Panning for Myanmar’s leftovers

Squatting along the rocky banks of the Nmai Hka River, villagers labor from dawn till dusk over large wooden pans, scrounging for crumbs from the junta’s table.

Children barely big enough to swirl the heavy slurry toil alongside men and women, doing backbreaking work that exposes them to toxic mercury.

Every few minutes, they pause and tilt their dripping pans to catch the sunlight, hoping for the glint from a few golden flecks that haven’t been scooped up with the rest of Myanmar’s vast mineral wealth by the ruling generals and their cronies.

On a recent day by the river, Ja Bu, 46, strained to lift shovel loads of slurry as a 10-year-old boy, ankle-deep in the cold, muddy water, worked a pan big enough for him to bathe in.

Sixty miles west, Ja Bu’s younger brother was searching for jade in the drainage ditch of a mine exhausted years ago by the junta. The few dollars that Ja Bu and her brother manage to scratch together each day from what the generals didn’t take buys food, clothes and shelter for 10 people.

During 45 years of military rule, the generals have steadily consolidated control over the country’s most lucrative mining areas. They have amassed enormous wealth from gems, minerals, timber and other vast natural resources, and left most of Myanmar’s people poor.

The junta tightly controls access to its large gem and jade mines, but remote places such as Kharbar offer a glimpse of a struggling people’s helpless, yet strengthening, rage against the government.

The junta’s violent crackdown against pro-democracy street demonstrations in September, the largest in two decades, sparked new calls for an international boycott of the government’s biggest moneymakers, including rubies, sapphires, oil and natural gas.

First Lady Laura Bush has urged jewelers not to buy gems from Myanmar, also known as Burma. Some of the world’s biggest names in precious stones, such as Cartier, Bulgari and Tiffany, say they won’t sell Myanmar’s blood-tainted treasures anymore.

The U.S. Senate passed legislation Wednesday to tighten sanctions against the junta by banning imports of that country’s rubies and high-quality jade. The House already passed its version of the bill but must act again on the Senate-passed version to approve minor differences.

But as Western shoppers shun Myanmar’s jewels, buyers from neighboring China are rushing in to scoop up the country’s gold and jade, highly prized by the growing middle class and by the fabulously wealthy, eager to find more ways to flaunt their new wealth.

It’s one of the main reasons why the junta is still strong after years of sanctions: When Western countries try to tighten the economic noose, neighbors led by China, India and Thailand loosen the knot by increasing trade and investment in Myanmar.

Government officials say jade replaced rubies as the main attraction at a state-run auction held last month in Yangon, the country’s principal city, also known as Rangoon. The fourth auction this year, it raised about $125 million for the junta in badly needed foreign currency.

But the junta doesn’t let much trickle down to places like Kharbar, a remote northern stretch near the Himalayan foothills, close to the Chinese border.

It’s a spectacularly beautiful, unforgiving place where villagers live in thatched huts with walls woven from bamboo. Thin as cardboard, they are flimsy shelter against frigid winter winds. And as the cost of food and fuel rises, so does the villagers’ resentment, which roils like the rapids of the Nmai Hka that taunts them with tiny gifts of gold.

Dong Shi, a wiry man in a green sweater splitting at the seams, has been working the brown slough and bamboo sluices here for three years.

On a good day, he finds $8 worth of gold flakes, the biggest about the size of a pinhead. Like other prospectors, he must pay $250, or more than half an average person’s annual income here, to the owner of the land for permission to pan just 10 square feet of riverbank.

After Dong Shi pays his stake’s owner, his share of the diesel to run a generator and sluice pumps, school fees for his four kids and other mounting expenses, he has little left.

“We eat all that I earn,” he said. “I have nothing left in my pocket. Tomorrow I go back to work on the river, just to have some more food.”

It is grueling, risky work. To separate gold particles from the slurry, miners squeeze drops of mercury from strips of cloth soaked in quicksilver, exposing them and the river fish they eat to dangerous levels of the heavy metal, which can damage kidneys and the nervous system.

For all the prospectors’ pain and risk, most pans come up bust. So they dig deeper, push the limits harder.

Desperate to hit pay dirt, dreaming of finding a rare nugget instead of just flecks, some villagers rig up hand pumps onshore to homemade breathing hoses, and wade to the middle of the river. They work up to three hours at a time underwater.

As the economic chasm widens between Myanmar’s people and their corrupt military rulers, places that were once synonymous with the sparkle of precious stones are now earning a darker reputation as hotbeds of political dissent.

One is Mogok, for centuries the entrance to the Valley of Rubies, which lies 200 miles south of Kharbar but might as well be a thousand, because the government rarely allows foreign visitors to see for themselves what is happening there.

Some of the earliest protests against rising fuel prices were held in Mogok this summer before they spread to the capital and grabbed world attention. Last month, more than 50 Buddhist monks defied the junta’s crackdown and marched peacefully through Mogok.

Anger has been boiling beneath the surface there for years as the junta pushed out more small-scale miners, who are left to search the dregs of abandoned mines, said Soe Myint, a leader in exile of detained opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy.

“Most of the gems are mined by government firms, or those affiliated with the junta, the generals’ relatives and cronies,” added Myint, who was elected to Myanmar’s parliament in 1990 and then jailed for 14 years when the military rejected Suu Kyi’s victory at the polls.

“Whether it’s jade, rubies or sapphires, locals cannot mine them anymore. They only get a very small portion. That’s why Mogok is at the forefront of the demonstrations. The local people have nothing else to do because all the land has been confiscated by the government and government companies.”

The trade in gemstones, the country’s third-largest source of revenue, is dominated by the Union of Myanmar Economic Holdings Ltd., a consortium co-owned by the Defense Ministry and military officers who hold the bulk of the firm’s shares.

The government tightly controls access to the country’s gem and jade mines, but it’s possible to get a hint of the suffering that has stirred so much anger against the junta by traveling north to the rough roads and fast-moving rivers around Kharbar. Here, two rivers fed by Himalayan glaciers converge to give birth to the Irrawaddy River, the broad backbone of Myanmar.

Long canoes with ear-splitting motors are the only way into the region’s most promising gold panning sites, one of the last places where small-scale miners can legally eke out a living. The area is also home to some of the world’s best jade deposits.

But the junta shut down the biggest operations two years ago, and the flood of cash from Chinese businesspeople suddenly dropped off. The local economy suffered more as most of the jade trade moved south to Mandalay, where more than 100 factories cut and polish the stones, mainly to supply growing demand in China.

Child labor is an essential part of production at the bottom end of outdoor factories that surround Mandalay’s jade market.

Children huddle on their haunches around glowing embers in metal braziers, melting doping wax on the end of dop sticks, plucking small pieces of jade from a cup, and carefully placing them on the wax blobs. They blow gently to harden the seals and then hand the sticks up the line to other children.

On a recent day, one boy sat on the edge of a stool, stretching his leg to reach a wooden pedal that he pumped to spin a bamboo cylinder, wrapped in sandpaper, as he ground pieces of jade to a refined sheen. Once they’d done their best with small hands scraped by the grinders, the boys passed the jade along to men.

It takes an experienced hand to get the shimmering polish that will bring the best price, a small piece of the profits that keep Myanmar’s military in power. That can’t be left in the shaky hands of children.

paul.watson@latimes.com

Watson was recently on assignment in Myanmar.