Smugglers Ply Bangladesh-Burma Border

Every night men gather on the muddy shores of the Naf River that flows between Burma and Bangladesh. They peer into the darkness and wait for the goods to arrive. Soon torches appear, motorboat engines whine and the smugglers’ race is on.

The scores of canoe-like boats that carry everything from pickles to cattle across the three-mile stretch of water are part of an illegal lifeline for local people on both sides of the border.

The job requires quick reflexes.

“They are coming, they are coming,” whispered one smuggler as he stood by the water near the town of Teknaf, in the southern tip of Bangladesh.

A cohort began giving orders. “We must take the supplies out and reload the boats quickly,” he said.

Most of the 8,000 people in Teknaf depend on smuggling.

From Burma they bring rice, chickens, timber, cigars, crockery, textiles, nuts and beer, while smugglers in Bangladesh send things like medicine, diesel oil, used clothing and biscuits.

Officials in Teknaf talk openly about the flow of goods.

“The illegal trade between the two countries is booming, although the Burmese authorities recently tightened checks at the border,” said Shankar Kumar Das, Teknaf’s administrator.

Border guards and traders said Bangladesh unofficially welcomes the rice smuggled in because it helps make up for a shortfall in production in the country’s southeastern region.

“At peak times up to 5,000 tons of Burmese rice arrived in Bangladesh daily,” one trader said.

He said the supply had recently dwindled because Burmese border guards tightened controls and Burmese farmers in Arakan province across the river were being made to give more of their produce to the Rangoon government.

An officer with the Bangladesh Rifles, the border force, said the smuggling can go on smoothly as long as his men do not stop it.

He said border guards have orders to seize any alcohol coming in from Burma, which is banned in Muslim Bangladesh, as well as small industrial goods.

“But these really matter little in the overall illegal trade, which heavily counts on rice,” he said.

In official trade, Burma sells $40 million worth of rice a year to Bangladesh and buys $25 million in jute and jute products.

The Naf River, which flows down through the Lushai hills before emptying into the Bay of Bengal, runs along the western Burmese province of Arakan, whose hills form most of the country’s 170-mile border with Bangladesh.

The province has a Muslim majority in a country where Buddhism has traditionally been the dominant faith.

Many people in the area have more in common with their Muslim cousins across the border than with fellow Burmese, and smuggling is often a family affair.

Many Burmese and Bangladeshis visit one another using eight-hour visas introduced in 1979 by then Bangladeshi President Ziaur Rahman.

The visas also allow crowds of small boys and girls to carry on a lively trade each day trekking across the frontier to sell towels, combs, cosmetics and toys.

The cross-border flow of people sometimes gets out of control. In 1978 more than 200,000 Burmese Muslims crossed into Bangladesh to escape persecution by the Burmese army.

Most of the refugees returned home a year later but officials say others remained and settled illegally on the hills and in the valleys around Cox’s Bazar district, a sea resort 50 miles from Teknaf.

The refugees have set down roots through marriage, with ties to local business and by buying land with black market money. Local officials said the refugees were responsible for a high crime rate in the area.