THAILAND

Fight over the spoils leads to rights abuses

Spectrum, Justin Heifetz, Published on 02/03/2014

» On a humid July day in Shan state, a 12-year-old girl was playing under the monsoon rains falling over her tiny northern township of Ke See. The Myanmar army had been quietly building a presence there since 2009, after the government signed a deal with China to lay pipelines through the area to take oil and gas from the Rakhine basin in the west to Yunnan province. These pipelines, called the Shwe, would be a safe alternative to the strategically vulnerable Strait of Malacca — so the governments said.