From Volume 7, Issue 16 of EIR Online, Published Apr. 15, 2008
Asia News Digest

Opium War II: Xinjiang's Drug Mafia Getting Stronger

April 9 (EIRNS)—A recent report, produced jointly by China's Ministry of Public Security and the Drug Enforcement Agency, said that drugs such as opium and heroin are getting smuggled into Xinjiang province for distribution throughout China. Most of the drugs are produced in Afghanistan. There had been a steep rise in seizure of Afghan drugs in western China.

As a result of a large volume of drugs moving in from the western periphery, Xinjiang province has become one of China's worst in terms of drug abuse, and the northwest has the fastest-growing drug addict population. The overwhelming majority of these use heroin, and a shift is occurring from smoking to injecting.

The report says Pakistan serves as a key trafficking route while Uighur groups are the distributors inside China. In 2006, Pakistan arrested 54 couriers from airports in Lahore, Islamabad, and Peshawar, destined for China.

At the same time, factors such as Afghanistan's bumper harvest, Britain's plan to undermine China's sovereignty by using opium/heroin, and the presence of a large population of Uighurs in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakstan, are encouraging wide-scale smuggling of heroin and opium inside China. The current low profile of drug smuggling across its borders with Kazakstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan is unlikely to continue. For the three Central Asian governments, managing the issue of their role as a transit country for heroin smuggling to China will prove challenging, and they are not currently equipped with the financial or human resources to assist China in trafficking prevention on their side of their borders with Xinjiang.

British Intelligence Analyst: Tibet May Lead to World War

April 9 (EIRNS)—A top British intelligence analyst with a prominent family background, Philip Bowring, in an article on the Asia Sentinel website on April 9, wrote that, the "Tibet effect," though it does not approximate the events in Bosnia in 1914, "can tip a delicate balance and stir what seemed dormant passions into gut-wrenching nationalistic rages." "Fanning the spark to produce flames and, they hoped, a conflagration, were the familiar Western powers who for 150 years have been endeavoring, often successfully, to humiliate and control the Middle Kingdom," Bowring added.

He said that globalization had given China an easy ride into international markets. Helped by the United States and easy access to foreign investment, China did well. But this is coming to an end, because of the economic disaster in the developed world. "Almost everywhere, but particularly in the developed world, there is a growing realization that whatever its overall benefits, globalization leads to rapid increases in income inequality and hence can threaten social fabrics and be easily undermined by democratic politics.... One could add in too the sudden rise in global food prices, giving the lie to the notion that self-sufficiency is no longer necessary and that production shortfalls can always be made up with imports," Bowring added.

UN: India and Africa Can Feed the World

April 10 (EIRNS)—Present in New Delhi at the time the India-African Union Summit was in progress, the director-general of the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO), Kandeh K. Yumkella, said a solid India-Africa collaboration in agriculture can feed the world. "This is, indeed, possible. India has the capacity and technology, and Africa has land and labor," Yumkella, who was in Delhi for an international conference on agro industries and its role in development and poverty reduction, told India Abroad News Service (IANS).

According to the UNIDO chief, the Indian Green Revolution of the 1970s and 1980s had demonstrated how technology can boost productivity to push production of food grain in a short period of time. "But the huge advances brought about by the continuing Green Revolution must be accompanied by similar advances in processing efficiency, reductions in post-harvest losses and improvements in quality levels of products," Yumkella said.

Lyndon LaRouche has often emphasized the importance of essential infrastructure and technology, such as food irradiation, that can dramatically reduce the amount of spoilage of crops, which in the case of Africa reaches as much as half of the harvested crop.

In 1985, the now-defunct Fusion Asia organized an international conference, where India's then-Planning Minister (later, President of India), the late K.R. Narayanan, gave the keynote address. Ramtanu Maitra of Fusion Asia and EIR presented a study which showed India's Ganga Valley, where a population almost the size of the United States resides, can produce enough food for at least 6 billion people, provided the leaders are geared up to do so.

British Intelligence 'Predicted' Xinjiang Uprising

April 11 (EIRNS)—In an article in the London Guardian on April 5, a British spy story writer, who is clearly doing the bidding of Britain's MI6, Charles Cumming, said that, by coincidence, his new novel, Typhoon, which will be published in June (two months before the Olympics), concerns a plot by "U.S.-sponsored" Uighur radicals to blow up the Beijing Games. Cumming's obvious ploy is to implicate the United States in the Uighur plots and keep the focus away from the MI6.

Cumming, an Eton and University of Edinburgh fellow, is widely considered to be an MI6 man, although he told the media on another occasion, that he was approached by the MI6, but never joined.

In his Guardian article, he says: "Uighurs have motives, at the very least, for fighting back. On January 5 this year, 18 Uighurs were killed and a further 17 arrested during a raid on what the Chinese described as a 'terrorist training camp' in the Pamir mountains. However, many western observers have cast doubt on the veracity of this claim. Just as there has been no proof of the planned attacks on the Olympic Games, the Chinese authorities have yet to produce any evidence which would suggest that the men and women killed in January were terrorists linked to al-Qaeda."

Cumming ignores the fact that 12 Uighurs were held and interrogated in Guantanamo Bay for their al-Qaeda links, and subsequently they were resettled in Bosnia.

China Would Like To Buy German Maglev Technology

April 9 (EIRNS)—The Chinese National Development and Reform Commission said that it is interested in buying the technology for the German magnetic-levitation train, Deutsche Presse Agentur reported from Beijing today. "We would greet the sale of the magnetic train technology from the German developers to Chinese firms," DPA quoted the National Development and Reform Commission, which also said it hoped China could win the technology at an "attractive price." The proposed construction of a maglev train in Munich, Germany, has just been rejected on the basis of alleged "too high costs." China remains the only nation which has an operating commercial maglev train, in Shanghai. Prof. Xie Weida, deputy director of the Railway Institute at Shanghai Tongji University, acknowledged that the technology would be very expensive, but it would make it possible for China to produce the maglev trains—and even sell them to the rest of the world.

However, the German firm ThyssenKrupp, one of the developers of the technology, has let it be known that it would not be selling either the technology or a license to China, DPA reported.

Government officials in Lhasa, Tibet, today said that they will spend 1.2 billion yuan ($160 million) this year to construct the Naqu logistics center for the Qinghai-Tibet railway. The center will have facilities for product processing, storage and distribution. The Chinese railroad to the "roof of the world," is the first-ever railroad in Tibet.

All rights reserved © 2008 EIRNS