade occurs. Within these tower blocks, thousands of trafficked workers from all over the world – just like Khobby – are reported to spend up to 17 hours a day working online to dupe unsuspecting 'clients' into parting with their money. The online swindles are as varied as investing money in fake business portfolios to paying false tax bills that appear very real and from trading phoney cryptocurrency to being caught in online romance traps. Anti-trafficking experts say most of the workers are deceived into leaving their home countries – such are nearby China, Thailand and Indonesia or as far away as Nigeria, Ghana, Uganda and Ethiopia – with the promise of decent salaries. Khobby told how his 'data entry' job was, in fact, a scam known in the cybercrime underworld as 'pig butchering'. This is where victims are identified, cold-called or messaged directly by phone in a bid to establish a relationship. Trust is built up over time to the point where an initial investment is made by the intended victim. This can be, at first, a small amount of the victim's money or emotions in the case of fake online relationships. There are small rewards on the investments, Khobby explained, telling how those in the industry refer to their victims as pigs who are being 'fattened' by trust built up with the scammers. That fattening continues until a substantial monetary investment is made in whatever scam the victim has become part of. Then they are swiftly 'butchered', which is when the scammers get away with the ill-gotten gains taken from their victims. Once the butchering is done, all communications are cut with the victims and the scammers disappear without leaving a digital trace. According to experts, cyber-scamming inside the GTSEZ boomed during the 2019 and 2020 COVID lockdowns when restrictions on travel meant international visitors could not access the Kings Romans casino. In the years since, the cyber-scam industry has burgeoned, physically transcended borders to become one of the dominant profit-making illicit activities in the region, not only in the GTSEZ in Laos but also in neighbouring Cambodia and in conflict-ridden Myanmar. Though not as elaborate as the GTSEZ, purpose-built cyber-scam 'compounds' have proliferated in Myanmar's border areas with Thailand. The Center for Strategic and International Studies estimates that cyber-scamming in Southeast Asia generates tens of billions annually, while the United States Institute of Peace equates the threat to that of the destructive fentanyl trade. 'Cyber-scam operations have significantly benefitted from developments in the fintech industry, including cryptocurrencies, with apps being directly developed for use at [cyber-scam] compounds to launder money,' said Kristina Amerhauser, of the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime. 'Victims and perpetrators are spread across different countries, money is laundered offshore, operations are global,' Amerhauser told Al Jazeera, explaining that the sophisticated technology used in cyber-scamming, along with its international reach, has made it extremely difficult to combat. About 260 trafficked scam-centre workers were recently rescued in a cross-border operation between Thailand and Myanmar. Yet, even in rare instances such as this when trafficked workers are freed, they still face complications due to their visa status and their own potential complicity in criminal activity. Khobby – who is now back in Dubai – told Al Jazeera that while he was coerced into working in the GTSEZ, he did actually receive the promised $1,200 monthly salary, and he had even signed a six-month 'contract' with the Chinese bosses who ran the operation. Richard Horsey, International Crisis Group's senior adviser on Myanmar, said Khobby's experience reflected a changing trend in recruitment by the criminal organisations running the scam centres. 'Some of the more sophisticated gangs are getting out of the human trafficking game and starting to trick workers to come,' Horsey said. 'People don't like to answer an advert for criminal scamming, and it's hard to advertise that. But once they're there, it's like – actually, we will pay you. We may have taken your passport, but there is a route to quite a lucrative opportunity here and we will give you a small part of that,' he said. The issue of salaries paid to coerced and enslaved workers complicates efforts to repatriate trafficking victims, who may be considered complicit criminals due to their status as 'paid' workers in the scam centres, said Eric Heintz, from the US-based anti-trafficking organisation International Justice Mission (IJM). 'We know of individuals being paid for the first few months they were inside, but then it tapers off to the point where they are making little – if any – money,' Heintz said, describing how victims become 'trapped in this cycle of abuse unable to leave the compound'. 'This specific aspect was a challenge early on with the victim identity process – when an official would ask if an individual previously in the scam compound was paid, the victim would answer that initially he or she was. That was enough for some officials to not identify them as victims,' Heintz said. Some workers have also been sold between criminal organisations and moved across borders to other scam centres, he said. 'We have heard of people being moved from a compound in one country to one in another – for example from Myawaddy to the GTSEZ or Cambodia and vice versa,' he said. Khobby said many of the workers in his 'office' had already had experience with scamming in other compounds and in other countries. 'Most of them had experience. They knew the job already,' he said. 'This job is going on in a lot of places – Thailand, Laos, Myanmar. They were OK because they got paid. They had experience and they knew what they were doing,' he added. High-school graduate Jojo said she was working as a maid in Kampala, Uganda, when she received a message on the Telegram messaging app about an opportunity in Asia that involved being sponsored to do computer studies as part of a job in IT. 'I was so excited,' Jojo recounted, 'I told my mum about the offer.' Jojo told how she was sent an airline ticket, and described how multiple people met her along the way as she journeyed from Kampala to Laos. Eventually Jojo arrived in the same scam operation as Khobby. She described an atmosphere similar to a fast-paced sales centre, with Chinese bosses shouting encouragement when a victim had been 'butchered' and their money stolen, telling how she witnessed people scammed for as much as $200,000. 'They would shout a lot, in Chinese – 'What are we here for? Money!'' On top of adrenaline, the scam operation also ran on fear, Jojo said. Workers were beaten if they did not meet targets for swindling money. Mostly locked inside the building where she worked and lived; Jojo said she was only able to leave the scam operation once in the four months she was in the GTSEZ, and that was to attend a local hospital after falling ill. Fear of the Chinese bosses who ran the operation not only permeated their workstations but in the dormitory where they slept. 'They told us 'Whatever happens in the room, we are listening',' she said, also telling how her co-workers were beaten when they failed to meet targets. 'They stopped them from working. They stopped them from coming to get food. They were not getting results. They were not bringing in the money they wanted. So they saw them as useless,' she said. 'They were torturing them every day.' Khobby and Jojo said they were moved to act in case it was their turn next. When they organised a strike to demand better treatment, their bosses brought in Laotian police and several of the strikers – including Jojo and Khobby – were taken to a police station where they were told they were sacked. They were also told they would not be paid what was owed in wages and their overseers refused to give their passports back. Khobby said he was left stranded without a passport and the police refused to help. 'This is not about only the Chinese people,' Khobby said. 'Even in Vientiane, they have immigration offices who are involved. They are the ones giving the visas. When I got to Laos, it was the immigration officer who was waiting for me. I didn't even fill out any form,' he said. With help from the Ghanaian embassy, Khobby and Jojo were eventually able to retrieve their passports, and with assistance from family and friends, they returned home. The IJM's Heintz, said that target countries for scammer recruitment – such as those in Africa – need better awareness of the dangers of trafficking. 'There needs to be better awareness at the source country level of the dangers associated with these jobs,' he said. Reflecting on what led him to work up the courage to lead a strike in the scam centre, Khobby considered his childhood back in Ghana. 'I was a boy who was raised in a police station. My grandpa was a police commander. So in that aspect, I'm very bold, I have that courage. I like giving things a try and I like taking risks,' he said. Jojo told Al Jazeera how she continues to chat online with friends who are still trapped in scam centres in Laos, and who have told her that new recruits arrive each day in the GTSEZ. Her friends want to get out of the scam business and the economic zone in Laos. But it is not so easy to leave, Jojo said. 'They don't have their passports,' she said.
