By Richard Humphries
TOKYO JOURNAL / FALL 2001
"Among the remedies which it has pleased Almighty God to give to man to relieve his sufferings, none is so universal and so efficacious as opium..." (Thomas Sydenham, 17th-century pioneer of English medicine)
My brief trip in February to Shan State occurred through fortuitous circumstance. I received a late night phone call announcing a press conference for the following day. When morning came, a series of available transport—tuk-tuk, airplane, car taxi and motorcycle taxi—combined to get me with dispatch to an unremarkable Thai-Burma border hamlet. There, a few pick-ups waited to carry journalists and assorted camera people across. All had to sign a book being kept by our Shan hosts. Except for myself all the visitors were Thai, though some gave foreign affiliations such as the BBC or Soldier of Fortune magazine.
We were going to Doi (Loi in Shan) Kaw Wan, a base for the Shan State Army (SSA). Its roughly 6,000 fighters represent the biggest threat to Rangoon’s dominance of the region. Soldiers from Burma’s Triangle Command, along with their allies from the ethnic-based United Wa State Army were battling the Shan in fierce battles for control of mountain peaks, river passages, trails, and border crossings.
As the pick-ups followed a dusty, bumpy trail to Doi Kaw Wan, I could not help but be impressed with the vista. Grizzled mountain ranges, occasionally covered in soft mist, were punctuated by fields and by clustered houses of bamboo and wood. Minority ethnic peoples in their colorful homespun dress were out and about, carrying on with life’s burdensome tasks. This was a world away from Chiang Mai, and even removed from the so-called ecological arcadias of hill tribe trekking advertisements found in that city. Yet while there was more authenticity, there was also a very nasty war.
Shan soldiers were keeping a sharp lookout over the surrounding hills and there was no doubt they meant business. They had the typical guerrilla army arsenal of automatic rifles, mortars, and rocket-propelled grenade launchers. And their Burmese enemies were not too far away, just some 500 meters.
The SSA leader, Col. Yawd Serk, was speaking to the media about two issues. One concerned the recent Burmese shelling of the Thai Golden Triangle gateway town of Mae Sai and who was responsible for that. Some Thai civilians had been killed and relations took months to regain some balance. “This is not related to us," Yawd Serk said. “It is the Burmese who planned it since the beginning. They have tried several times to create conflicts with Thailand but the used the minorities’ names to do the job."
The other issue was drugs and was easily the more important problem. Narcotics not only explains the first issue indirectly but also explains why Shan State, the heart of the Golden Triangle, has been in constant turmoil for at least 40 years.
For Thomas Syndenham, the papaver somniferum, or opium poppy suggested nirvana was achievable. He has not been alone. As far back as ancient Sumeria, there is a reference to the poppy flower in one text as hul gil or “plant of joy.” For others, the Yunnan poppy, or moonflower, has much more sinister qualities. Adrian Cowell, a British video journalist who has covered Shan State’s wars and drugs trade for over 30 years says, “…narcotics has haunted Shan State like the curse in a Nordic saga.”
And if curse it is we cannot really blame Thor or Odin. Government oppression, local venality, ethnic war, and acute poverty there certainly are but Western nations also have a lot to answer for. Britain fought two wars to force opium upon China, and both Britain and France used taxes from the drug, often garnered through state monopolies, to support colonial bureaucracies in the region.
The poppy has long been grown in Southeast Asian hills and in China’s Yunnan province. It was valued in gold, hence the Golden Triangle. Typically, a poor peasant farmer’s wife would “harvest” the crop with a knife by slitting unripe poppy pods vertically in parallel strokes. The white sap that oozed out quickly darkened and was packed into small, portable “bricks” with leaves or plastic. Until recently, mule convoys have been the favored method of transporting the opium to refineries.
The difference between 200 years ago and now is one of scale. What was more localized is now an international business. For example, WW2 saw significant expansion in the trade. In fighting in northern Burma against Japanese forces, the United States paid its ethnic Kachin auxiliaries with opium packets, dropping them from Dakota aircraft.
In the 1950s, Shan State became an important Cold War staging area. While the bulk of the defeated Chinese Kuomintang (KMT) armies joined Chiang Kai-shek in Taiwan, units based in Yunnan fought their way out through the hilly recesses of Xishuangbanna and on into Shan State. Taiwanese leaders and American policy makers saw instant possibilities for intelligence gathering and for invasions of Yunnan. They aided the Kuomintang groups directly despite the obvious offense to Burma. Civilian Air Transport (CAT), an American airline with intelligence links, brought in supplies and brought out opium. Years later CAT became Air America and did much the same thing in Laos.
Opium was long used in the West as a medicine and abused by opium den aficionados but it is an opium derivative that causes the havoc of today. In 1895, Heinrich Dreser, a scientist with the German firm Bayer found that the derivative diacetylmorphine (discovered in 1874 by an English chemist) could be further refined, using precursor chemicals such as acetic anhydride, into a more powerful substance with fewer side effects. It was hoped that this new substance could be used to wean addicts off morphine. And so they’d feel heroic about doing so, Bayer gave it the name heroin.
Eventually the United States lost interest in the KMT armies and, after several failures, those armies lost interest in re-invading their lost homeland. By this time though, benefits gained from the moonflower had become a raison d’être. One of the KMT generals, Duan Shi-wen put it succinctly. “To fight you must have an army and to have an army you need guns and to buy guns you need money. In these mountains the only money is opium.”
And fight they did. In the 1960s and 1970s the KMT battled for control of the trade in Shan State with the Burmese Army, with numerous warlords (and in the colorful, pistol-packing Olive Yang, a warlady), and with a melange of ethnic-based armies. By the mid 1980s though it was a spent force. The moonflower, however, has never lacked for suitors. The warlords, the ethnic armies, and the Burmese army fought each other in a dazzling mosaic of betrayals and shifting alliances. Today we're friends; tomorrow you die about sums it up. If one considers the constant mergers, acquisitions, spin-offs and fierce infighting of the corporate world perhaps there is an analogy. Nevertheless, corporate raiders, no matter how much they affect glowering poses on magazine covers, lack panache compared to the opium warlords.
On July 1, 1973, the then American President Richard Nixon created the Drug Enforcement Agency or DEA. America was perhaps belatedly realizing, if not publicly acknowledging, that its proxies and clandestine services in Southeast Asia were compounding the problems of heroin addiction. This was visible via addicted GIs, returning from Vietnam. Still, American policy has long been to look for simple answers and ones easily explainable to a public brought up on a Hollywood version of reality. There were the opium farmers of course, mostly poor ethnic peoples in Shan State’s Wa and Kokang Hills. One could spray their fields with chemicals. But then there were the warlords, the Mr. Big (or at most a few Bigs), who could be eliminated or at the very least told by someone like Rambo to get the hell out of Dodge.
The trade is not as reductive as that. Warlords there are and have been, and certain tough opportunistic individuals like Lo Hsing-han and Khun Sa have achieved enough power and notoriety to themselves appear on magazine covers. What are all too often ignored are the powerful, secretive, and seldom touched Chinese syndicates. These own many of the refineries, arrange for distribution, and control (read that as bribe) the politicians and military officers in Burma and Thailand who provide cover and protection. And many Americans, preferring Wild West solutions, overlook the fact that this is a demand-fueled trade.
It was in the 1990s and after the Burmese military crackdown the amount of opium produced reached its height. In 1993 an estimated 2,500 metric tons of opium was produced, which theoretically meant 250 tons of heroin. Since 1997 production has declined by half due to bad weather and to competition from Afghanistan, whose fields were on average three times more productive per hectare. Recently though, the Afghani Taliban leadership has banned opium. When the Taliban speaks one tends to listen attentively or die unpleasantly so Afghani opium production has declined to nil. There is a very good chance that Burmese production will once again increase to pick up the slack.
Although in the same dictatorial mold as the Taliban the Burmese junta has not taken the same drastic step. Since 1989 it has made numerous cease-fires with its armed opponents, the biggest of whom were then free to conduct their narcotics business without official harassment. This replicated government policy of the 1960s when local militias, called Ka Kwe Ye, were supposed to support government offensives against ethnic rebels in return for freedom to trade in opium. Both Lo Hsing-han and Khun Sa were in this program for a few years.
This time the main opposition force being neutralized in this manner was the United Wa State Army (USWA). Considered among the most backward and misused of Burma’s minorities, the highland Wa of Shan State practiced headhunting well into the 20th century. There is an oft-repeated story from the 1930s of a Sikh colonial officer being quickly withdrawn from the region. Apparently there was unmistakable excitement among the Wa over the possibility of gaining such a remarkable trophy as his head.
Until 1989, the Wa were used as cannon fodder by the Burmese Communist Party in its war against the central government. When the Wa mutinied that party effectively ceased to exist and the communist leaders fled to China. In the last 12 years the USWA has built up a strongly armed 20,000-man army and a highly lucrative narcotics business. Their main center near the Thai border, Mong Yawn, is shown on maps as a flyspeck town but actually has 60,000 residents, a casino, a hospital, and several “factories.” There’s also a fortified hill headquarters for Wei Hseuh-kang, a USWA kingpin though of Chinese origin. It is in their factories that the USWA leadership has shown a great ability for diversification.
Heroin is increasingly no longer the drug of choice in the region. Its place is being taken over by methamphetamine or yaa baa (madness drug), as it is known in Thailand. First developed in Japan in 1919, “meth” was given to kamikaze pilots during WW2, and in injected form to Adolf Hitler. It’s easy to make. According to the Utah State Criminal Investigations Board, “Today, anyone who can read a recipe can manufacture meth.” Ephedrine and pseudo-ephedrine (a main component of Sudafed, and why that medication is banned in Japan) are the chemical precursors. Add a few other ingredients plus water and cook them; that’s all it takes. The average pill in Thailand sells for 50 baht (¥140) and an estimated 700 million tablets are exported yearly from Burma, mostly to Thailand. The Wa dominate this trade.
While the drug can give users a temporary sense of exhilaration, prolonged use can lead to aggressive behavior, hallucinations, and a condition resembling schizophrenia. The social costs of yaa baa usage in Thailand have reached alarming proportions. Officialdom, which who once paid lip service to the evils of opium, has been loud in its calls for decisive action against the trade in yaa baa.
And this is where Col. Yawd Serk and the Shan State Army come in. Until January 1996, when Khun Sa “surrendered” to Rangoon, the Colonel and his Shan nationalists had fought for the drug lord (and Rangoon government-controlled press continually harps on that fact). But that was then. Clearly now a favorite with both the Thai media and with regional Thai commanders with whom he may have a de facto alliance, Yawd Serk says, “Drug suppression is a major policy for us. Whatever Burma says, the truth is that the people know what we are doing.” The SSA is also careful to state that their main gripe is not with the Wa but with the Burmese Army that manipulates the minorities.
So, if there is a “frontline” against yaa baa and opium it may be here. In March, an Australian Broadcasting Corporation film crew accompanied the SSA in an attack on a Burmese military post. It was storing a large amount of yaa baa for future sale in Thailand. Respected Australian defense analyst Desmond Ball, author of “Burma’s Military Secrets,” went with the team to Thailand. He noted, "In the case of the methamphetamine production labs you've got Burmese troops actually guarding the plants, you've got military intelligence guys providing the escorts of the trafficking caravans and military people who allow it to actually cross the border into Thailand."
Though long suspected, this would seem to implicate Burmese Army field commanders in the narcotics trade. The big question must be—how high up the chain of command does involvement go? After all, the regime has passed anti-drug laws, periodically burns what it says are drug seizures, and participates in regional conferences whose purpose is to stem the trade. It has announced a policy to make Burma drug free by 2014. And, on June 26, it even opened an Anti-Drug Museum in Rangoon. Who could doubt their sincerity?
Well, it should be noted one of the guests at the museum opening was none other than Lo Hsing-han, who also donated money towards its construction. Both of the warlords once dubbed “Opium Kings” by the DEA now live comfortably in Rangoon, where they are free to invest in (and some might say support) the local economy. Khun Sa got a late start in 1996 but is said to be involved in bus companies. Lo Hsing-han has had more time and his Asia World Ltd. is one of Burma’s largest conglomerates. The Trader’s Hotel, a large edifice in downtown Rangoon, owes its existence to Lo Hsing-han’s profits from opium. Asia World has important connections with Singapore and Malaysia, ironically two states with enforced death penalties for drug dealing.
The USWA also has its own investment vehicle, the Myanmar Kyone Yeom Group. It dabbles in food processing, real estate, and ‘border trade.’ Other groups involved in the drugs trade follow the same pattern and make good use of money laundering. This is not hard to do as Burma lacks transparency and government financial statistics have a fairy tale value.
Money laundering typically involves a complicate process of deposit placement, layering transactions, and monetary integration to change naughty into nice. Burma’s banks are simplifying the process and to some extent advertising their services. You might even call it one stop shopping. Even the junta got into the act in its early years, charging a 40% “whitening” fee for repatriated funds acquired illicitly.
So how deep is the regime’s involvement? Opinion ranges from selective toleration to active participation with the most likely scenario somewhere in the middle. Yes, there are anti-drugs campaigns and the government claims to be making seizures. Nevertheless the really big figures are left alone, money laundering seems to be state policy at times, and the military does benefit financially, and very considerably, from the trade. Will moves toward national reconciliation produce a solution to the drug menace? Well, depending on how far the reconciliation goes the possibility exists but it will take much more than that. After all, one doesn’t have to light a pipe to be addicted to opium. One can be just as easily addicted to it financially. (RH)