Saidpur, Bangladesh 03/18/13 – for APOLIS Global - Recently our friends at the Pulitzer Center introduced us to Jason Motlagh, an award-winning writer, photographer and filmmaker. We heard that he had an upcoming reporting project in Bangladesh and we asked him to visit our women’s cooperative and document the story behind our Market Bag and Garden Bag. During Jason’s visit he captured how our manufacturing partner has been empowering female artisans in the rural community of Saidpur, Bangladesh for over 40 years.

Hasina is an artisan and mother of five who has worked within the cooperative for over 15 years. Her eldest daughter recently graduated from college and the rest of her children are now in school. The cooperative supports a local orphanage by regularly purchasing school supplies and uniforms. As well as consistently helping to facilitate literacy programs and financial planning for families within the community of Saidpur.

We are proud to share highlights from Jason’s recent trip that illustrates how our model of advocacy through industry is transforming a small community in northern Bangaldesh.

Today, the street outside the sultan’s crumbling residence is quieter, but the fallout from his brazen campaign has not settled. As Malaysian security forces continue their mopping up operations against the sultan’s men in eastern Sabah province, a fresh wave of fighters has reportedly entered the fray. According to Abraham Idjirani, spokesman for the Royal Sultanate of Sulu and North Borneo, some 400 armed men have managed to breach a joint Malaysian-Filipino naval blockade in the Sulu Sea. It’s not yet clear who sent them, though the sultanate asserts they are from Mindanao, where leaders of the southern Philippine militant group Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) have pledged support. On March 31, the MNLF threatened a “long, protracted war” if Malaysian forces continued their pursuit of the self-proclaimed Royal Army of Sulu.

The Sabah affair is emblematic of territorial disputes that have long overshadowed the region. Centuries before the modern states of Malaysia and the Philippines came into being, the islands of the Sulu Sea, and part of resource-rich Sabah, were ruled by the Sultanate of Sulu. In 1878, the sultan made a fateful deal to lease Sabah to a British commercial interest; the territory was later annexed by the British crown and, in 1963, became part of an independent Malaysia. Now the Kiram family wants it back. It still receives roughly $1,700 a year in rent from Kuala Lumpur, but views the sum as ridiculous given how profitable the land is and the status afforded to other sultans in Malaysia. (For reference, Sultan Kiram and the Sultan of Brunei, once named the world’s richest man, share the same great-great grandfather.)

These days, Sultan Kiram, 74, could use some extra cash. On a recent morning, he was away at the hospital for one of his biweekly dialysis sessions. Fatima, his panguian — to use the term bestowed on a sultan’s wife — insists that while “he’s still O.K.,” he’s not the fleet-footed tango dancer who dazzled her early in their marriage. A retired civil servant, she worked full-time for over 20 years to support the family while the sultan managed a modest seafood-exporting business. In between filling cuttlefish orders from Japan, he was called upon to help mediate domestic insurgencies. Photo albums on the coffee table show the sultan wearing his trademark brown sunglasses next to grim-faced MNLF rebels and government officers.

Back in the 1970s, Fatima recalls urging her husband to also take up the gun. “I told him, ‘Why don’t you go the mountains and fight the [Malaysians]’ … you are only recognized if you are a rebel force,” she says. For years, the sultan countered that patience and diplomacy were the best course and wrote letters to officials, but to no avail. On Feb. 6, about 200 of his followers — some of them heavily armed — were dispatched to Sabah. A weeks-long impasse in a coastal village ended in bloodshed, as a Malaysian ground assault gave way to air strikes. The Sultan’s fighters and their commander, Agbimuddin Kiram, the sultan’s 70-year-old brother, melted into the jungle, where sporadic gun battles persist.

The crackdown has made a hard life even harder for the 800,000–plus Filipino migrant workers who help sustain Sabah’s booming palm-oil and petroleum industries. The Malaysian government, already facing criticism for harsh treatment of its migrant underclass, is accused by rights groups of widespread harassment of civilians as it moves to flush out the Royal Army. Dozens of homes have been destroyed and hundreds of Filipinos have fled abroad. Analysts warn that the toll will further aggravate anti-Malaysian sentiment in the southern Philippines, less than an hour away by boat.

With such valuable interests in the region and general elections on the horizon, the Malaysian government has shown no willingness to cede any ground. State officials, keen to project strength, have labeled the Royal Army “terrorists” and ignored the U.N.’s demands for a cease-fire. In Manila, President Benigno Aquino has tried to balance relations with Malaysia, a key ally and trading partner, with pressing political calculations at home as a midterm ballot nears. The sultan enjoys considerable standing among Muslims in the restive south of the country, and his claim to Sabah has become a matter of local pride.

Sultan Kiram judges the incursion to be a partial success in that his cause finally has the world’s attention. “I regret that people have died,” he says, moments after returning from his hospital treatment, walking with a cane. “However, we must make a sacrifice to enjoy the fruits that are rightfully ours.” He would not (or could not) say who the new fighters who have joined his army were, only that they were “volunteers” going to Sabah to seek “revenge for their brothers” killed by Malaysian forces. “We cannot stop people now,” he adds, somewhat cryptically, “but peace is our hope.”

The sultan says his people will hold out as long as it takes, but time may not be on his side. At midday his voice was faint and, behind the signature dark glasses, one of his eyes was fully shut. A handful of local journalists who by now had gathered outside to interview him would have to wait a while longer. The sultan needed a nap.

The boy was invisible from the skies I flew in over the day before, wandering alone somewhere under cover of the plantations that blanket Malaysian Borneo. The monoculture is carved by muddy rivers where crocodiles lurk and laterite roads that lead to processing plants with belching steel smoke stacks. Patches of clear-cut earth indicate where some farms are being expanded to keep the boilers full and the profits flowing into the coffers of the multinational agro-businesses that own them.

On the ground, in the void between the giant trees, Leonary stands out. He plods along, despite the heat and unexpected arrival of an outsider with questions about where he’s from, why he’s not in school. After moving from Indonesia as a boy with his migrant worker parents, he attended a learning center run by a local non-profit organization. But because he did not have any legal documents, he was barred from secondary school, leaving him with no choice but to work the same farm as his parents for about $7.50 a day. “There is no other option for me,” he says.

***

To the Malaysian government, Leonary Marcus officially does not exist.

He is one of an estimated 50,000 stateless Indonesian children living in Sabah province, the country’s palm oil producing heartland. Thousands more have come from the Phillipines, born to workers that have arrived in waves since the 1970′s to fulfill a demand for cheap labor in what is now the world’s second-largest palm oil industry. Without papers that prove nationality, their children are likewise denied healthcare and education, while the rest of the region continues to enjoy the fruits of their labor.

Over the past two months, life has grown even harder for migrant workers in Sabah. When followers of the mysterious Sultan of Sulu traveled to the region in early February to re-establish a land claim, a weeks-long standoff turned bloody, leaving more than 70 people dead and scores displaced. Malaysian forces are accused of rights abuses against the migrant community in the backcountry as they try to flush out remaining gunmen, while scores of Filipinos have fled the violence by boat.

In 2011, the export of palm oil and palm-based products earned Malaysia $27 billion — a five-fold increase over the past decade — thanks to brisk trade with China, the European Union, India and the United States, which is now importing record levels for its low price and long shelf life. Today, more than half of all products sold in U.S. supermarkets, from cosmetics to candy bars, contain palm oil. And with new government-mandated labeling requirements in the United States and Europe aimed at phasing out unhealthy trans-fats found in other types of oil, demand is increasing.

That’s more good news for Sabah, which accounts for one-third of Malaysia’s palm oil output. Twenty-five years ago, Lahad Datu, the main town in eastern Sabah, was a forgotten backwater of clapboard buildings. Drunkards roamed cracked sidewalks by day and nightfall was a signal to stay indoors. Locals recall how their hapless police force was nowhere to be seen when a gang of pirates shot their way into the town’s only bank, walking out with sacks of cash over a trail of dead bodies.

Such visions are hard to square with the robust development sweeping the area: Over the past 15 years the city’s population has doubled; downtown real estate prices have quadrupled; gleaming business-class hotels and fast-food franchises line newly paved roads that are monitored by squad cars. In the middle of a busy traffic roundabout in the center of town, a gilded palm tree stands as a symbol for the government-led campaign to upgrade a region that has lagged far behind Malaysia’s industry-rich Western peninsula.

“Life here used to be much different; it was a rough kind of place,” says Tammay Bin Inton, 58, a community leader for whom the days of violent street crime and power outages are a not-so-distant memory. He sat with a group of friends at a popular Indian teashop, talking football over cups of milk tea and samosas. With some pride, he noted that both of his children had recently moved back from Kota Kinabalu, eastern Malaysia’s largest city, to start projects of their own and take advantage of the boom. “The quality of life here has improved tremendously,” he says. “Business is good.”

South of town, lines of tanker trucks deliver crude palm oil around the clock to a sprawling, state-owned refinery complex where fresh lots have been set aside for potential investors. Provincial officials hope that a deep-water port currently under construction nearby will position the region to be a top exporter of biodiesel, if and when overseas demand surges. With government plans to double the overall area under cultivation by 2020, the prospects of Lahad Datu’s inhabitants are poised to get brighter.

But when the subject changes to the migrant laborers who keep the tankers revving around the clock, the mood at the cafe table sours. Mention of the vital role legions of Indonesians and Filipinos play by filling menial plantation jobs that most Malaysians would never consider causes the men to grumble vaguely about an increase in troubling behavior (“…the migrants are causing public disturbances”); the erosion of local culture and traditions; and the threat migrants posed to local employment prospects (“…what about the locals?”).

“The foreigners must be controlled. They are stealing jobs… Those that don’t have documents should be kicked out of Malaysia,” says Arnan Angkut, 50, a contractor. As for those who have toiled for decades to the benefit of the local economy, whose children are rejected by state schools and hospitals? “That’s up to the bosses (of the plantations). They can take care of their workers as they see fit. We don’t want to pay for anything.”

It was several days later that I came across an interesting item in the Business Times newspaper: Malaysia is losing at least 3 billion Ringgit ($986 million) in potential exports and tax revenue due to unpicked palm fruit resulting from its labor shortage. To avoid huge losses and hit target output goals, the Malaysian Palm Oil Board estimated that 40,000 additional workers needed to be hired, and fast. The article pointed out that many oil palm planters are mechanizing agricultural practices wherever possible and offering better wages in the estates across the region.

“Despite this,” the article continued, “many locals continue to shun plantation jobs.” Officials lamented the loss of potential tax revenues and vowed to get approval for extra foreign workers. No mention was made of incentives that might be offered to retain existing Indonesian and Filipino workers, some of whom are starting to leave the country for rival Indonesia as palm plantations expand into virgin tracts of forest.

The contradiction seems to be lost on everyone in Sabah. Nasrun Datuk Mansur, a state assemblyman and assistant to the state’s chief minister, later boasted to me that palm oil is the catalyst for a raft of business activities raising Lahad Datu’s profile, and the region’s.

Acknowledging the perennial need for migrant workers, he added, somewhat incongruously, that they “should leave their children behind” because of the extra burden it places on the state. “We have responsibility to take care of our own children here.”

Until Malaysia gained its independence in 1957, all children could attend school regardless of where they came from or what documents they had. But with migrant populations now accounting from nearly one-third of Sabah’s 3.2 million people, rights activists say that over the years burgeoning nativism has made the government less willing to pay for universal education.

“This whole question that arose from locals that, if you provide the education for migrant children, then the local children lose out,” says Aegile Fernandez, program director of Tenaganita, a Malaysia-based nonprofit group that assists migrant workers. In other words: to propose reforms that would extend rights to migrants’ children would prove costly at the ballot box. And with elections on the horizon in the coming months, no politician dares stray from the script.

When I reminded Mansur that his government does not currently provide any services, he feinted by complimenting the non-governmental organizations that are stepping up with help from foreign governments and agro-businesses, whose mega-farms dominate the countryside. “The companies are also making money,” says Mansur. “They should be responsible to support the foreign children.”

Pressed further about the thousands who are not taken care of, he ended the discussion and walked out of the room.

***

They may lack government funding, but Sabah’s stateless children have at least have Torben Venning. Tall and sturdy-built, with a fair complexion that refuses to adapt to the equatorial sun, the Danish native has waged a dogged campaign to sew education in plantation country since he arrived more than two decades ago as a traveler.

Venning and some friends opened a facility in 1990 to educate 70 farm children. Since then, his organization, Humana Child Aid Society, has established 128 “learning centers” (designated as such because they are not officially accredited) that offer instruction to more than 12,000 students with help from donors such as the European Union. “We came here as teachers and had no idea this was going to develop into the project it is today,” he said.

It costs about $13 a month per student to provide lessons in core primary subjects, along with a uniform, two meals and salary for teachers, some of whom are brought from the students’ home countries. Venning says that educating them will ultimately benefit the country by “ensuring that they have a future beyond the plantations and don’t become part of the social problem.”

Yet, ever the diplomat in a land not his own, he tiptoes around the question of whether the Malaysian government’s must look after the children of its labor force. He prefers to focus on the heavyweight companies that are picking up some of the slack.

On a searing hot morning Venning drove me out to what he described as a model of corporate social responsibility. The pavement on the outskirts of Lahad Datu crumbled into a dirt track that winded up steep switchbacks before descending into an expanse of oil palm plantations where the dense canopy scarcely allowed any light through.

We finally arrived at the gate of plantation owned by Wilmar International, one of Asia’s largest agribusiness companies and the world’s largest listed palm oil firm, with more than $30 billion in revenues in fiscal year 2010.

Manager Frederick Chok greeted me with skepticism at one of four learning centers on the premises. Wearing a white company polo shirt, he pointed out athletic fields and a mosque just a short walk away, as well as a new series of concrete barracks where, we were told, veteran workers and their families were housed.

Inside the classroom, walls featured bilingual posters and a flat-screen television with a satellite connection. Twenty-plus students, ages 5-15, were upbeat and engaged. Their teacher, a young Indonesian woman in a lavender headscarf, said off-the-cuff that she’d been surprised by the amenities made available to her, to Venning’s visible delight. He capped the visit off by leading the group in an off-key rendition of his Humana theme song, which borrows heavily from a Donna Summer track. Even Chok mustered a smile.

Afterward we had coffee on the veranda of the great house that overlooked the sprawling, 8,000-hectacre property, the size of a small national park. Chok stressed the importance of corporate social responsibility like a mantra and said his company spends nearly $1 million every year to take care of migrant children. In the “competition” to retain experienced workers, Chok added that doing the right thing also made good business sense. (Singapore-based Wilmar has its critics, however. The Rainforest Action Network, a San Francisco-based environmental group, alleges the company’s security forces have used violence and heavy machinery against villagers in Indonesia’s Sumatra province. Wilmar rejects the claims.)

In Venning’s view, larger companies like Wilmar were generally doing more to look after workers’ children since the advent of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil. The Zurich-based non-profit stakeholders group was formed in 2004 to address social and environmental problems associated with palm oil. The group, which unites investors, traders, and oil palm growers with retailers and social organizations to better monitor supply chains and promote sustainability, now certifies about 14 percent of the palm oil produced worldwide.

But systemic challenges persist. Greenhouse gas emissions are not included in the RSPO certification process. As peatlands, the earth’s largest single source of stored carbon, are cleared for palm plantations in Malaysia and Indonesia, massive amounts of carbon are being released.

In the wilds of Malaysian Borneo, the high cost of logistics inhibits the construction of more learning centers, giving children no alternative to palm oil work. For all Venning’s efforts, Humana and its partners take care of only one-fifth of the children estimated to be living on Sabah’s plantations. Even those lucky enough to receive some degree of education have little to no mobility once they become adults.

***

Off a nameless back road about an hour’s drive from Lahad Datu, Fatima Binti, 18, gazes out into the endless maze of trees. A shortage of money and the long distance from the small plantation the family works forced her to stop going to the nearest learning center a year ago. Absent documents, she can’t go into town, fearful she might be picked up and harassed by police.

The maximum fine for not having official documents was 10,000 Ringgit ($3,200), a sum that would exceed the family’s haul for the year. The alternate scenario, deportation and being split apart from her family, was unthinkable.

The rain is falling hard as she clicks her scuffed pink nails on the rail of the porch, waiting. She wants to be a doctor and longs to join her friends in class. She hopes her siblings will attend school “so they will be able to read and count.”

Until then, Fatima is resigned to stay close to her parents, cutting and clearing palm branches from dawn until dusk, helping them earn whatever they can.

“It was not political, just a way of showing the public new art,” says the lanky 19-year-old.

But in a nascent democracy experiencing a flush of civil freedoms, self-expression and politics are inseparable. The next day, Mr. Arker Kyaw returned to see his mural scratched out. A week later, the government decreed a nation-wide ban on street art.

After more than five decades of oppressive rule, Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, is awash in free speech on fronts where none was permitted. Breakneck reforms, including the release of hundreds of political prisoners and an end to direct media censorship have allowed stifled voices to emerge in newspapers, art galleries, and theater houses where plain-clothes security agents used to eavesdrop for signs of dissent.

But the government does not yet have a mechanism that grants artists access to work on public spaces, putting them at the frontline in the ongoing debate over where freedoms begin and end as the country continues its transition.

“It’s certainly a good thing that young artists are testing the limits,” says Phil Robertson, deputy director of Human Rights Watch‘s Asia division. It’s not unlike the tests of democracy that have been seen by graffiti artists across the world. At the same time, he warns, “it seems there is a narrowing of tolerance for expression in some areas … and now the government is going after graffiti artists. One wonders: Is this a backlash, or is this political opening as sincere as [Myanmar's] leaders would have us believe?”

The ban has not stopped dozens of artists steeped in the renegade spirit of American hip-hop culture from working in the shadows. Fresh graffiti, spanning flying television to stencils copied from British street legend Banksy, seem to pop up every other morning under bridges and on construction projects that are tearing up entire blocks and intensifying traffic snarls.

Myanmar’s graffiti culture

“Of course we’re gonna paint anyway; We just have to be more careful,” says Soe Wai Htun, noting that his crew has plans to a do “an even bigger public exhibition” in the wake of the defaced Obama mural.

Smug defiance toward authorities is one standard practice that Burmese street culture has adopted from the United States; tribalism is another.

When Arker Kyaw heard that his Obama mural had been attacked, he initially suspected the hand of municipal authorities, as had been done before. Only later did he learn that a rival graffiti crew was responsible for the defeatist phrases “We Quit” and “This is Not Message, Do Not Reply.”

While he is affiliated with a larger crew, Arker Kyaw insists that he stands for the individual and paints alone. “I’m interested in expanding the art form, not revenge,” he says. “I want to be the best.”

Others counter that “battling” is fundamental to graffiti culture, wherever it is practiced, and an affront to stale notions of ownership. “We battle each other like real street artists do, in America,” says one rival, who goes by the nickname Marshall.

‘It’s evolving’

While the vanguard Yangon’s art scene generally welcome what they’re seeing as an antidote to old taboos and the crass modern development that is cropping up around the city, some say it understandably lacks the technique and conceptual originality that has elevated street art in cities like New York and Tokyo.

“It’s evolving but there’s not yet enough originality, ” says Aung Soe Min, a prominent gallery owner who works with more than 200 artists in Myanmar, just a handful of them graffitists. But, he adds, the quality of public art is “evolving quickly” and “has symbolic value in a country that always thinks of law and order first.”

In these still uncertain times, a growing number of street artists are organizing private exhibitions as a platform to introduce Burmese urban art to new audiences. 

In December, curator Moe Satt hosted a festival entitled, “Beyond Pressure,” featuring the works of top graffiti artists from Yangon and Mandalay. “Rendezvous,” a new exhibition that begins this week, includes work from as far away as the UK in a bid to raise Myanmar’s street art profile in Southeast Asia and promote homegrown artists alongside more established talent, according to organizers, who say it’s the largest urban art event ever held here.

Fine line between legal and illegal

Until public art is embraced in the new Myanmar, Arker Kyaw and company say they plan to walk the line between legal and illegal, alternating between spot-lit galleries and sidewalks by night. Then there are those who prefer to work within the spaces that are permitted – and shout as loudly as they can about their grievances with the new government

On a recent afternoon, Lailone, a some-time street artist with an engineering degree, held his first solo exhibition in the lobby of a tattoo parlor across the street from a five-star hotel. A mixed crowd of Burmese and foreigners enjoyed donuts and coffee, while taking in cartoons under the theme “Not For Sale”: a not-so-subtle indictment of the surge of land grabbing being perpetrated by powerful business interests with ties to the military.

One of his pieces depicts a lawyer asking a poor farmer if he’s reading an agricultural guidebook. The farmer replies, “No, I’m studying land laws ahead of the confiscation that’s coming.” Another piece depicts a farmer hanging from the top of a flagpole, singing the national anthem as foreign companies raze all the land beneath him.

“I’m afraid for my culture, for the environment,” says Lailone.

At least he’s no longer afraid of speaking his mind, say analysts. Looking around at his room full of politically charged creations, he adds, with a wide grin: “Now I can drown [the authorities] with my humor.”

* Susie Taylor contributed to this report from Yangon.

Although she was the best peeler in the factory, speed was never enough. Mon was beaten if she slowed down, she said, and when she asked for a day off to rest hands swollen with infection, her boss kicked her and threatened rape.

Thanks to a bottomless appetite for cheap shrimp in the West, Burmese migrants such as Mon are the backbone of a Thai shrimp industry that is the world’s third largest. The United States is Thailand’s top customer, accounting for a third of the country’s annual shrimp exports.

Rights groups say that overseas demand for shrimp products in greater volume has fueled a culture of exploitation in the Thai industry. They insist that the failure of foreign companies to sufficiently verify the origin of the shrimp they importallows abuses to persist.

“If you look at the cost of shrimp overseas, it’s very, very cheap, and that comes from the exploitation inherent in the shrimp industry,” says Andy Hall, an expert on migration at Mahidol University who tracks Burmese labor in the Thai seafood industry.

Brisk business with major U.S. retailers such as Wal-Mart, Costco, Sam’s Club and Red Lobster pumps more than $1 billion in revenue each year into the Thai economy, the second largest in Southeast Asia. As Thai living standards have risen, a shortage of unskilled labor has attracted tens of thousands of Burmese migrants looking to escape the poverty and job scarcity that has gripped their homeland for decades.

Protests — even very, very large ones — are nothing new in the world’s most densely populated city. Tens of thousands are known to take to the streets to chant down rivals or the latest spike in petrol prices. The difference with the now two-week-old Shahbagh movement, say those old enough to know, is that it has managed to transcend Bangladesh’s stale party politics, religion and the age divide unlike any mass agitation in recent memory. While the ruling Awami League party has tried to co-opt some of the momentum and the opposition is crying foul, all have taken a backseat to a frustrated young generation that is finding its voice.

“The No. 1 thing about Shahbagh is that it’s political, yet nonpartisan,” says Toufique Imrose Khalidi, editor in chief of bdnews24.com, a leading online news outlet. In country where a maidservant is sure to get death for killing one person, he explains, young people are simply trying to figure out why convicted war criminals are not punished accordingly. “This is really about the rule of law and democracy, about justice in general. Nothing is fair in this country, and never has been.”

The protests began Feb. 5 after Abdul Kader Mullah, the leader of the country’s largest Islamic party, Jamaat-e-Islami (JI), was sentenced to life in prison for murder and abetting Pakistani forces during the 1971 liberation war. JI members were among those who collaborated with Pakistan in a brutal campaign to quell a nationalist uprising that included widespread rape, systemic killings and a targeted push against Bangladeshi intellectuals. All these years later, JI remains a fixture in national politics with vast, lucrative business interests. As such, analysts say, many Bangladeshis took the belated verdict against Mullah to be emblematic of a broken legal system — and a possible way out for the convicted, should the party’s political allies gain the upper hand in the future.

In response, online activists organized a gathering at the capital’s Shahbagh Square. What they initially hoped would draw between 400 and 500 people has since swelled to over 100,000, with some estimates placing the number far higher. The protests continue to swell, in the capital and other major cities, despite the threat of violence and intimidation. And, grim effigies notwithstanding, they have taken on a carnival-like atmosphere: floats and drum circles, ice cream vendors and free food are on hand for the mix of students, teachers, café owners and rickshaw pullers who say they have come together to right a historic wrong.

“We fought and died for liberation, but the people have not seen the benefits,” says Shiraz ul-Islam, 76, a war veteran who bore shrapnel scars on his shins and wrist and a bullet graze across his forehead. He first heard about the protests while in the hospital recovering from surgery and says he was restless to “help support the youth who want to finish the revolution that we started.” On his seventh day out, ul-Islam was accompanied by three of his daughters and his 12-year-old granddaughter as fresh crowds poured into the square waving banners and flags calling for Mullah’s execution.

The movement appears to have doubled down since the killing of one of its own. Late last Friday, Ahmed Rajib Haider, an outspoken blogger and co-organizer, was stabbed to death by unknown assailants. Activists blame members of JI’s youth wing, which has been involved in sporadic street attacks since the protests began. (JI officials reject the charge.) In the aftermath, Prime Minister Sheik Hasina vowed she would not rest until the party is banned and moved quickly to do so. Over the weekend, the government passed an amendment allowing a tribunal to punish any organization whose members committed crimes during the country’s fight for independence. Another gave prosecutors the right to appeal any of the panels’ verdicts, effectively laying the groundwork for a ban.

In a statement published on the JI’s website, acting general secretary Rafiqul Islam Khan asserted that the moves were part of a “plot to push the country into severe anarchy” by an Awami League–led government bent on “political revenge.” It could take weeks until Mullah goes back to court, but his lawyer Abdur Razzaq contends that under this kind of pressurized climate, any chance of a fair hearing is precluded. What’s more, he warns, the lack of “political space” for JI and its faithful is likely to cause more trouble in the weeks ahead.

Having already defied JI calls for a nationwide strike and the death of a comrade, the Shahbagh protesters insist they are undeterred. “Since killing, we have taken an oath not to leave until we have true justice,” says Mamudul Haque Munshi, 28, a protest organizer with the Blogger and Online Activist Network. “We can change the political equation here.” For his part, Khalidi, the editor, hedges that it’s too early to make facile conclusions of a paradigm shift in the national politics, given the deep-seated corruption and powerful players. But, like many of his generation, he does not want to underestimate the youths now filling the streets either. “They are capable,” says the former activist. “Let’s wait and see.”

When Burmese mortar rounds crashed into his village last July, Magawng La Hkam hobbled into the bush with nothing but his wooden crutches.

Confined to a camp for displaced persons near the Chinese border ever since, the 68-year-old ethnic Kachin farmer said he yearns to return home but can’t shake the memory of what he saw on that day: the mangled remains of a boy he passed as he fled.

Deep in the resource-rich hills of northern Burma’s Kachin state, a civil war grinds on between government forces and Kachin rebels, calling into question the more conciliatory signals emanating from the country. Over the past year, an estimated 75,000 civilians have been driven from their homes.

Shifting front lines have pushed thousands more refugees into China, where aid is scarcely able to reach them.

International rights groups accuse the Burmese army of deliberate attacks against civilians, torture, rape, forced conscription and summary executions. Both sides employ child soldiers and seed the ground with land mines that have claimed the lives of combatants and civilians alike.

The conflict, which reignited when a 17-year cease-fire collapsed last June, persists despite a political thaw in lowland southern Burma that has taken hardened observers by surprise. Since coming to power last year, the nominally civilian government has freed hundreds of prisoners, eased media censorship and reached agreements with other ethnic minority rebel groups in a wide-ranging push to open up the country.

Valuable turf

In remote Kachin, however, the fate of ancestral lands has been a sticking point for the mostly Christian Kachin rebels, who have a reputation for fearsome hit-and-run guerrilla tactics that date to World War II. The Kachins are one of more than 100 ethnic minorities in Burma, a strategic crossroads bordering China, India and Thailand.

Western governments that for decades kept their distance from Burma, also known as Myanmar, have responded favorably to the general thaw. After special elections in April in which democracy activist Aung San Suu Kyi was elected to parliament, the European Union suspended most of its sanctions. The United States, for its part, has removed barriers to investment and appointed its first ambassador in 22 years.

Having traveled to Burma on an official visit in November, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton in May urged American businesses to “invest in Burma, and do it responsibly,” with the caveat that broader sanctions would remain in place to prevent “backsliding.”

Foreign analysts say that enduring U.S. concerns over human rights abuses and ethnic conflicts are not lost on Burmese President Thein Sein, a former general, but that his calls for a military cease-fire in Kachin state are being ignored by military leaders.

Indeed, Burmese government forces have ramped up their offensive against the Kachin Independence Army, underscoring the limits of civilian authority and the vast wealth at stake in the hinterlands.

Known as the “Land of Blue and Gold,” Kachin has mountain jungles and river valleys that abound with minerals, jade and timber. Kachin state also has massive hydropower projects that stand to benefit energy-starved China, which has invested billions in the region, at the expense of ethnic Kachin natives.

The fighting erupted last June near the Myitsone dam, a controversial joint venture between the Burmese government and state-owned China Power Investment Corp. that would have sent 90 percent of the electricity generated to China’s southwestern Yunnan province.

Thein Sein later halted construction in response to protests over forced evictions and environmental concerns, a rare bow to public pressure that rankled Chinese officials.

Though outnumbered and outgunned, Kachin rebel leaders say they are willing to lay down their weapons only in exchange for greater autonomy and a fair share of economic largesse.

The Burmese “want to solve this dispute militarily,” said Brig. Gen. Sumlat Gun Maw of the Kachin army. “We want a real dialogue. Kachin is rich in natural resources, and so they don’t want to give us equal political rights,” he added in an interview at his command center in a hotel in Laiza, the KIA’s administrative capital.

The former boomtown has experienced an exodus of Chinese businessmen who once filled its casinos and tax coffers. Hotels rooms are empty and entire shopping blocks shuttered, the local markets now frequented mostly by displaced civilians from the half-dozen camps that have swelled in and around the city with the advance of Burmese forces.

Hka Htum Lu, 42, arrived on foot four months ago with her family after their village came under attack. Several weeks ago, her husband went back in search of belongings. He has not returned.

“It’s hard to say what’s missing most, because we lost everything,” she said while nursing one of her six children. Like many others, the family subsists on rations of rice and salt provided by the KIA’s political wing, and whatever else it can scrounge from the forest.

Across town, a group of Burmese child soldiers passed the day chain-smoking cigarettes between meals at a lightly guarded cinder block compound.

Nay Myo Oo, 16, said he was forced to join the Burmese army after a bogus arrest and trained to lay land mines until he ran away. Now his feelings are mixed: He’s relieved that his combat days are over but worried he’ll never see his family again.

Citing a shortage of money and manpower, Kachin officers concede there are perhaps 100 underage soldiers in their ranks but insist they are there to be disciplined, not sent out to fight. (With access strictly controlled, this could not be confirmed.)

Ties to China

The KIA is financed largely by taxes and illicit cross-border trade in products ranging from dry goods to teak, highlighting its awkward relationship with China, its lifeline to the world.

In Laiza, the Chinese yuan is the currency, and Chinese mobile phone networks keep locals connected. China hosts Kachin university students, and when soldiers are seriously injured, lax border controls allow them to be taken to better hospitals for treatment. Even basic necessities such as medicine and rice are smuggled into Kachin territory.

This dependence is tempered by the fact that Chinese-funded infrastructure projects are at the crux of the conflict in Kachin state.

“We are neighbors in more ways than one, and we can’t avoid each other,” said Sumlat Gun Maw, the Kachin general, measuring his words carefully. “We welcome investment from China . . . as long as it doesn’t hurt civilians.”

China has not taken a formal stance on the war, but KIA officers and analysts say it wants stability along the border to protect its commercial interests.

China has refused to classify thousands of displaced Kachins living on its side of the border as “refugees” and is accused of sending some back to Burma. As a signatory to international refugee treaties, such a designation would require China to meet legal obligations for assistance.

In the meantime, refugees rely on grass-roots organizations for help. May Li Awng, the founder of a local aid group based in Maija Yang, the second-largest town under KIA control, fears that conditions are poised to go from bad to worse as the monsoon season continues.

“I’m not sure anything will change; the Chinese are paranoid about foreigners,” she said.

An eerily vacant sprawl of gambling halls and brothels, Maija Yang has attracted droves of civilians from Shan state, scene of the fiercest clashes. Many are children separated from parents. They sleep three to a bed in camp.

Last week, a Burmese government team met with KIA representatives in Maija Yang for the third round of informal talks in a month. Progress has been scant.

“We know the way the Burmese think. They are tricky,” said a rebel supporter with knowledge of the talks. During the last face-to-face meeting, hosted by China, the Burmese army maneuvered heavy guns deeper into Kachin territory, the supporter alleged.

KIA officials insist that the Burmese army must pull back to the original 1994 cease-fire lines before talks can move forward.

Motlagh reported with a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

Father Thomas Gum Rai Aung points to a spot in the emerald hills that flank his village to show how high the floodwaters will rise if a dam project nearby is completed. “Everything we’ve built here will be gone in an instant,” he said, with a sweep of his arm.

For now, the project is on hold. But Rai Aung has already lost his flock.

Two years ago, authorities in Burma, also known as Myanmar, began forcibly relocating thousands of ethnic Kachin to clear the way for the hydroelectric dam. The Chinese-financed initiative was approved on the grounds that electricity and the revenue it generates would improve livelihoods in an isolated region with poor infrastructure and few economic prospects.

Construction was halted last year after a public backlash over the dam’s social and environmental impact. But activists worry that Chinese leverage with state officials will succeed in restarting the project, threatening a fragile ecosystem and nascent chances for a peace settlement with ethnic rebels who say the dam violates native rights on territory that historically belonged to them.

The Myitsone dam, a joint venture with the state-owned China Power Investment Corp., is the first and largest of seven planned along the Irrawaddy River, Burma’s most vital waterway. Slated for completion in 2019, the dam would send 90 percent of the electricity generated from northern Kachin state across the border to China’s southwestern Yunnan province in exchange for $17 billion over 50 years.

Burma’s state-run media initially reported that more than 2,100 people from five villages would be moved to “model villages” and given new houses equipped with running water and electricity. On a Web site launched as part of a public relations campaign, the Chinese company says it has invested $25 million in the resettlement while “fully respecting the desires of the project-affected people.”

Critics dispute those claims. In an August letter to the government, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi said 12,000 ethnic Kachin from more than 60 villages had been severed from their homes and traditional way of life. She warned that the Myitsone project poses serious environmental risks, made worse by nearby fault lines that “raise the specter of horrendous devastation” in the event of an earthquake.

A bleak outlook

President Thein Sein’s decision to suspend the project was seen as a blow to China, the former military regime’s main patron, and a sign that democracy might finally be taking hold in a land where opposition groups have had little room to breathe, let alone effect change.

Analysts speculated that it might also be another indication that Burma is tilting from China’s orbit toward the West. In the months since, fast-track political and economic policy changes have warmed Burma’s relations with the United States and the European Union.

In Kachin state, however, Burmese generals have ignored the president’s calls to end hostilities, which have intensified since the army attacked territory controlled by the rebel Kachin Independence Army near contested dam sites on the Taping River. According to a March report by Human Rights Watch, both sides acknowledge that the fighting is partly about such projects.

The fighting has displaced an estimated 75,000 civilians, and there are reports of grave human rights abuses. Most of the refugees live in ramshackle camps along the Chinese border in rebel-controlled territory. As many as 10,000 have fled to China, and the rest are in camps around the riverside capital of Kachin state, Myitkyina, which is about 25 miles south of the Myitsone project.

Historically a hub for border trade with China, Myitkyina, a city of about 150,000 people, has not experienced the economic growth seen in many of Burma’s lowland cities. Infrastructure is shoddy, and the people endure rolling blackouts and perennially high unemployment. Local religious leaders say the bleak social and economic climate has led to a sharp rise in drug abuse and depression among Kachin youths.

“Conditions today are hopeless” for the Kachin, said one shopkeeper, 28, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he feared trouble with state authorities. He earned an engineering degree two years ago, he said, but has found no work in his field.

“Our people have so many grievances against the Burmese,” he said.

‘I am a farmer without land’

Less than an hour’s drive north, scores of Kachin evicted by the Myitsone project live in a sprawling Chinese­-sponsored resettlement camp ringed by fences. Row upon row of wood and tin-roofed homes are interspersed with community buildings, including a meditation center, a health clinic and a new high school. But residents say they lack what is needed most: freedom of movement.

“We are stuck here with nothing to do. I am a farmer without land,” said Mung Doi, 35, who sneaked back to his village despite being forbidden to do so, only to return to camp when Burmese troops and guerrillas exchanged fire in the area.

Farther along the road to Myitsone, Kachin villages lie derelict, with scattered trash and broken fences suggesting a hasty departure. Between the empty clusters of homes, gold mining operations have turned former rice paddies into heaps of upturned earth; once-dense teak forests in the surrounding hills have been reduced to stumps.

Religious leaders say that after residents were forced out, a host of private mining and timber companies connected to powerful northern military commanders moved in.

Rapid deforestation, unregulated mining and erosion have taken a heavy toll on the Irrawaddy ecosystem, according to Burmese activists and environmental watchdogs. They fear that if the dam project moves forward, its impact will extend far beyond the project site, to communities downstream that rely on the river flow and adequate nutrients to sustain the rice production on which the country depends.

The Chinese, meanwhile, are lobbying hard to resume construction, and there’s a gathering sense among Kachin residents that they will ultimately get their way.

Rai Aung, the parish priest, is convinced that it’s just a matter of time. In his view, the war with the Kachin rebels has delayed construction, but he doubts that the president has enough political clout to thwart the interests of generals who still call the shots in the backcountry.

“I’m waiting for the water to come,” he said. “Then I will leave for good.”

Motlagh reported this story with a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

There are large-scale civilian deaths in Afghanistan that make headlines, and then there are the small incidents that are barely noticed at all. That was the fate of 12-year-old Benafsha Shaheem.

On May 3, she was traveling with family members from her village in western Farah province to a wedding party in the neighboring province of Herat. Packed into a white Toyota Corolla wagon, they neared the outskirts of the city of Herat when, according to a report compiled by the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, the vehicle was fired on by an Italian patrol convoy. Benafsha was seated in the middle of the backseat wearing a red dress, her relatives say. She was shot in the face and died instantly. Her mother was wounded in the chest.

Italian security forces based in Herat province said the vehicle was repeatedly warned to stop before it was fired on. Benafsha’s uncle, Ahmad Wali, who was driving, says traffic was moving in both directions but that rain made visibility poor. Suddenly, he recalls, sparks flew in front as armored vehicles came into view. Glass was sprayed into his face.

Such incidents are not uncommon in Afghanistan today and parallel the situation in Iraq where similar shootings were instrumental in turning popular sentiment against the coalition forces led by the United States. In Afghanistan, as it was in Iraq, when civilians die, international forces say that a suspicious vehicle approached a checkpoint or convoy and failed to heed calls as well as possibly warning shots to stop. After those standard procedures are done, an “escalation of force” takes place.

Photos of the Shaheem family’s vehicle show that multiple bullets passed through both the front and rear windshields. Afghan investigators point out that the incident took place in daylight, in moving traffic on a main road, and that most of the passengers were women. Given these facts, they say, it’s hard to gauge why shots were fired. A coalition spokesman in Kabul said he was not free to discuss the shooting in more detail because of an ongoing probe.

Benafsha’s death yielded just a few paragraphs in the day’s wire reports, lost in the stream of bigger names and numbers. She was wrapped in a blanket inside a particle-board coffin and loaded into the trunk of the Toyota where her brother sat next to her remains for the long drive back. Within hours, another deadly U.S. air strike in Farah’s Bala Boluk district would kill scores of civilians and reverberate from Kabul to Washington. Criticized around the world and beset by demonstrations in Afghanistan, the U.S. military continues to dispute the high death-toll estimates in Bola Boluk. But even so, it is low-key tragedies like Benafsha’s that are adding up.

According to United Nations figures, of the 2,118 Afghan civilians killed in 2008 — an almost 40% increase versus the year before — coalition and Afghan forces accounted for 828, largely from errant air strikes and raids. Until the Bola Boluk incident, one of the worst tolls was exacted on celebrants of another wedding occasion in July in eastern Nangarhar province. Mistaken intelligence reports of an insurgent gathering prompted a U.S. air strike that left 47 people dead.

The Taliban is still to blame in most instances, using misinformation and human shields to intentionally draw civilian casualties and exploit the backlash to their advantage. Brigadier General Richard Blanchette, the coalition spokesman, says the stricter protocols have come into force down the chain of command to ensure operational decisions are fully vetted, with additional confirmation on the ground before air power is deployed. This means “taking more time” if necessary, he explains, or, if civilians are at risk, “just cancel it.” While roadside incidents are trickier since they involve split-second judgment, there is a top-down emphasis on restraint. “We are spending an enormous amount of time trying to make the system as safe as possible for civilians,” he says.

In the aftermath of Benafsha’s death, investigators from the Afghan rights commission said the presiding Italian commander contacted them to inquire how compensation could be made. Past settlements have averaged about $2,000, distributed through the Afghan government. In a rare gesture, the commander himself later traveled by helicopter to Benafsha’s village in Farah where they say he offered her family several thousand dollars. The family refused to accept the money up front. But when it was agreed the funds would go toward building a school in Benafsha’s honor, they relented.

Contacted by phone, Aref Shaheem, Benafsha’s father, angrily said that coalition forces were “only killing people.” They claim to be in the country to protect Afghans, he says, but they continue to take innocent lives. “They can’t be trusted.” As a result, he argues, the Taliban in his area only grows stronger. He says it was little consolation to learn the soldiers responsible for his daughter’s death were punished, as investigators say they were told. (The coalition would not confirm this.) She is gone, he says, and so is any vestige of faith he had left in the Afghan government and its foreign backers.

Jason Motlagh’s travel to Afghanistan and South Asia was funded by the non-profit Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.