Residents wait for food to be distributed as one of them plays a religious song on the guitar at ‘The Light of The World’ rehabilitation centre for heroin addicts in Myitkyina, the capital of Myanmar’s Kachin state.
Reuters/Naung Chein, Myanmar
A year ago, Wun Naung Lay left his village in northern Myanmar to look for work and found heroin instead.
Today, the skeletal 25-year-old is locked up and going cold turkey beneath a filthy blanket in a bamboo cell.
Wun Naung Lay is one of more than 600 young men who have undergone primitive drug rehabilitation at the Youth for Christ Centre, a collection of tin-roofed shacks on a riverbank in Kachin State.
Myanmar is the world’s second-largest producer of opium after Afghanistan and use of its derivative, heroin, is widespread.
The centre’s popularity is a testament both to the severity of Myanmar’s drug problem and the lack of options for users in a poor country where modern treatment programmes are rare.
It offers a 40-day “course” of prayer, Bible study and devotional singing, with football and weightlifting for those strong enough.
Detox begins in the Special Prayer Room, as the bamboo cell is called. New arrivals are locked in around the clock for seven to ten days.
“At first I just wanted to go home, but now I’m feeling a bit better,” said Wun Naung Lay, whose forearms are perforated with needle holes.
The Youth for Christ Centre is the brainchild of Ndingi Laja, 45, a former convict and folk singer better known by his stage name Ahja.
A wiry and intense figure, Ahja believes his devotion to God helped him kick heroin while serving a nine-year sentence for drug use.
Founded in 2009, a year after his release, the centre is an attempt at faith-based abstinence on a larger scale.
His methods find little support among global health experts, who say voluntary drug treatment is not only more humane but also more effective.
They advocate harm-reduction policies, including needle-exchange programmes and substitution drugs such as methadone, which focus on mitigating the ill-effects of drug use.
There is no methadone at Ahja’s riverside rehab - he doesn’t believe in it.
“It isn’t effective. You never escape the addiction completely,” he says.
After their grim stint in the Special Prayer Room, the men are moved to a dormitory that is also locked at night.
This discourages residents from sneaking out to buy alcohol or cigarettes, both banned at the centre, or from running away entirely.
A quarter of the 65 males, mostly aged 15 to 25, who started the latest course have “escaped”, said Ahja.
Some are farmers and labourers, others are students. They are usually Kachin, who are predominantly Christian, but some are from Buddhist ethnic groups.
Most arrive voluntarily, but some are brought by force with the help of staff members, many of them former addicts.
Ahja started his centre with donations from fellow Christians. He charges each patient 40,000 kyat ($40), although poorer families pay less, sometimes nothing.
He insists his methods are effective, although he can’t say how many patients stayed off drugs after leaving the centre.
Around Myanmar, drug users are still criminalised and stigmatised.
Under a law enacted when it was a British colony, even possessing a needle carries a six-month jail sentence.
A crackdown by police in Myitkyina, Kachin State, last year drove users underground and interrupted prevention and treatment programmes that help combat the spread of HIV/Aids.
About 20% of injecting drug users, most of whom live in heroin-saturated northern Myanmar, are infected, according to the Ministry of Health.
Cambodian opposition leader ‘to return on Friday’
AFP
Phnom Penh
Cambodia’s newly pardoned opposition leader said yesterday he would return from exile on July 19 to join his party’s campaign to defeat Prime Minister Hun Sen in upcoming elections.
Sam Rainsy, who lives in France, had faced 11 years in jail after he was convicted in absentia for charges that he contends were politically motivated, including publishing a false map of the border with Vietnam.
The French-educated former banker - who worked with global finance giant Paribas in the 1980s - was pardoned by King Sihamoni on Friday at Hun Sen’s request. “I will arrive at Phnom Penh International Airport on Friday, July 19, 2013 in the morning at 9:05 on a Thai Airways flight,” Rainsy wrote on his Facebook page, in a post that was widely shared and received thousands of “likes”.
A spokesman for his Cambodia National Rescue Party, Yim Sovann, confirmed the travel schedule, adding that it would take time to arrange Rainsy’s return due to some “issue with his travel document”.
Rainsy, who holds joint French and Cambodian citizenship, is travelling on his French passport as his Cambodian passport was revoked by the government after his criminal convictions.
Thousands of opposition supporters are expected to turn out to welcome him at the airport, according to his party.
Rainsy said on Friday he was “very happy” to be able to return to Cambodia, adding that the pardon was “a small victory for democracy” but also warning that “much more remains to be done”. Rainsy, who is seen as the main challenger to strongman Hun Sen, has been removed from the electoral register and as a result is unable to run as a candidate in the July 28 general election unless parliament amends the law.
Hun Sen is one of Southeast Asia’s longest-serving leaders and has steered the impoverished country from the ashes of civil war and overseen a growing economy through development, tourism, and garment exports.
But his government is regularly accused of suppressing political freedoms and muzzling activists. He is widely expected to win a majority in this month’s polls.
In May he said he would try to stay in power for another decade, until he is 74. He had previously vowed to hold office until he reached 90.
While all political parties are free to canvass voters and hold public events, observers say there is little chance of unseating Hun Sen and his Cambodian People’s Party (CPP), which won the last two polls by a landslide amid allegations of fraud and election irregularities.
