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For well over a century, Myanmar’s remote mountains and valleys have played a central role in the regional supply chains for illicit drugs. Initially, opium poppies were grown in Myanmar; later, high-purity heroin was produced to meet global demand.

In more recent years, though, illicit drug production in Myanmar has increasingly moved from plant-based heroin to synthetics like methamphetamine. The UN Office on Drugs and Crime World drug report 2017 revealed that criminal groups operating in Myanmar have become significant players in the global production of synthetic drugs.

It’s easy to blame the growing problem of synthetic drug production in Myanmar on ethnic insurgency groups like the United Wa State Army and Shan State Army. However, while these groups are far from innocent, the problem has much more to do with the globalisation of organised crime and the domestic drug policy of the Chinese government.  A brief review of Myanmar’s 100-year connection with drug production can shed light on these relationships.

Following the opium wars between China and Britain in the mid-1800s, the demand for opium in China seemed unquenchable. To be fair, the demand was created and then nurtured by the British forcing opium on China rather than by a deliberate Chinese government policy decision.

Opium poppy quickly became a highly valuable cash crop for farmers in Myanmar’s remote hills and valleys.

In 1901, the Chinese Qing Dynasty embarked on a program to suppress the production of opium. While the policy resulted in a reduction in the production of opium in Chinese territory, it drove greater demand for production in the Golden Triangle of Myanmar, Laos and Thailand.

Then, in 1950, the chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, Mao Zedong, led a nationwide campaign to suppress opium use and production. For a second time, a Chinese government decision would result in a substantial change in regional drug production trends. While this policy decision all but eradicated poppy production in China it again fueled greater production in the Golden Triangle.

By the late 1960s, heroin base was beginning to be produced in Myanmar. By the early 1970s, organised crime groups had established supply chains that stretched from Myanmar to markets in North America and Australia.

By the early 2000s global demand for heroin had peaked, at the same time as production in Afghanistan increased. In contrast, the demand for low-purity methamphetamine, colloquially known as ‘yaba’, was growing across Southeast Asia.

Illicit drug preferences among users in countries like Australia, Canada and the US were also changing. While the demand for plant-based drugs like cocaine and heroin had slowed, there was a growing market for crystal methamphetamine, or ‘ice’.

Meanwhile on the Chinese mainland, economic growth led to a rapid expansion in the number of chemical and pharmaceutical production facilities. This rapid growth—often without adequate controls over illicit drug precursors and industry compliance frameworks—resulted in supply-chain vulnerabilities that were exploited by Chinese organised crime groups.

By the late 2000s, Chinese organised crime groups were supplying much of the global illicit drug markets’ crystal methamphetamine and crystal methamphetamine precursors.

Four years ago, China’s government realised that it had a domestic drug problem. It took swift action and instituted a nationwide crackdown on the production of methamphetamine. For a third time in a little more than a century, the Chinese government’s drug policy would impact on Myanmar.

But this time the production of illicit drugs in Myanmar wouldn’t be controlled by local warlords or criminals. The evidence from organisations like the UNODC appears to indicate that Chinese organised crime groups have relocated their methamphetamine production to Myanmar’s conflict-riddled special zones.

And it’s now a truly transnational organised crime business. Chemists from Taiwan use precursors sourced from Chinese industry to manufacture increasing volumes of yaba and ice in Myanmar to export to global illicit drug markets. Rather than being drug producers, Myanmar’s ethnic armies have become landlords who allow the production and movement of illicit drugs and their precursors.

The key leaders in these global organised crime structures are far removed from the diversion of precursors in China, the production of methamphetamine in Myanmar, the smuggling of illicit drugs across the region, and the money laundering in casinos in Laos.

While the weight and number of seizures across the Mekong subregion continue to grow, the current seizure strategy appears to be unable to reduce the availability of yaba and ice.

Resolving the internal conflict in Myanmar, to reduce the number of ungoverned spaces, is at best a long-term prospect. In the meantime, many an insurgent or militia group in Myanmar is reliant on ‘rent’ from the illicit drug trade to continue its operations.

Stronger methamphetamine precursor controls in China and Myanmar will be critical to any effective response. However, tackling the challenge of methamphetamine production in Myanmar also requires effective regional coordination, that includes the Chinese government, to stem the flow of methamphetamine precursors.

The Mekong Delta’s porous land and water borders makes it difficult to detect and interdict global illicit drug supply chains. Enhancing border management across the Mekong subregion will be critical to disrupting the flow of precursors.

Australia’s strengths in border governance and surveillance could help agencies across the region. There are compelling national security and law enforcement arguments for Australia to do so. As a first step, Australia could focus on encouraging interagency and bilateral information-sharing at border crossings.

In December 2017, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) released its latest report on opium production in Myanmar and, at face value, the news was good. Since 2015, the area of cultivated opium poppy in Myanmar’s Shan and Kachin states has decreased by 25% to 41,000 hectares. And, for good measure, heroin seizures in China, Cambodia and Thailand increased dramatically over the same period. The Royal Thai Police reported an impressive 278% (264 kilogram) increase in heroin seizures for 2017.

Despite this ‘good news’, authorities—especially those in Australia—shouldn’t be too quick to declare that the war on drugs in the Mekong Delta is working or that the organised crime threat there has diminished. The UNDOC survey found that, overall, Myanmar’s poppy fields are producing 15% higher yields compared to 2015, so the reduction in the area under cultivation hasn’t had any impact on heroin supply in countries such as Thailand, China and Australia. Compelling evidence suggests that criminal groups in the Golden Triangle, or at least in Laos and Myanmar, still present a very real threat to law and order and stability.

The reduction in poppy cultivation could have something to do with changes in organised crime activity in the Golden Triangle. With user demand for heroin stabilising globally, and Afghan poppy cultivation increasing, many criminal groups in the Golden Triangle are shifting their focus to producing and distributing synthetic drugs. Since 2015, ‘East and South-East Asia have become the leading subregions for methamphetamine seizures worldwide’.

The UNODC’s World drug report 2017 revealed that criminal groups in Laos and Myanmar have become significant players in the global production of synthetic drugs (primarily methamphetamines). The numerous ungoverned spaces in Laos and Myanmar provide criminal groups with safe environments for producing large quantities of both low- and high-purity methamphetamine. The region’s contribution to Australia’s illicit drug problems has been frequently highlighted in the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission’s illicit drug data reports.

Low-purity amphetamine tablets are sold in many ASEAN countries as ‘yaba’. The yaba market is a low-profit, high-sales-volume opportunity for criminal groups, which produce pills in the tens to hundreds of millions. In 2016, Thai police seized 215.58 million yaba tablets. In contrast, crystal methamphetamine (or ice) is produced for markets in China and Australia. While sales volumes in those markets are relatively low, the profit margins are high.

Australia needs a far more integrated whole-of-government response to the law and order issues in the Mekong Delta. Budget cuts and other fiscal constraints have left the Australian Border Force and Australian Federal Police presence in the region sadly lacking. It’s critical that the newly established Home Affairs portfolio’s first international engagement strategy focus on enhancing police-to-police cooperation in the region. That should start with rebuilding the ABF and AFP presence in Thailand, Laos, Myanmar, Cambodia and Vietnam.

The main facilitators for organised crime activity and drug production in the Mekong Delta remain corruption and foreign bribery. Home Affairs, in partnership with the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, could work on developing a more comprehensive framework to strengthen anti-corruption programs in the region. A specific focus of that effort could be collaboration with the UNODC on implementing the United Nations Convention against Corruption across ASEAN.

Home Affairs could also consider how it might contribute, alongside the Attorney-General’s Department, to enhancing mutual legal assistance (MLA) agreements and processes with Mekong countries. MLA is essential to the disruption of transnational organised crime and indispensable in the fight against corruption and foreign bribery. Yet my experience in Myanmar and Laos has been that MLA processes are still not well understood by investigators.

The porosity of the Mekong Delta’s land and water borders makes it difficult to detect and interdict global illicit drug supply chains. Australia’s strengths in border governance and surveillance could help agencies across the region. Australia could focus on encouraging interagency and bilateral information-sharing at border crossings.

These suggestions have the potential to disrupt the supply of illicit drugs originating from Myanmar and Laos, but they don’t address the underlying development problems in the region. As long as farmers can make more money from opium poppy than from other crops, the problem will continue. And as long as criminal groups can act with impunity in permissive environments, nothing will change. In dealing with these issues, lessons learned from Thailand’s successful opium poppy eradication programs of the 1980s could be a starting point for policymakers. However, when it comes to the large-scale production of synthetic drugs, enhancing the rule of law remains one of the very few viable options.

Myanmar’s military has lately been engaged in a brutal campaign against the Rohingya, a long-marginalised Muslim ethnic minority group, driving hundreds of thousands to flee to Bangladesh, India, and elsewhere. The international community has rightly condemned the crackdown. But, in doing so, it has failed to recognise that Rohingya militants have been waging jihad in the country—a reality that makes it extremely difficult to break the cycle of terror and violence.

Rakhine State, where most of Myanmar’s Rohingya reside, is attracting jihadists from far and wide. Local militants are suspected of having ties with the Islamic State (ISIS), al-Qaeda, and other terrorist organisations. Moreover, they increasingly receive aid from militant-linked organisations in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. The main insurgent group—the well-oiled Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army, also known as Harakah al-Yaqin—is led by a Saudi-based committee of Rohingya émigrés.

The external forces fomenting insurgent attacks in Rakhine bear considerable responsibility for the Rohingyas’ current plight. In fact, it is the links between Rohingya militants and such external forces, especially terrorist organisations like ISIS, that have driven the government of India, where some 40,000 Rohingya have settled illegally, to declare that their entry poses a serious security threat. Even Bangladesh acknowledges Rohingya militants’ external jihadi connections.

But the truth is that Myanmar’s jihadi scourge is decades old, a legacy of British colonialism. After all, it was the British who, more than a century ago, moved large numbers of Rohingya from East Bengal to work on rubber and tea plantations in then-Burma, which was administered as a province of India until 1937.

In the years before India gained independence from Britain in 1947, Rohingya militants joined the campaign to establish Pakistan as the first Islamic republic of the postcolonial era. When the British, who elevated the strategy of ‘divide and rule’ into an art, decided to establish two separate wings of Pakistan on either side of a partitioned India, the Rohingya began attempting to drive Buddhists out of the Muslim-dominated Mayu peninsula in northern Rakhine. They wanted the Mayu peninsula to secede and be annexed by East Pakistan (which became Bangladesh in 1971).

Failure to achieve that goal led many Rohingya to take up arms in a self-declared jihad. Local mujahedeen began to organise attacks on government troops and seize control of territory in northern Rakhine, establishing a state within a state. Just months after Myanmar gained independence in 1948, martial law was declared in the region; government forces regained territorial control in the early 1950s.

But Rohingya Islamist militancy continued to thrive, with mujahedeen attacks occurring intermittently. In 2012, bloody clashes broke out between the Rohingya and the ethnic Rakhines, who feared becoming a minority in their home state. The sectarian violence, in which rival gangs burned down villages and some 140,000 people (mostly Rohingya) were displaced, helped to transform the Rohingya militancy back into a full-blown insurgency, with rebels launching hit-and-run attacks on security forces.

Similar attacks have lately been carried out against security forces and, in some cases, non-Rohingya civilians, with the violence having escalated over the last 12 months. Indeed, it was a wave of coordinated predawn insurgent attacks on 30 police stations and an army base on 25 August that triggered the violent military offensive that is driving the Rohingya out of Rakhine.

Breaking the cycle of terror and violence that has plagued Myanmar for decades will require the country to address the deep-seated sectarian tensions that are driving Rohingya towards jihadism. Myanmar is one of the world’s most ethnically diverse countries. Its geographic position makes it a natural bridge between South and Southeast Asia, and between China and India.

But, internally, Myanmar has failed to build bridges among its various ethnic groups and cultures. Since independence, governments dominated by Myanmar’s Burman majority have allowed postcolonial nativism to breed conflict or civil war with many of the country’s minority groups, which have complained of a system of geographic apartheid.

The Rohingya face the most extreme marginalisation. Viewed as outsiders even by other minorities, the Rohingya are not officially recognized as one of Myanmar’s 135 ethnic groups. In 1982, the government, concerned about illegal immigration from Bangladesh, enacted a law that stripped the Rohingya of their citizenship, leaving them stateless.

Successive governments have defended this approach, arguing that past secessionist movements indicate that the Rohingya never identified as part of the country. And, in fact, the common classification of Rohingya as stateless ‘Bengalis’ mirrors the status of Rohingya exiles in the country of their dreams, Pakistan, where tens of thousands took refuge during the Pakistani military genocide that led to Bangladesh’s independence.

Still, the fact is that Myanmar’s failure to construct an inclusive national identity has allowed old ethnic rivalries to continue to fuel terrorism, stifling the resource-rich country’s potential. What Myanmar needs now is an equitable, federalist system that accommodates its many ethnic minorities, who comprise roughly a third of the population, but cover half of the total land area.

To this end, it is critical that Myanmar’s military immediately halt human-rights abuses in Rakhine. It will be impossible to ease tensions if soldiers are using disproportionate force, much less targeting civilians; indeed, such an approach is more likely to fuel than quell violent jihadism. But as the international community pressures Myanmar’s de facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi to take stronger action to protect the Rohingya, it is also vital to address the long history of Islamist extremism that has contributed to the ethnic group’s current plight.

Late last month, the United Nations Security Council held their annual open debate on women, peace and security (WPS). 80 representatives spoke, 72 of whom were representatives of member states. The president of the Security Council called on representatives to focus their statements on the progress achieved in implementing commitments made last year for the 15th anniversary of UNSCR 1325.

The WPS agenda is based on eight UN Security Council Resolutions. The first of those resolutions, UNSCR 1325, which passed on 31 October 2000, acknowledged that men and women experience conflict differently. It required women’s protection from the effects of violence (particularly sexual violence); and their participation in the prevention, mitigation, resolution and recovery from conflict. Since then, subsequent resolutions have gone into detail about a range of activities including peace negotiations; disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration; security sector reform; the rule of law; and countering violent extremism.

In this year’s debate, Australia’s Ambassador to the UN, Gillian Bird, reported on research by Monash University into the role women play in combatting extremism so we can better understand how to tap into their valuable experiences. She also spoke of other concrete commitments, including support for the Global Acceleration Instrument facilitating grassroots women’s participation in peace processes.

In closing, the Ambassador stated that ‘to sustain peace we must include women; not just in our words, but in our actions.’ This sentiment was echoed by Germany’s representative, who articulated that ‘the shortcomings in the implementation of the women and peace and security framework are due not to a lack of words, but to a lack of action.’

Australia’s National Action Plan (NAP) on WPS expires in 2018. It’s a whole-of-government policy document, coordinated by the Office for Women in the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet. The Attorney General’s Department, Australian Civil–Military Centre, the AFP, DFAT and the Department of Defence all have responsibility for its implementation.

Outside of government, a range of non-government organisations like World Vision, the Red Cross, ActionAid and Care implement a range of programs within the WPS agenda. It’s largely due to the advocacy of organisations like the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom that Australia even has a NAP. Community groups like Diaspora Action Australia localise the agenda, and academics from a range of universities undertake research that can be used to inform policy.

Australia’s NAP is flexible enough to address some of the peace and security challenges we currently face. However, more work needs to be done to mainstream the agenda and implement it in our foreign policy, peace and security operations.

Situations in our near neighbourhood—Bougainville and Myanmar—require close scrutiny with the WPS agenda in mind, as do conflicts that are further afield, such as Iraq and Syria.

In Bougainville, women are key peacemakers. As their independence referendum draws nearer and negotiations on the reopening of the Panguna copper mine continue, we must heed the voices of women to prevent a resurgence of conflict.

In Myanmar, the Army uses rape as a tactic of war, particularly against minority ethnic groups, blatantly ignoring Security Council Resolution 2106. Australia is simultaneously normalising its relations with Myanmar and increasing its WPS activities in Australia’s Defence Cooperation Program. It’s paramount that Burmese military personnel are proactively screened for allegations of sexual violence before being included in training and education opportunities and the Defence Cooperation Program.

In Syria and Iraq, gendered war crimes have driven the conflict with Daesh. There’s an unprecedented opportunity to end impunity for sexual violence in armed conflict. Rape is being used as a tactic of war, as a constituent of genocide and in crimes against humanity. More than 30,000 foreign fighters that swelled the ranks of Daesh and other extremist organisations in Iraq and Syria last year. In countries such as France, Germany, and the United Kingdom, war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity are outlawed in domestic legislation.  Finland and Sweden have already bought cases against their nationals.

In Australia, genocide is outlawed under the Genocide Convention Act of 1949. War crimes are criminal offences under the Geneva Conventions Act and the War Crimes Act which have been incorporated in Division 268 of the Criminal Code Act. Over 100 Australians have travelled to Iraq and Syria to fight with Daesh and other extremist groups. Investigations and prosecutions need to be bought against Australians who have perpetrated these crimes.

Australia has made great strides in implementing the WPS agenda since it launched its first NAP back in 2012. While actions such as provision of gender advisors throughout the Australian Defence Force are a notable advance, implementation of the agenda isn’t just about applying a general gender perspective. It requires consideration of the design and conduct of activities such as security sector reform, disarmament, demobilisation, reintegration and the rule of law.

The key failing of the Australian NAP is monitoring and evaluation. Civil society is currently considering the recommendations it will make to government on the process and content of the next NAP. No doubt they will call for a good monitoring and evaluation framework. It will need to  incorporate pre-existing evaluation processes across government and integrate new frameworks such as the Sustainable Development Goals and General Recommendation 30 of the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women. In so doing, it’ll ensure WPS is included in standard operating procedures for all government departments responsible for the specific activities outlined in the Security Council resolutions.