Burma’s Suspicious Defense Facility

Aaron Stein 0:00

Hello and welcome to the Arms Control Wonk podcast. My name is Aaron Stein, a contributor to the Arms Control Wonk blog. I'm also an associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute and a PhD candidate at King's College London.

Jeffrey Lewis 0:15

And I'm Jeffrey Lewis. I'm the founding publisher of ArmsControlWonk.com. And I'm the director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies. And I'm happy to talk about East Asia today.

Aaron 0:29

And we are talking about East Asia today. I think we're going to start with... Burma or Myanmar, I think you choose which one you want to use. We're going to probably interchange them. But Burma, I'd say, was one of the countries, maybe predated the pivot, but it's a place that the administration has hung its hat on as a success.

Jeffrey 0:52

The Obama administration.

Aaron 0:53

The Obama administration has hung its hat on as a success. Burma is on the way to democracy. Well, is it? And what is that thing they're building out there in the middle of the jungle that you posted up on Foreign Policy? That's quite a large facility.

Jeffrey 1:08

Yeah, so we're getting a little buzz because... Well, let me give you the backstory. So in January... Some reporters went to this place, went to a place called Hawk, I guess. My Burmese is non-existent. I'm trying to learn as quickly as I can. And they interviewed local people. And the local people had a really interesting story. They said that, you know, one day men with guns showed up, and they took all of their farms, and they leveled their village, and they built this giant defense facility.

And the facility had visits from high level of And they had huge security and there were foreign workers living there and they wouldn't let the workers out and they'd let very few people in. And they said that it was a chemical weapons facility built with Chinese assistance. And the minute that story came out, the government arrested all of the journalists.

They are still in jail to this day. And they tried to seize every copy of this story. So what we did was we took the place information. Bought a satellite photograph, and were able to identify the facility.

Aaron 2:21

And it's really interesting. It's really big. I mean, just having done a lot of these open source analysis myself, I was surprised when I read your article with just how large the facility was.

Jeffrey 2:35

Yeah, we're shocked, right? Because they're saying, the Burmese government is saying it's a standard ordinance factory. And there is nothing standard about this thing. No, it's massive.

Aaron 2:45

I mean, you mentioned a little bit in your thing, the, I guess I want to say the journalists who were covering this story said it was foreign built and perhaps Chinese involvement. Does that strike you as possible? Or is it maybe somebody else involved? Yeah.

Jeffrey 3:01

Well, so what we did was we tried to check out as much of the story as we could. And so we found the site, and sure enough, they had confiscated a whole bunch of farmland and built a factory there. And we measured. Actually, the locals said it was a certain amount of farmland, and we measured it, and it was basically consistent with what the locals said.

They weren't exaggerating. It's really big, and it's sprawling. And then the locals made a bunch of other claims, like there had been high-level visitors, and we found a helipad. Which in Burma is a sign that important people come and go because that's what they use they use helicopters and the locals said there was big security and we found a really strong security perimeter including a really interesting security gate And they said there were foreign workers.

And there's barrack-style housing that looks very different from the housing that you can tell that they constructed for the Burmese workers. So those things all checked out.

Aaron 3:58

Now, I don't know if it's a chemical weapons factory or not.

Jeffrey 4:03

That's just impossible to know without getting inside. And I don't know if it's Chinese. What really struck us is the... Worker housing and the security gate and the helipad and all of the construction looks a lot like a different facility built by the same government entity called the Directorate of Defense Industries near a place called Minbu, where there is a lot of reporting that would suggest the North Koreans are working.

So I think as we joked in the piece, you know, If it's Chinese, you're not going to be able to tell unless they bring their mothers with them and they're out in the morning doing the little exercises to the blaring music and the satellite takes a picture. But, you know, could be the Chinese, could be the North Koreans.

The entity that's responsible for building this, DDI, and the general who heads it, Thang Tay, have been sanctioned by the Treasury Department for cooperation with North Korea.

Aaron 4:59

Well, I mean, it just... If there's cooperation with North Korea, and they're obviously building this large facility, and at the very least, they're confiscating farmers' lands and putting journalists in jail without any due process. Perhaps they haven't read the First Amendment. As part of this normalization process that the administration is going on with, I'm just curious. If they're doing this, but they're going to hold some sort of election, should we push them on something else?

I mean, what is the point of this if they're trying to have their cake and eat it too, cooperate with the United States while all this surreptitious stuff appears to still be going on?

Jeffrey 5:38

Yeah, so that's the thing that we ended up saying in foreign policy is the administration has kind of from the get-go had this policy that treats... Engagement and the process of democratization as the solution to the trade with North Korea and proliferation. So they generally have seemed, to me at least, that when the Burmese say, oh, we promise we're going to stop doing X or Y or Z, the administration more or less takes their word for it.

And that's because I think they believe that if they get a democratic Burma, then that will solve their proliferation problem and it will solve the North Korea problem. What Strikes me is that that's not a terribly sophisticated view of what democratization is, and it's probably wrong, right? And so I think when you see an entity like DDI and a guy like Bang Tae who has cooperation with North Korea, and you look at the empire, and maybe he's got like 20 or 30 facilities and we've been staring at them in satellite photographs, including this one near Pauk and the one near Minmu, and...

A few others that we're going to reveal in the coming weeks. Even though the North Koreans promised to cut off cooperation, those facilities are expanding. They're not getting smaller, they're getting bigger, which means he's getting richer. And, you know, when journalists poke their noses around and ask awkward questions like, hey, have you cut off cooperation with North Korea?

Because that's an awfully big factory. You know, they throw them in the can.

Aaron 7:11

So...

Jeffrey 7:13

Yeah, I really have my doubts about whether this policy is sustainable unless the administration finds a way to make non-proliferation and really just sort of scrutiny of these kinds of activities part and parcel of the engagement.

Aaron 7:33

I guess the major knock on the Obama administration is that They're all carrots and no stick. That's your line we had before as we were talking about this. There doesn't seem to be any teeth to this. If they're not cooperating on the proliferation issue and There are certain problems going on inside the country where allegations, I wouldn't even call them allegations, the ethnic cleansing of Rohingya Muslims.

It's when do we get tough with them? When do maybe we say enough is enough, you either get on the straight and narrow or perhaps we're going to look again at this engagement policy with you, even though it fits with the pivot or the rebalance or whatever you want to call it.

Jeffrey 8:17

Yeah, well, the bloom is really off the rose when it comes to engagement, right? I mean, I am really, I'm totally struck by how angry, I think justifiably angry, but still I'm struck by it, how angry the human rights community is about Aung San Suu Kyi's, the sort of famous dissident who wants to be president now, how unwilling she is to criticize the government.

Over what they're doing to the Rohingya. I mean, the quote from the executive director of Human Rights Watch, right, where he said the world was apparently mistaken to assume that as a revered victim of rights abuse, she would also be a principled defender of rights. That's a...

Aaron 9:06

It opens the administration up to criticism from the Muslim world, which before Syria was a serious point of engagement for them. Just reading Turkish press and the little bits of Arabic I can read, The United States and the West is called out continuously for what is double standards. Why aren't you raising such a big deal about the killing of Rohingya Muslims?

It comes up in the Central African Republic. And then why do you make such a big deal when Muslims commit atrocities against Westerners or Christians? I think we should be saying something. I don't think that the U.S. should let You know, the Turks or, you know, the Gulfies lead on this. I mean, I think if we're engaging them, you know, do something to maybe stand up for Muslim rights someplace.

A, it helps with soft power, and B, it's just the right thing to do.

Jeffrey 10:08

So is that, I mean, is that a serious... That is news to me. I didn't know that, that this was such an issue in the... In the, I guess I would say, the Muslim community or the community of Muslim nations. It's really a big deal?

Aaron 10:26

Well, I mean, it was before Syria really went to crap. Before that, you know, it was, I'm most familiar with the Turkish press. It was in the Turkish press a lot, and particularly in the conservative Turkish press. And they would report about it. And there were NGOs trying to get involved and deliver aid. And it did come up.

And it just creates, it adds to the image of this double standard that goes around that the U.S. and the West doesn't care about when Muslims are being killed, but goes through the roof and crazy when Muslims commit atrocities. So, I mean, the Boko Haram stuff that's going on feeds this narrative, and it's To be honest, they sort of have a point.

Not to say that the U.S. condones this, but we don't make as big a deal about it as we do in other crises, and I think we should.

Jeffrey 11:25

Although I do remember that people said this about Kosovo, and then when the United States got involved in Kosovo, now it just gets moved over to the other side of the column of, oh, see, this is double standards because you're criticizing what the Russians are doing in Crimea, but you went and did Kosovo to poor Yugoslavia, right?

Aaron 11:49

It's the fundamental problem facing the United States in this part of the world, and Is this double standard. It's A, if you don't do something, you have double standards. But if you intervene, then it's the Western country, again, attacking another country on the premise of human rights, which human rights, one man's human rights is another man's oppression.

You can see this in the Iranian case. You can see this in the Turkish case. You can see this in a lot of places. So I just think it's the right thing to do to call it out.

Jeffrey 12:23

Yeah.

Aaron 12:23

And I think it's the right... And, you know, it gets back to this facility. There are claims, or at least the Rohingya people are saying that they've been the victims of a chemical weapons attack. Now, everybody seems to always complain whenever they're oppressed of being the victims of a chemical weapons attack. Maybe they are. Obviously, by your article, the Burmese aren't playing ball the way that we want them to.

Should we push them a little harder on non-proliferation to try and

Jeffrey 13:01

Well, it's worth saying, right, that the Kosovars said they were the victims of chemical weapons attacks. And oh, gosh, now I have to check. Or was it the Bosnians? Anyway, there were chemical weapons allegations in the civil wars that followed the disintegration of Yugoslavia. And I think those probably weren't true. But on the other hand, you know, I think the allegations in Syria are true.

So it's really hard because everybody who's getting ethnically cleansed, Says that they're a victim of chemical weapons attacks. But it doesn't mean they're always lying. Aaron, did you read or hear, I guess not read, do you know Radiolab did one of these interviews with the Hmong people who claim that they were the victims of Soviet and Vietnamese chemical weapons?

I did not. Oh, this is fascinating because they did this interview, and as Radiolab was doing these interviews, they basically concluded that there was no evidence to support the claim that these people, who had been brutally repressed, right, and many of whom are in the United States now because they had sided with us in – The Vietnam War, rather than the communists.

But they really confront this old Hmong guy about these claims. And he freaks out on them. And his daughter, who's translating, breaks down in tears. And they basically say, by denying that we're being subjected to this, by denying that chemical weapons were used, you're basically denying the entire suffering of our people. And the journalists were initially really resistant to that.

I think one of them said they were trying to hijack the interview, and people were really People were really divided and really angry. There were people who really thought that regardless of the details about chemical weapons, they were in fact minimizing the suffering of those people. And there were people who thought, well, this is an issue of reporting and reporters have to be objective.

And if some of the claims are true and some of the claims are false, they have to get to the bottom of that. So that's almost the same thing that happens here, right? That you've got these people who are being pretty badly – Attacked. And there's this additional claim of chemical weapons. The analyst in me wants to get to the bottom of whether it's true or not.

But you don't want to minimize their suffering.

Aaron 15:27

No, and it gets back to the all carrot, no stick. I mean... Burma signed the CWC in the early 1990s, 1991? 1993. But it hasn't come into force.

Jeffrey 15:40

So this is a case where the stick is very little, right? The stick is very tiny. It should not be all that painful. The Burmese signed this treaty in 1993, and they have yet to ratify it. And they have, since the process of engagement began, repeatedly promised that they will do so. They hosted a technical delegation from the OPCW, the Organization for the Prevention of Chemical Weapons, for people who listen, a Nobel Prize winning body that verifies and is responsible for implementing the CWC.

They posted meetings and they make promises, but they never do it. So they should do it. They should ratify the treaty and that has... Perfectly normal procedures that we in the United States and other countries around the world endure to verify. And there would be a procedure that would allow us to go and check out this standard ordnance factory.

So it's not really that painful for them.

Aaron 16:35

No, and I mean, I think as the Syria case shows, there are also methods to declare and destroy them without, I guess... Drawing the complete wrath of the international community. There's a way to climb down, even if there was something going on in there. But that gets back to the fact is, It's this question of what is democracy.

They may have an election and Aung San Suu Kyi, I hope I pronounced that correctly, will probably be the president, I'm assuming. But the man who runs this facility will go around continuing to run his facilities, cooperating with North Koreans. How factionalized do you have any idea how the government is and whether even if there was a carrot, it would do anything to coerce this man to stop mucking around?

Jeffrey 17:25

Well, so I think that this is a real challenge, and it gets to the fundamental question about what it is we really mean when we say we want a country to become more democratic. There's a great picture of Aung San Suu Kyi and Thang Tay, this general, You know, sort of walking together and talking, right? She knows that she has to have this guy on her side if she wants to run for president.

And so I think whereas the administration has sort of tended to see democracy as the outcome of an election, ah, the great dissident is elected, I think they are sort of, and they view that as that's going to fix all of the problems, that they're neglecting the reality that Politics are complicated and usually a transition to democracy means some bad guys get off the hook and they get away with stuff and they stay rich and they stay powerful.

And so can you really have a democratic system in Burma that's worthy of the name, even if Aung San Suu Kyi is elected president? But guys like Thang Tay have these empires, they continue to trade with North Korea, and then with guns, continue to show up, throw people off their farms, knock down their village, and then arrest any reporters who ask nosy questions.

I think the answer to that is no. Democracy is more than just elections. It's a civil society that can hold people accountable. To my way of thinking, it's nice that they let Aung San Suu Kyi out of house arrest, and it's nice that they may let her run for president, but, you know, electing one charismatic dissident is not democracy.

Aaron 19:17

Yeah, and what I find interesting, too, is, I mean, I think we're both saying that, you know, nonproliferation, I think, is important, but if they're going to, you know, If there's going to be this faction within the country, even if, say, they sign a CWC, I think it's something that we've learned in Syria, and maybe us in the non-proliferation community, because we spend our lives on chem, bio, and nukes, forget how devastating conventional weapons are.

And I think it speaks to what do we really want from them? I think it's essentially, I think the democracy stuff Could go on the back burner if they just didn't kill their own people. And this gets back to the Rohingya question. Make it easier for the United States to do business with you. Just don't show up at the State Department briefing every single day with, what are you going to do because X amount of people were killed?

Jeffrey 20:18

Well, I would put it less cynically than that, which is that Even in societies that are nominally democratic, and I don't know if you've ever read the Robert Moses book by Robert Caro called The Power Broker. I have not. It's about the politics of ... It's really about the politics of the United States between the 1920s and the 1960s, although it's mostly about New York City and New York State.

But even though we think of ourselves as having a democratic system, Tammany Hall in New York City is pretty corrupt. And so you can have a democratic system that's less than perfect. Right. And it's not just elections. It's a whole bunch of other stuff. Tammany Hall was corrupt, and they had a lot of power. But by and large, they found it hard.

I don't think they ever did, although I hate to say that because they may have. They didn't bump off their opponents. And I think the same thing is kind of true when you look at states. And I think this is the difference between our relationship with China at the moment and our relationship with Russia. Neither is a democratic society.

But I think we're concerned that what we see in Russia is movement toward increasing authoritarianism. Whereas in China, we are still hopeful that what we see is a reforming and changing society. We're concerned it's not reforming fast enough. It's not changing fast enough. But simply having elections isn't democracy. It's all this other stuff. And so you could say, well, don't show up at a State Department briefing.

And that's true. Like, yes, they should not kill their people. But I don't think it's wrong to be savvy about the role of civil society in terms of sustaining a democracy, right?

Aaron 22:19

Because, you know, Russia still has elections.

Jeffrey 22:22

But it doesn't have all the other things, I think, that you need to maintain a vibrant society. And so my concern, to go back to this facility... It's not nonproliferation for nonproliferation's sake. It's this question of would most Burmese people want Burma to seek nuclear or chemical weapons? Would most Burmese people want... Generals to get rich off an arms trade with North Korea, would most Burmese people want that entity to be powerful enough to take people's farmland and demolish their villages?

And if the answer is no, and I think the answer to that's no, then the question is, do they have any recourse? And what concerns me about this facility is, as soon as reporters showed up and asked the hard questions like, Why did you take these people's farms? What are you doing? The response of the government wasn't to say, let's talk about what an important mission for national defense this is.

It was throw them in the clink.

Aaron 23:20

Right, and they're still there.

Jeffrey 23:22

And they're still there. So, you know, is that a democratic society worthy of the name, even if Aung San Suu Kyi wins the election?

Aaron 23:29

Right, exactly. No, I think that's a really good point. And I think...

Jeffrey 23:34

I'm a little lectury today. No, no, it's good. I'm going to go teach my class.

Aaron 23:38

Yeah, no... You know, it's just really interesting how we balance that and how we balance what we want, the ideal, versus what is practically obtainable. And I think, just a final question, just because I'm fascinated by this. What was the impetus for reaching out to Burma or Myanmar? I mean, do you see it as containment 2.0 with China being the target?

Or was it just a little apple they were able to pluck because it was... Is it willing to make some changes to its society? Where is this going?

Jeffrey 24:14

I think Apple willing to plot. My sense is that the thing about military juntas is that they tend to be pretty brutal not only toward the people that they rule, but internally. They tend to have infighting. My sense is that some of the most senior generals who ran the country were Worried. They were worried about what would become of their families after they died.

They were worried about particularly the position of their children. And so, although in many ways I think they're quite admiring of the stability and control of the North Korean system, hence the kind of emerging relationship that they sought with Pyongyang, I think they were also worried that if they died, Things would fall apart and, you know, their kids would end up paying the price.

And so I think the Obama administration saw a group of generals who could be bought or who had a price. And I don't blame them for taking advantage of that. I think that was a, that was a wise decision to see if if, if the price was when we were willing to pay. And by and large, I think it has been But they've actually got to make good on their end of the bargain.

And that's where I'm starting to get a little bit skeptical.

Aaron 25:42

Well, you've promised us more SAT photo analysis in the future. So you have more articles coming?

Jeffrey 25:48

Oh, yeah. So what was really interesting about this phenomenon is we buy this satellite photograph of this facility near PAWC, and we start checking all the things the locals say, the security and the VIP visits and the foreign workers. And we find these features, the security gate, the helipad, the worker housing. Just for fun, we compared it to the other site that the North Koreans were supposed to be at, which we had been thinking about writing, and we find the same worker housing and the same helipad and the exact same security gate. I mean, exactly the same. Like, it's this big giant structure that you know, it's like a building over the road that you have to drive through.

So I thought it was pretty interesting. They look exactly the same. But once we had that signature, we started looking at all of the facilities that are allegedly linked to Feinte and the Directorate of Defense Industries. And by sheer happenstance, my colleague Catherine Dill finds this other giant facility in the jungle, which we haven't revealed yet, that nobody knows about.

It's not on any list. It's just huge and sprawling. And it's got the same housing and the same helipad, and the only thing that was missing is the security gate. And we went to the spot where we thought it would be, and we could see them building the foundations of it. Oh, wow. And so now we've got this typology, basically, of what the new facilities that DDI is building possibly with, North Korean cooperation look like and there's, there's the, the, the North Korean one near Minbu that we know about. There's this one near A Pauk that you know is the subject of this article, and there's at least three more new ones that they're building on top of their empire of, you know, 20 some facilities already. So this is gonna be fun.

Aaron 27:44

Yeah, would it be worth it to have them sketched up so you can get a sense of just how big they are?

Jeffrey 27:50

Oh, so this is the thing. We need money. We need money. We're talking about ways to get funding. Turns out the community that funds civil society in Burma is really interested in funding journalists who might get arrested. But they're not interested in funding those of us who can take satellite pictures that the Burmese government can't stop. So we're trying to discuss ways.

We're going to try to raise the money to buy the satellite photographs and do the work. We might do an Indiegogo campaign, but we've got to get the people in administration to sign off on something like that.

Aaron 28:21

Okay, well, maybe we can dial for dollars from the podcast. But...

Jeffrey 28:26

Hey, we got like 1,000 people listening to the Iran one, right?

Aaron 28:29

I know. We're getting pretty good hits.

Jeffrey 28:31

If you gave us $50, we'd have $50,000.

Aaron 28:34

That's true. And then you guys can do all the sat analysis.

Jeffrey 28:38

We can hire you and bring you out here.

Aaron 28:40

That would be great. Yeah, get away from Geneva. I keep putting on a linen shirt, pretending like I'm back in California, but it keeps raining. I'm in Europe. Anyways, with that image in your mind of me in a linen shirt, I think we should call it a day.

Jeffrey 28:56

Yes, I'm going to go see if I can get some mind bleach.

Aaron 28:59

All right. Have a good one, and thanks for listening.

Jeffrey 29:01

Okay, bye, Aaron. All right, bye-bye.