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Myanmar torches seized drugs: state media
AFP - Sunday, November 1
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Myanmar torches seized drugs: state media
YANGON (AFP) - – Myanmar's junta has burnt more than 20 million dollars worth of drugs seized during a recent campaign against ethnic rebel forces in the remote northeast by the Chinese border, state media said Sunday.
Prime Minister Thein Sein attended the torching ceremony Saturday in Kokang, a mainly ethnic Chinese region of Shan state, where clashes broke out between the regime and rebels in August, the New Light of Myanmar newspaper reported.
The report said the drugs were seized from 50 different hideouts in Laukkai, the region's main town, between August 11 and October 24, beginning with a raid by security forces on a factory owned by Kokang rebel leaders.
This sparked fighting with the Kokang group in breach of a 20-year-long ceasefire, which prompted an exodus of more than 30,000 refugees into China and earned Myanmar a rare rebuke from Beijing, usually its closest ally.
At Saturday's ceremony, Myanmar police chief Khin Yi accused ousted rebel leader Phone Kyar Shin, also known as Peng Jiasheng, and his associates of producing and trafficking drugs "freely and openly like a Mafia gang", the newspaper said.
Analysts say that while in the past the junta often tacitly assented to ethnic groups' involvement in the drugs trade, it is now using it as a pretext to put pressure on groups that do not want to join the Burmese security forces.
The regime recently stepped up its decades-long campaign against the minority groups because it wants them to come under its control ahead of the elections planned for 2010.
The junta has also vowed to make the country drug-free by 2014 by following a 15-year elimination plan drawn up in 1999, but Myanmar remains the world's second largest producer of opium after Afghanistan.
Khin Yi was quoted as saying at the burning ceremony that the authorities would make "every effort" to achieve the plan "with added momentum".
The US State Department said in September however that Myanmar, which has been military-ruled since 1962, had "failed" in its efforts to meet international anti-drug measures.
Two senior US officials will travel to Myanmar this week in the latest move by President Barack Obama's administration to engage the reclusive regime.
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