“The law in Burma [Myanmar] is like an old dog,” said a veteran ethnic-Kachin politician along Myanmar’s rugged northern border with China. “It barks if you kick it, otherwise it stays silent.” Global Witness, a London-based environmental watchdog, has inadvertently set the old dog howling in northern Myanmar.

The commotion started with a Global Witness press release issued last week, which reported that China and Myanmar were actually working to halt rather than accelerate logging in northern Myanmar by closing their common border to the timber trade. China’s announcement in March of the logging ban follows several years of lobbying by Global Witness to halt the rapacious timber trade in northern Myanmar’s ethnic-Kachin areas, which the advocacy group has characterized as “illicit”.

Indigenous environmental groups based in Kachin state have since expressed their concerns about the alleged ban and discomfort with Global Witness’s advocacy approach. A spokesman for the Kachin Environmental Organization said the new ban on cross-border log trading is really intended to provide the ruling State Peace and Development Council (SPDC) with the legal power to arrest small businessmen involved in the trade. He stated his belief that businessmen associated with the military junta were unlikely to be affected.

He also noted that Ohn Myint, the SPDC’s army commander in Kachin state, issued a directive last week prohibiting the Kachin Independence Organization (KIO), an ethnic rebel group, from trading gold, jade or logs through its main trading gate with China in the border town of Laiza. The army commander reportedly asked the Chinese government to assist in enforcing this ban.

The KIO has been under increasing pressure to surrender its arms to the military government, and Kachin leaders see the latest ban as another tactic toward achieving that end. A Kachin working for a second environmental non-governmental organization (NGO), who recently returned from the China border, expressed concern that a ban on the logging trade would be selectively applied, enabling the SPDC to further monopolize the logging trade, weaken the KIO, and cause more economic hardship for already impoverished local communities.

Since the Yangon government and the Kachin Independence Organization concluded a tentative ceasefire in 1994, mining and logging in northern Myanmar have intensified. Local communities are concerned about the long-term ecological impact of breakneck resource extraction and are increasingly disturbed that for the past decade the lion’s share of the profits has gone to military officials, their collaborators in the KIO and a handful of local and Chinese businessmen.

Many Kachin civilians are also dependent, formally or informally, on extractive industries. Some earn their livelihood by selling goods and services to the loggers. In the absence of government-initiated development projects, the KIO has used a modest amount of its logging income to support the development of desperately needed hospitals, schools and roads.

Enter Global Witness, a leading advocate of applying international law to regulate underground trade in timber, diamonds and oil. Global Witness’s mandate is to highlight the link between the exploitation of natural resources and human-rights abuses, particularly in cases where the resources fund and perpetuate conflict and corruption.

The outfit undoubtedly has a strong track record. Global Witness applied advocacy pressure that played a key role in the closing of the Thai-Cambodian border to illicit logging, thereby choking off the Khmer Rouge’s income and prompting its peace with the Cambodian government. It also carefully chronicled the blood-diamond trade in some of Africa’s conflicts and played a role in the United Nations sanctions that were eventually passed against Liberian warlord Charles Taylor.

Global Witness has recently focused its considerable energies and resources on the illicit logging trade in northern Myanmar, in what appeared to it a similar war-torn situation where extractive industries perpetuate the conflict.

In an October 2005 report titled “A Choice for China: Ending the Destruction of Burma’s Northern Forests”, the advocacy group chronicled and identified some of the main culprits behind the destruction of one of Southeast Asia’s last great stands of hardwood forest.

However, Global Witness’s conceptual approach and legalistic advocacy policies are problematic when applied to Myanmar and have evoked concerns among local environmentalists who are arguably more familiar with the political, economic and social complexities behind the trade.

Contrary to Global Witness’s stated mandate, the conflict in Kachin state is not driven primarily by the resource trade. Rather, the Kachin insurgency has been motivated by a deep historical sense of resentment and is primarily a nationalistic struggle for an ethnic homeland. A 1994 ceasefire agreement between the government and the Kachin Independence Organization has not resolved the underlying political issues and ethnic Burman – Kachin tensions still run high.

The SPDC’s decision to grant lucrative concessions to exploit natural resources to former top-ranking Kachin rebels has in effect bought the compliance of those who would lead the charge back to war. To borrow a phrase, the logging trade has turned former battlefields into an ecologically destructive marketplace.

Global Witness’s advocacy approach, which is focused on halting the “illicit” cross-border logging trade, is hence problematic. For starters, its characterization of the trade as “illicit” is dubious.
Global Witness classifies 98% of Myanmar’s logging trade as illegal because it is not recorded in the country’s official trade statistics and is therefore assumed to have not passed through official customs checkpoints in Myanmar.

In reality, much of what Global Witness defines as “illicit” logging trade has occurred with the explicit or tacit permission of both governments for more than a decade. Although much of the timber trade indeed bypasses customs officials, heads of state of China and Myanmar personally concluded many of the deals to exploit northern Myanmar’s forests and export the raw product to China.

In other cases, logging and exports occur with the explicit permission of the SPDC’s regional commander in Kachin state, the highest-ranking member of the government at the divisional level. Moreover, the Myanmar Timber Enterprise, the commercial arm of the SPDC’s Ministry of Forestry, is permitted to export timber across the border. Although aspects of the logging trade may violate Myanmar’s legal procedures, legal compliance, especially by high-ranking military officials, is generally weak.

Indeed, it is commonly estimated that the SPDC’s official trade data records less than 20% of all exports that crossed into China in the past decade. In other words, by Global Witness’s definition, nearly all of Myanmar’s trade with China is illicit. This is true for a variety of
reasons: trade through unofficial gates, customs officials undervaluing of goods in return for bribes and the central government’s manipulation of publicly reported statistics to understate trade flows and disguise balance-of-payment deficits.

A second problem with Global Witness’s approach is that it deflects attention from the real issue – environmental justice. Much of Myanmar’s “legal” bilateral trade in wood products was harvested in an unsustainable manner, and notably in violation of Myanmar’s own domestic laws and international treaty obligations. Environmental oversight is extremely weak, and forestry, police, customs and army officials are all known to be heavily involved in extorting money in the name of law enforcement.

Similarly, legality and justice are almost always worlds apart in Myanmar. The SPDC is a council of generals who promulgate and arbitrarily enforce laws, unconstrained by a constitution, parliament or judicial oversight. The institutions governing the logging trade are similarly dominated by the military. The post of minister of forestry is a highly coveted and lucrative one, always occupied by a high-ranking army official.

Official permission to log is given on the basis of patronage and bribes, rather than internationally acceptable impartial bidding procedures. Nor are the wishes of local communities ever taken into account. Global Witness’s focus on legal technicalities at the border draws attention away and partially validates the pervasive abuse of the law in Myanmar.

For those reasons, Global Witness’s advocacy approach is likely to fail.
The logging trade is too important to both Myanmar’s and China’s governments for it to be stopped on mere legal technicalities – as Global Witness apparently hopes.

Exports to China account for 20-30% of Myanmar’s total annual logging revenue and have accounted roughly for more than half a billion dollars in revenue over the past five years. China is similarly dependent on Myanmar for hard wood imports, much of which it re-exports in a booming furniture trade to the US and European countries.

Ominously, Global Witness’s approach may actually enable the military to tighten its monopoly grip and streamline its operations over the logging trade. If China makes a serious effort to block the illicit trade, loggers in Myanmar will likely divert the trade through the SPDC’s official trade gates, or its ports in Yangon.

This would enable the SPDC to reap even greater profits to the detriment of the small-scale loggers who are not associated with the military.
Although allegations of corruption have tarnished the KIO’s reputation, it remains an important balance to the SPDC.

No one doubts that Global Witness has the right intentions. But by focusing their considerable energies on the “illicit” nature of the cross-border logging trade, their approach does not ensure the equitable or sustainable environmental policies it aims to achieve. Worse, it may exacerbate an already abysmal environmental situation.

A more holistic, and considerably more difficult, approach would be to focus on securing a total ban on the logging trade, similar to what was accomplished in Thailand, in a manner that does not advantage the military government at the expense of the Kachin public.

Global Witness would be well placed to lobby both the United States and European Union into expanding their trade sanctions to include the imports of Chinese furniture made of Myanmar teak and other tropical hardwoods. Until then, Myanmar’s destructive timber trade will continue unabated, providing hard-currency earnings that prop up and perpetuate one of the world’s most abusive regimes.

Samuel Blythe is a Thailand-based journalist.