Buying friends and influencing drug
lords By David Scott Mathieson
CHIANG MAI, Thailand - If the drug trade
ever had a friend, it's the man in uniform. Access
to the authorities is a necessary companion of
efforts to subvert authority, and make a buck, or
a kyat, a yuan or some baht.
Sometimes the
criminal himself is in uniform, and some of the
most lucrative rackets in history have been
organized and run by the police or the army. As
Hand in Glove, [1] a new study by the
Chiang Mai-based Shan Herald Agency for News
demonstrates, Myanmar's army, the Tatmadaw, has
been a good friend of the
drug
trade for years. This probably explains why
Myanmar remains one of the world's biggest
producers of illegal narcotics.
While
there have been several serious efforts at
uncovering the truth behind the drug-trade
dynamics in Myanmar - from Alfred McCoy's The
Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, Bertil
Lintner's definitive book Burma in Revolt,
and Ronald Renard's The Burmese Connection
- there has never been a systematic cataloguing of
collusion between the Tatmadaw and the vast web of
opium farmers, drug financiers, caravan-protection
crews and laboratory locations that stretch
through northern Myanmar.
Hand in Glove
provides a unique ground-eye view of the trade
in opium, heroin and amphetamine-type substances
(ATS), known in Thailand as yaa baa (crazy
medicine) or in China as bingdu. It
augments a previous report by the Shan news
agency, "Show Business", released in 2003, which
presented trends in narcotics production, and the
punitive and largely ineffectual attempts of
Myanmar's ruling junta, the State Peace and
Development Council (SPDC), to control it by
pretending to curtail it.
First-hand
accounts The people behind the Shan Herald
Agency for News know their subject well. Their
director, Khuensai Jaiyen, once worked as an
information officer for Khun Sa, the Chinese-Shan
drug lord who controlled swaths of the Shan state
mountains for decades, becoming one of the most
powerful, and media-friendly, opium and heroin
smugglers in the world. Khun Sa exploited Shan
nationalism to make a profit.
The drug
lord's true character was revealed in 1996, when
he surrendered to the Myanmar regime in return for
a comfortable retirement in Yangon, avoiding a
US$2 million arrest bounty by the Americans. He
remains safely protected by Myanmar military
authorities, many of whom, such as former eastern
Shan state commander and now No 2 in the regime,
General Maung Aye, had profited from his
generosity and "charity".
The rapid
disbanding of Khun Sa's once powerful Mong Tai
Army (MTA) gave the Tatmadaw a free hand to
rampage through central Shan state, displacing
hundreds of thousands of civilians, killing
hundreds and driving thousands more to Thailand.
The Myanmar authorities then gave control of the
drug trade to the United Wa State Army (UWSA) and
its local allies.
For Khuensai and his
news agency, documenting drug-trade patterns,
environmental destruction, human-rights abuses and
the politics of Shan state has more urgency than
the (literally) cutthroat world of the drug trade.
The independent, grassroots news agency has
developed into an impressive portal of information
into the ravages of conflict in Shan state, and
the network of reporters and informants used in
the book are enviable. Khuensai has also
supported young journalists and human-rights
activists, which has helped raise international
awareness of the Shan cause, leading to the
renowned 2002 report by the Shan Women's Action
Network (SWAN), "License to Rape", which
documented cases of systematic sexual violence
committed by the Tatmadaw against women in Shan
state. That report later caused a stir of
embarrassing media attention for the junta and
helped win SWAN activist Charm Tong a private
visit with US President George W Bush last
October.
Hand in Glove is an
impressively detailed survey of the dynamics of
the drug trade. It lists the key traffickers and
groups' involvement, opium-cultivation sites,
drug-laboratory locations, precursor-chemical
flows and smuggling routes. It also contains
instructions on how to process ATS pills, and the
methods of smoking opium, heroin and yaa
baa. The detailed maps impressively illustrate
the vast spread of the production and supply chain
of the heroin and ATS trade, many of them
suspiciously close to hundreds of Tatmadaw units.
The main purpose of the book is to outline
the systemic collusion between drug dealers and
Myanmar's military, and this it does with
disturbing accuracy. The names of notorious
players in the drug trade, such as Wa leaders Bao
Youxiang and Wei Hsuehkang, are listed alongside
obscure but equally potent operators, such as Sai
Tun Aye, Myint Swe, Ja Ngoi and more.
These are mainly pro-SPDC ethnic militia
leaders, Lahu, Kachin, Wa and others, given local
security responsibilities in exchange for economic
ventures in drug production, casinos, and
cross-border trading. The Pyithu Sit (People's
Militia) leaders and businessmen operate under the
control of Tatmadaw officers from battalion to
regional-command level.
The patronage
network fostered by the drug trade has economic
and security dimensions that require army officers
to regulate it. The militias attack
anti-government forces, supply army units, lavish
gifts such as four-wheel-drives and jewelry on
officers (and their wives) and finance local
festivals and military operations. In return they
are granted freedom to transport drugs and smuggle
them across borders, sometimes with Tatmadaw
assistance.
This system has developed over
the years, and the Tatmadaw knows who the main
players are. An informant for this book mentioned
this to an SPDC official. "The fact is that
national security says we need them and their
sources," the unnamed official replied. Serving
officers such as former northeastern commander
Lieutenant-General Myint Hlaing and deposed
military intelligence chief General Khin Nyunt
have benefited personally. When the monthly salary
of SPDC leader Senior General Than Shwe is only
1.2 million kyat (US$1,000) and his lifestyle is
clearly beyond his means, who is providing him
with the disposable income?
On a local
level, the drug trade provides kickbacks to poorly
paid and supported government soldiers who extort
protection fees from poppy fields and yaa
baa smugglers. The soldiers are considerate,
recounted one farmer: "They make sure not to step
on the opium plants when they walk though the
farm."
Numbers of Tatmadaw battalions and
units that are actively involved in protecting the
trade at a local level are located and listed in
the book. Even if one were skeptical of the
information presented here, it is an important
source for further research on this long suspected
cooperation.
Antidote to the
West The book is also a powerful antidote
to elite perspectives from the United Nations and
Western counter-narcotics agencies that cooperate
with Myanmar authorities on opium-eradication
projects and drug-suppression activities. Their
encouraging pronouncements have been suspect for a
long time, especially when Antonio Maria Costa,
former executive director of the UN Office on
Drugs and Crime (UNODC) declared in 2004, "What we
may be seeing, if the decline continues, is a
potential end to more than a century of opium
production in the Golden Triangle."
It is
clear that there have been major shifts in the
drug trade in the past several years. Opium
cultivation has decreased, from 1,676 tonnes in
1997, to 680 tonnes in 2005, partly in response to
an explosion of production in Afghanistan, but
also because of draconian government policies of
displacing farmers from opium-cultivation sites to
meet unrealistic deadlines to become "drug free".
Hundreds of thousands of civilians in Shan
state have been forcibly relocated or their opium
crops destroyed, leading to large-scale starvation
and poverty. The UN's World Food Program has
staged emergency feeding programs for communities
in Shan state since late 2003 as a result.
But as the book demonstrates, cultivation
has spread across northeastern Myanmar through
what is called "the bubble effect": squeeze here
and the trade moves somewhere else. New
plantations are often outside survey zones, so who
knows how much is really there?
The market
shift from opiates to amphetamines in the 1990s
replaced profits lost on heroin production, but
also had the perverse result of diffusing the
number of small-level smugglers and producers
under the control of major armed groups such as
the UWSA and Kokang Chinese, with Tatmadaw
connivance. As Hand in Glove argues, the
trade has changed but everything remains the same.
Even the UNODC admits this: its report this August
on ATS dynamics noted an increase in production in
Asia. This book should serve as a challenge.
If there are still ATS labs in Panghsang, the
headquarters of the United Wa State Army and a
regular port of call for UNODC and other
international development officials, then
shouldn't international agencies check it out? If
Lahu Pyithu Sit units are operating in downtown
Tachilek and running convoys of drugs, then maybe
the Tatmadaw units nearby should, as the police
parlance goes, make some inquiries. The
international community should no longer
diplomatically believe in "assurances" from SPDC
officials that the trade is being effectively
interdicted.
Annual US narcotics reports
declare that no Tatmadaw officer over the rank of
colonel has ever been disciplined for drug
offenses. Hand in Glove will make you ask
why that is.
