The Golden Triangle

The Golden Triangle The Golden Triangle is an area covering 367,000 square miles in Southeast Asia where a significant portion of the world’s opium has been produced since the beginning of the twentieth century. This area is centered around the meeting point of the borders that separate Laos, Myanmar, and Thailand. The Golden Triangle’s mountainous terrain and distance from major urban centers make it an ideal location for illicit poppy cultivation and transnational opium smuggling.   Until the end of the 20th century, the Golden Triangle was the world’s largest producer of opium and heroin, with Myanmar being the single highest-producing country. Since 1991, the Golden Triangle’s opium production has been outpaced by the Golden Crescent, which refers to an area that traverses the mountainous regions of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran.   A Brief History of Opium in Southeast Asia Although opium poppies appear to be native to Southeast Asia, the practice of using opium recreationally was introduced to China and Southeast Asia by Dutch traders in the early 18th century. European traders also introduced the practice of smoking opium and tobacco using pipes.   Soon after the introduction of recreational opium consumption to Asia, Britain replaced the Netherlands as China’s primary European trade partner. According to historians, China became the primary target of British opium traders for financial reasons. In the 18th century, there was high demand in Britain for Chinese and other Asian goods, but there was little demand for British goods in China. This imbalance forced British merchants to pay for Chinese goods in hard currency rather than British goods. In order to make up for this loss of cash, British merchants introduced opium to China with the hope that high rates of opium addiction would generate large amounts of cash for them. In response to this strategy, Chinese rulers outlawed opium for non-medicinal use, and in 1799, Emperor Kia King banned opium and poppy cultivation completely. Nonetheless, British smugglers continued to bring opium into China and the surrounding areas. Following the British victories against China in the Opium Wars in 1842 and 1860, China was forced to legalize opium. This foothold allowed British traders to expand the opium trade to Lower Burma when British forces began to arrive there in 1852. In 1878, after knowledge of the negative effects of opium consumption had thoroughly circulated throughout the British Empire, British Parliament passed the Opium Act, prohibiting all British subjects, including those in Lower Burma, from consuming or producing opium. Nonetheless, illegal opium trade and consumption continued to take place. The Birth of the Golden Triangle In 1886, the British Empire expanded to include Upper Burma, where the modern Kachin and Shan states of Myanmar are located. Nestled in rugged highlands, the populations that inhabited Upper Burma lived relatively beyond the control of British authorities. Despite British efforts to retain a monopoly on the opium trade and regulate its consumption, opium production and smuggling took root in these rugged highlands and fueled much of the region’s economic activity.   In Lower Burma, on the other hand, British efforts to secure a monopoly on opium production succeeded by the 1940s. Similarly, France retained similar control over opium production in the lowland regions of its colonies in Laos and Vietnam. Nonetheless, the mountainous regions surrounding the convergence point of the Burma, Thailand, and Laos borders continued to play a major role in the global opium economy. The Role of the United States Following Burma’s independence in 1948, several ethnic separatist and political militia groups emerged and became embroiled in conflict with the newly formed central government. At the same time, the United States actively sought to forge local alliances in Asia in its effort to contain the spread of communism. In exchange for access and protection during anti-communist operations along China’s southern border, the United States supplied arms, ammunition and air transport for the sale and production of opium to insurgent groups in Burma and ethnic minority groups in Thailand and Laos. This led to a surge in the availability of heroin from the Golden Triangle in the United States and established opium as a major source of funding for separatist groups in the region. During the American war in Vietnam, the CIA trained and armed a militia of ethnic Hmong people in northern Laos to wage an unofficial war against northern Vietnamese and Lao communists. Initially, this war disrupted the economy of the Hmong community, which was dominated by opium cash-cropping. However, this economy was soon stabilized by the CIA-backed militia under Hmong general Vang Pao, who was given access to his own aircraft and permission to continue opium smuggling by his American case handlers, preserving the Hmongs’ access to heroin markets in southern Vietnam and elsewhere. Opium trade continues to be a major feature of Hmong communities in the Golden Triangle as well as in the United States. Khun Sa: King of the Golden Triangle By the 1960s, several rebel groups based in northern Burma, Thailand, and Laos supported their operations through the illegal opium trade, including a faction of the Kuomintang (KMT), which had been expelled from China by the Communist Party. The KMT funded its operations by expanding the opium trade in the region.   Khun Sa, born in Chan Chi-fu in 1934 to a Chinese father and Shan mother, was an uneducated  youth in the Burmese countryside who formed his own gang in the Shan State and sought to break into the opium business. He partnered with the Burmese government, which armed Chan and his gang, essentially outsourcing them to fight the KMT and Shan nationalist militias in the region. In exchange for fighting as the Burmese government’s proxy in the Golden Triangle, Chan was permitted to continue trading opium. However, over time, Chan grew friendlier with Shan separatists, which aggravated the Burmese government, and in 1969, he was imprisoned. Upon his release five years later, he adopted the Shan name Khun Sa and devoted himself, at least nominally, to the cause of Shan separatism. His Shan nationalism and success in drug production garnered the support of many Shan, and by the 1980s, Khun Sa had amassed an army of over 20,000 soldiers, which he dubbed the Mok Tai Army, and established a semi-autonomous fiefdom in the hills of the Golden Triangle near the town of Baan Hin Taek. It is estimated that at this point, Khun Sa controlled over half of the opium in the Golden Triangle, which in turn constituted half of the world’s opium and 45% of the opium that came to the United States. Khun Sa was described by historian Alfred McCoy as â€Å"the only Shan warlord who ran a truly professional smuggling organization capable of transporting large quantities of opium.† Khun Sa was also notorious for his affinity for media attention, and he frequently played host to foreign journalists in his semi-autonomous narco-state. In a 1977 interview 1977 with the now-defunct Bangkok World, he called himself the â€Å"King of the Golden Triangle.† Until the 1990s, Khun Sa and his army ran an international opium operation with impunity. However, in 1994, his empire collapsed due to attacks from the rival United Wa State Army and from the Myanmar Armed Forces. Furthermore, a faction of the Mok Tai Army abandoned Khun Sa and formed the Shan State National Army, declaring that Khun Sa’s Shan nationalism was merely a front for his opium business. To avoid punishment by the government upon his impending capture, Khun Sa surrendered on the condition that he be protected from extradition to the US, which had a $2 million bounty on his head. It is reported that Khun Sa also received a concession from the Burmese government to operate a ruby mine and a transport company, which allowed him to live out the rest of his life in luxury in Burmas main city, Yangon. He died in 2007 at the age of 74. Khun Sa’s Legacy: Narco-development Myanmar expert Bertil Lintner claims that Khun Sa was, in reality, an illiterate frontman for an organization dominated by ethnic Chinese from Yunnan Province and that this organization still operates in the Golden Triangle today. Opium production in the Golden Triangle continues to fund the military operations of several other separatist groups. The largest of these groups is the United Wa State Army (UWSA), a force of over 20,000 troops nestled in the semi-autonomous Wa Special Region. The UWSA is reported to be the largest drug-producing organization in Southeast Asia. The UWSA, along with the  Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army (MNDAA) in neighboring Kokang Special Region, have also expanded their drug enterprises to the production of methamphetamine known in the region as yaa baa, which is easier and cheaper to manufacture than heroin.   Like Khun Sa, the leaders of these narco-militias can be seen as both business entrepreneurs, community developers, as well as agents of the Myanmar government. Nearly everyone in the Wa and Kokang regions is involved in the drug trade in some capacity, which supports the argument that drugs are an essential component of the development of these regions, offering an alternative to poverty.   Criminologist Ko-Lin Chin writes that the reason why a political solution to drug production in the Golden Triangle has been so elusive is because â€Å"the difference between a state-builder and drug kingpin, between benevolence and greed, and between public funds and personal wealth† have become difficult to delineate. In a context in which conventional agriculture and local business is stunted by conflict and in which competition between the United States and China deter long-term successful development interventions, drug production and smuggling have become these communities’ path toward development. Throughout the Wa and Kokang special regions, drug profits have been funneled into road construction, hotels, and casino towns, giving rise to what Bertil Lintner calls â€Å"narco-development.† Towns such as Mong La attract over 500,000 Chinese vice tourists every year, who come to this mountainous region of the Shan State to gamble, eat endangered animal speci es and partake in the seedy nightlife.    Statelessness in the Golden Triangle Since 1984, conflict in Myanmar’s ethnic minority states has driven approximately 150,000 Burmese refugees across the border into Thailand, where they have been living in nine UN-recognized refugee camps along the Thai-Myanmar border. These refugees have no legal right to employment in Thailand, and according to Thai law, undocumented Burmese found outside of the camps are subject to arrest and deportation. The provision of temporary shelter in the camps by the Thai Government has remained unchanged over the years, and limited access to higher education, livelihoods and other opportunities for refugees has raised alarm within the UN High Commission for Refugees that many refugees will resort to negative coping mechanisms for survival. Hundreds of thousands of members of Thailand’s indigenous â€Å"hill tribes† constitute another major stateless population in the Golden Triangle. Their statelessness renders them ineligible for state services, including formal education and the right to work legally, leading to a situation in which the average hill tribe member makes less than $1 per day. This poverty leaves hill tribe people vulnerable to exploitation by human traffickers, who recruit poor women and children by promising them jobs in northern Thai cities such as Chiang Mai. Today, one in three sex workers in Chiang Mai comes from a hill tribe family. Girls as young as eight years old are confined to brothels where they may be forced to service up to 20 men per day, putting them at risk of contracting HIV/AIDS and other diseases. Older girls are often sold overseas, where they are stripped of their documentation and left powerless to escape. Although the government of Thailand has enacted progressive laws to combat human trafficking, the lack of citizenship of these hill tribes leaves this population at disproportionately elevated risk of exploitation. Human rights groups such as The Thailand Project assert that education for the hill tribes is the key to solving the human trafficking issue in the Golden Triangle.

Most Effective Way of Picking Up Expository Essay

Most Effective Way of Picking Up Expository Essay Expository Essay Topics for School and College Starting from high school, students deal with many types of essays. In fact, there are so many types of writing assignments that even an experienced student can get confused to tell them apart. Teachers are trying to assign different types of writing tasks to introduce their students to various essay types. However, it’s quite difficult to combine the task with regular tests, student’s projects, practical lessons and tons of work that almost every student has. That’s why we decided to create a helpful guide to help students with creating their excellent expository essay one of the most common types of writing the assignment. Traps and Pitfalls of Writing an Expository Essay Writing an expository essay is not a very difficult task. You can easily cope with it if you know some main principles and basic rules of writing an essay. However, what you shall start with is understanding of how this type of essays differs from others. The hidden danger that becomes a reason that so many students get lower marks for their expository essay is a similarity of expository and narrative essays. Many students can’t tell two of these types apart and write both of them in the same way. That is not really correct. However, it’s easy to improve! There are two key words that can easily show you the difference between these essay types: TELL narrative essay In this case, all you have to do is to tell your reader about an idea, object, event or situation. Your task is to inform your target audience about something. EXPLAIN expository essay Dealing with an expository essay, you have to write an explanation of something. Your task is not only to introduce a topic to your reader but also to explain some statement or your point of view. You can even provide some instructions to your target audience or teach your readers about something. Basic Ideas for Expository Essays An expository essay is aimed at giving your readers some basic understanding of what the discussed object is, how to do something or how something is done. While there’s a great diversity of topics, you shall start with deciding on the subtype of your expository essay. The most common variants of expository essays are: Definition Exposition definition essay gives a detailed explanation of something. It reveals some main concepts of the topic, including a description of the most important features of the discussed subject. The main question that essay answers is â€Å"What is it?† Process This type of expository essays explains the process of creating something. At the same time, there are two possible variants of an expository process essay. It can be a type of instruction that gives an idea of how to do something to your reader. Or it also can be an explanation of the process of producing some certain things. For example, a detailed explanation of how a LED-lamp is made without an offer to make it on your own. Classification The type of essays speaks about certain features of a subject or phenomena that allow determining the class or type it belongs to. The explanation may also include some general information about the possible classes and types. Compare and contrast This type of expository essays includes a comparison between two objects that will help to attract a reader’s attention to certain features of one or both of the objects. Often, the contrast is the best way to discuss some small but important features of a thing. Cause and effect Often we accept a phenomenon or an object as a whole, without understanding its causes and the effects it can make on other objects. Cause and effect expository essay throws some light on complex concepts, letting your readers see the complex process and the chain that leads to the final result. How to Recognize an Expository Essay by Its Topic Expository essays may refer to many topics and themes. However, there’s always a way to know that the essay is an expository one, right after reading its topic. What are that special features that help to recognize expository essays between others: Signal words. There are special words that express the main function of the essays and help you to understand which type of paper it is: describe, define, explain, etc. Guidelines or instructions. If the topic sounds like a name of tutorial or instruction, the essay is probably an expository one. Important Features of the Expository Essay Topics Often teachers give an expository essay topic that you have to work with. However, sometimes students are allowed to choose a topic on their own. This is a great chance to express your knowledge and creative thinking. However, to choose a topic that allows you to express your knowledge and writing talent, you shall understand which features the topic shall have: The theme will be interesting to you and to your target auditory. If you choose a popular topic that doesn’t attract you and doesn’t reflect your interest, you may feel a lack of motivation to work with it. In opposite, if you rely on your personal interests only, your essay may sound not interesting to others. That’s why it’s very important to find a good compromise and to stop your search on a topic that will be interesting both to you and to your readers. The topic shall be complicated enough to require explanation. If you choose an easy topic and start to explain concepts that are known for everyone, it may sound silly. That’s why it’s important to search for a complicated and complex theme that needs more explanation and description. The topic shall reflect your academic knowledge. If you study in school, your topic may sound less complicated than if you study in college or uni. It’s important to choose the theme that is attractive and understandable to your classmates or group mates and, at the same time, allows you to express the knowledge you have. The topic shall correspond to your academic field and subject. If you study literature, your essay shall be connected to the field. If you are a medical student, it’s necessary to write about health issues. Your teacher may also ask you to write on a different theme, in that case, an essay topic can be different from the main subject and the field of your study. There shall be enough information about the topic. Before making a final decision about a topic, check if there’re enough information sources you can work with. In a case you are not ready for extra spends, it’s better to be sure the sources are free. It’s very important to start writing your essay only after developing a clear understanding of what you write about and what your topic is. When you pick a topic up, don’t forget to check if it has all the features mentioned above. Great Collection of 50 Best Topics for Your Expository Essays Even if you have a clear understanding of how an expository essay topic shall sound, it may be difficult to come up with an idea about your own one. In that case, some good examples of the topics can be especially useful. We’ve chosen 50 good topics that can be used directly or can serve as examples and inspiration for creating your own one. All topics are separated into groups according to the field and theme they belong to. Personal Experience Writing about your personal experience is a great choice. First, essays of this type are easier to write. Second, you have more opportunities to make your essay sound interesting and easier for understanding. Third, you will probably spend less time, searching for additional information as the topic is already familiar to you. Often the task to write an expository essay about some personal experience is assigned in school. However, sometimes it’s given to college students too. Describe your first day of living in a new flat/house/apartment. Explain how visiting your grandparents influenced your character. Describe how your life changed when you got your pet. Describe your first week of living outside the parents’ home. Describe your best traveling experience. Explain how your first job helped you to become more independent. Describe a book that influenced your life philosophy. Explain the choice of your future profession. Explain how your favorite teacher changed your attitude to study. Describe the situation that embarrassed you most of all. Literature Literature is a very interesting subject. Reading a book or a poem different people may feel different emotions or accept the information in various ways. That’s why it’s always interesting to write your own explanations of something and then compare it to how your group mates see it. This is the reason why teachers ask their students to write an expository essay about a poem or a book that was studied recently. Define which writing methods are often used in your favorite book. Explain the role of the monologues in a poem that you read recently. Explain the factors that could influence the behavior of the main character. Explain the reasons why poetry is less popular than it was 200 years ago. Define the main features that allow recognizing the style of the author. Explain criteria that are used for evaluating books, poems, and novels. Describe how a novel shall be created. Define the common features of the popular literature of the 18th century. Describe how dialogues help to attract the attention of a reader. Describe the subtext of a story. History Almost every student faces the task of writing an expository essay on a historical topic. Knowledge of history is required almost in every scientific sphere. Moreover, historical topics are often interesting to both a writer and a target auditory.   Define the most significant changes that have happened in medicine since the beginning of the 20th century. Explain how the legal system of the USA was formed. Describe the influence of the Second World War on the world’s economy. Define the key historical figures for the development of car industries. Explain the reasons for the First World War. Define the most important reasons for the development of the civilization of Ancient Egypt. Define the key differences in the legal system of Ancient Rome comparing to other countries of the same time. Explain which factor influenced the art of the 17th century. Explain the reasons for the popularity of communism. Define important reasons of civil revolution in the USA. Social Issues Writing an essay about some social issues is a great chance to get the attention of your target auditory and to get an excellent mark. Why? The reason is the popularity of social issues and the interest they always cause. Moreover, the theme is attractive with its diversity and variety of topics connected to social issues. You can easily find something interesting and trendy to talk about. Describe the main negative changes that happened in society during the last decade. Define the key reasons of the growing rate of suicides among teenagers and young people. Explain how lessons of sexual education in schools can reduce the number of divorces in the future. Define which changes shall be made to help elderly people feel more involved in the social life. Describe how the relationship between parents and children changed in the last 50 years. Explain the main factors of unemployment growth. Describe possible means that can help young mothers to overcome post-natal depression. Explain the importance of tolerance between professional workers. Define the main social causes of bullying among school children. Explain why wearing the uniform may be important to college students. Science and Technology Writing about science or technology can be an exciting task. Topics connected to some new inventions and recent changes in the industry always cause a lot of interest and attention. If you like to write on some unique topics, you can choose many themes that are fresh and trending in the sphere of science and technology. Explain why it’s important to have some IT classes in every school. Describe the role of science development in reducing the level of pollution globally. Define the industry that causes the most negative effect on the environment. Define the ways of developing genetic engineering without braking moral norms and values. Describe how solar energy can be used. Describe the way IT technologies may change in the nearest decade. Explain why it’s important to study black holes. Describe the newest medical inventions that are aimed at solving cerebral diseases. Define the most important factors for slowing the process of global warming down. Explain the opportunities space exploration gives for solving current environmental problems.