Photos: Wa / UWSA, Birmanie / Burma / Myanmar

Photos prises avec un Canon PowerShot S45.
Photos taken with a Canon PowerShot S45.

Citation - Quote

Il n'y a aucune règle pour faire de bonnes photographies,
il y a seulement de bonnes photographies.
There are no rules for good photographs,
there are only good photographs.
Ansel Adams

1. Wa Township Secretary, Ar Kheu Village,
Wa Special Region n° 2, Burma

"Wa is a member of the Northern Mon-Khmer language family. More specifically, it is the major language of the Palaungic branch of Mon-Khmer. Wa is spoken by about one million people in an area on the border between China's Yunnan Province and the Shan State of the Union of Myanmar (Burma)". Source: SOAS Wa Dictionary Project.

"The Wa are one of the least-known peoples of Asia, although 400,000 of them are said to inhabit the Shan State of Myanmar, and 600,000 the Yunnan province of China. Indeed, very little has been written on the Wa, except in Chinese, between Sir J George Scott's 1900-01 Gazetteer of Upper Burma and the Shan States and Magnus Fiskesjo's 2000 unpublished PhD dissertation, "The Fate of Sacrifice and the Making of Wa History". In fact, most of what has been written on the Wa has to do with the United Wa State Army. The 20,000-strong United Wa State Army (UWSA) is the military wing of the United Wa State Party (UWSP) and was formed after the collapse of the Communist Party of Burma in 1989".

Excerpt from Myanmar's Wa: Likely losers in the opium war, Pierre-Arnaud Chouvy, January 24, 2003, in Asia Times, Hong Kong.

2. Wa woman and children, Ar Kheu Village,
Wa Special Region n° 2, Burma

"The Wa altogether, and not only the UWSA, have been said to challenge regional stability in Southeast Asia, something that Thailand, the main consuming market of methamphetamine pills (ya ba) produced among other areas in UWSA-held territory, has long been keen to advocate. Indeed, Thailand has repeatedly denounced the UWSA as being the main threat to its national security. Although one cannot deny the fact that some elements of the UWSA are involved in illicit drug production and trafficking (opium, heroin and methamphetamines), one also has to acknowledge the bias that the outside world holds against the Wa ethnic group who, as a people, are of course no more natural-born traffickers than any other".

Excerpt from Myanmar's Wa: Likely losers in the opium war, Pierre-Arnaud Chouvy, January 24, 2003, in Asia Times, Hong Kong.

3. Song Keh Village,
Wa Special Region n° 2, Burma

"Myanmar's tribal peripheries have always been difficult to access, by the Burmans, the Chinese, and even to the British and the Japanese. Of course, the protracted Myanmar conflict has only made isolation worse by making physical accessibility even harder through political unrest. This explains to some extent the current lack of reliable information on the Wa, one remote hill tribe among others. Hence, still reflected in today's literature on the Wa of the UWSA is the tendency to observe them from the outside. Thus, when it comes to describing the Wa and their current responsibilities in the drug trade, one may wonder to which extent representations, both cultural or political, take over factual evidence.
Indeed, as mentioned by anthropologist Magnus Fiskesjo, the Wa have always been looked at from the outside, their territory being referred to as a periphery, although when "looking out from the Wa center, we encounter first the galaxy of Shan Buddhist principalities found along the China-Burma frontier, and second, the Chinese and Burmese states, located at a still farther distance" ".

Excerpt from Myanmar's Wa: Likely losers in the opium war, Pierre-Arnaud Chouvy, January 24, 2003, in Asia Times, Hong Kong.

3. Ar Kheu Village,
Wa Special Region n° 2, Burma

"The Wa are part of the Mon-Khmer people, one of the indigenous and oldest peoples of Southeast Asia and also one of the world's least-known. Historically, it is estimated that the central Wa territories made up 150 square kilometers in a very mountainous area between the Salween and Mekong rivers, where the UWSP / UWSA established Wa Special Region No 2 after signing its ceasefire with Yangon's military junta. As emphasized by Fiskesjo, the Wa consider themselves autochthonous of northeastern Myanmar and southern Yunnan, something that can be argued for by the persistence, during the past few centuries, of an autonomous Wa center, both politically and economically independent".

Excerpt from Myanmar's Wa: Likely losers in the opium war, Pierre-Arnaud Chouvy, January 24, 2003, in Asia Times, Hong Kong.

4. Song Keh Village,
Wa Special Region n° 2, Burma

"Common discourses on the Wa are still shaped by geohistorical perceptions and biases. As underlined by Fiskesjo, the surrounding "civilized" polities or ethnic groups saw the Wa as an external "barbarian" people, "wild", or even, in late imperial Chinese terms, "raw" (Wa who were not under Chinese administration as opposed to those who were, the "cooked" Wa). But, economically, the Wa are not very different from other highland ethnic tribes".

Excerpt from Myanmar's Wa: Likely losers in the opium war, Pierre-Arnaud Chouvy, January 24, 2003, in Asia Times, Hong Kong.

5. Song Keh Village,
Wa Special Region n° 2, Burma

"As is commonly the case with such populations in Southeast Asia, the Wa relied mainly on hill rice species grown under regimes of shifting slash-and-burn cultivation. Irrigated rice paddies were and still are scarce, even in those rare valleys where irrigation is possible. While Wa people in China have resorted to irrigation since the 1950s only, it is only during the past few years that they employed it within Myanmar. As for the main cash crop of the Wa, it has been, and still is to a large extent, opium, which became widespread in mainland Southeast Asia's northern uplands by the late 19th century".

Excerpt from Myanmar's Wa: Likely losers in the opium war, Pierre-Arnaud Chouvy, January 24, 2003, in Asia Times, Hong Kong.

6. Song Keh Village, Roofs,
Wa Special Region n° 2, Burma

"Opium production still appears to many as the only viable way to compensate for structural shortfalls in food security at the small-scale level of the peasant economy. Indeed, 75 percent of the population of the Wa Alternative Development Project area suffers from rice shortages during four to six months of the year, a dire situation that United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) wants to address by providing both alternative income (cash crops) and more intensive agricultural techniques, mostly through the double cropping of rice (better land use, irrigation, improved varieties of rice, etc). The Wa have launched a large-scale rubber-tree plantation around Pangshang, and China, whose border runs along the outskirts of the city and where most Myanmar heroin is trafficked, has promised the tax-free import of Wa rubber in an effort to help with opium suppression".

Excerpt from Myanmar's Wa: Likely losers in the opium war, Pierre-Arnaud Chouvy, January 24, 2003, in Asia Times, Hong Kong.

7. Mong La Pagoda,
Special Region n° 4, Burma

Mongla is a Shan town, the capital of Special Region n° 4, less than 10 km from the Chinese border and 240 km north of the Thai border. "Mongla is the headquarters of the National Democratic Alliance Army*, a military outfit led by Sai Leun, a.k.a. U Sai Lin, a.k.a Lin Mingxian, a former communist commander. It is made up of Shans (50%), Akha (20%), Loi (15%), Chinese (5%) and Lahu, Kachin, Miao and others (10%). Its official language is Shan. Its area, some 5,000 square kilometers, covers the northern part of the Namlwe river, which includes Mongyang, Mongma, Mongyu and the triangle section between China and Laos. It was declared drug-free in 1997". Source. *The NDAA is also known as the Eastern Shan State Army (ESSA).

During the last years and until 2003, as many as 600,000 Chinese tourists crossed "the frontier every year to visit the exotic attractions of this fast-growing border town, built on profits from the opium trade. Because gambling is illegal in China, the casinos are a huge draw for Chinese tourists, who fly to an airstrip on the Chinese side of the border, then travel a short distance by road across the border to reach Mong La". (Geoffrey York, A convergence of old warriors and new money, Globe and Mail, Wednesday, May 5, 2004).

8. Mong La Casinos,
Special Region n° 4, Burma

"The night sky of Mong La is brightly lit by the neon lights of the gaudy casinos and posh hotels. One of its central squares is little more than dozens of brothels and strip clubs. Its wide boulevards and newly paved streets are a sharp contrast to the poverty of the farmland and villages surrounding it. Chinese gamblers stake as much as $100,000 (U.S.) on a single wager at Mong La's casinos. Loan sharks hover near the betting rooms, ready to lend money to desperate gamblers at exorbitant interest rates -- enforced by violence against those who don't repay their loans". (Geoffrey York, A convergence of old warriors and new money, Globe and Mail, Wednesday, May 5, 2004).

9. Wa hills, Mong Kar area,
Special Region n° 2, Burma