In Burma’s wildest corner, jade, drugs and rebels will test the new government

Yup Zau Hkawng, a jade businessman in Kachin State, and member of Peace Talk Creation Group, PCG, in portrait in his home. (Quinn Ryan Mattingly/For The Washington Post)

In Hkum Lu, 90, the eldest resident in Shwezet IDP camp. She says she often cries at night thinking of and missing her previous home. (Quinn Ryan Mattingly/For The Washington Post)

By Annie Gowen-April 4

MYITKYINA, Burma — The jade tycoon of Burma lives behind stone walls and a sophisticated security system. A visitor must be buzzed through a gate into the garden, pass a hunk of jade as big as a compact refrigerator, enter through a sliding screen and glide by the preserved tusks of the family elephant before sitting down with the man himself.

Yup Zau Hkawng is a well-known figure in Burma’s Kachin state, a broker in the peace process between armed rebels and the military and one of the few ethnic Kachin to own a jade mining business.

Burma’s northernmost state is home to 1.2 million people and some of the country’s most intractable problems — including a rapacious jade mining culture, opium cultivation, environmental devastation, controversial development deals with China and an armed insurgency. Kachin may pose one of the stiffest challenges to the new democratically elected civilian government, led by Aung San Suu Kyi, that has taken over a country that suffered decades of military rule.

[Burma gets an unassuming democrat as president]

Ask Yup Zau Hkawng what the odds are that Suu Kyi and the new civilian leaders will be able to make any headway here, and he breaks into a slow, conspiratorial smile.

“I’d rather say [I] hope than tell you what I think,” he said.

At the root of much of Kachin’s agony lies the immensely valuable green stone — jade. Activists have charged that families and cronies of the country’s all-powerful military are plundering the state’s jade and other natural resources, such as timber and gold. Large companies have been working around the clock in the past year to extract as much jade as possible before the new government comes in, turning mountains into valleys in a matter of weeks.

Read More