Page 2 of 2 Death of a drug
lord By Bertil Lintner
Sai area, and
sent the Lao air force to bomb the battle site.
Officially, he cheated both Khun Sa and the
Kuomintang, and made off with the opium. Other
sources told this correspondent that the opium had
already been sold, and Khun Sa subsequently made
his first significant investment in Thailand.
On attempting to contact the Shan rebels,
perhaps to switch sides, in 1969 he was arrested
and imprisoned in Mandalay. He
was
charged with high treason for attempting to
contact the rebels, not for drug trafficking, for
which at the time he had informal government
permission to engage in.
In April 1973,
his men who had gone underground in the jungle
kidnapped two Soviet doctors who were working at
the hospital in the Shan state capital of
Taunggyi. An entire division of Myanmar government
troops was mobilized to rescue the doctors. The
operation was unsuccessful and it was not until
August 1974 that the foreign hostages were
supposedly unconditionally released through
Thailand. By strange coincidence, Khun Sa was
released from prison shortly afterwards. It was
later revealed that Thai northern army commander
General Kriangsak Chomanan had helped to negotiate
an exchange of prisoners.
Friends in
high places Khun Sa later slipped away to
northern Thailand, where he established a new
headquarters at Ban Hin Taek in Chiang Rai
province.
His so-called "Shan United
Army", SUA, was supposed to be fighting for Shan
independence from Myanmar, but was, in reality,
little more than a narco-army escorting opium
convoys and protecting heroin refineries. In 1982,
the Thai army decided to turn against him, and
Khun Sa and the SUA were driven out of Ban Hin
Taek. But they soon established a new base, this
time inside Myanmar, at Homong, where new
refineries were set up to process raw opium into
heroin.
By then he was officially the most
wanted man in the world, indicted by the United
States and referred to by then-US ambassador to
Thailand William Brown as "the worst enemy the
world has". But, even so, the stream of
high-powered visitors to his not-so-secret
headquarters never ceased to amaze observers.
Among them was Lady Brockett, an American
model turned British socialite, and her husband,
Lord Brockett, who used to party with Britain's
Prince Charles. Khun Sa even presented the lady
with a pair of ruby-studded shoes, which he had
designed himself.
Despite all the
anti-drug bravado from the US, Khun Sa also had
influential American friends, including James "Bo"
Gritz, a highly decorated Vietnam War hero who
used to spend much of his time searching for
American prisoners of war and those missing in
action in Indochina. Gritz's trips to Homong were
allegedly financed by Texas oil tycoon Ross Perot,
once a US presidential candidate.
Another
American acquaintance was Shirley D Sac, a New
York gem dealer and socialite who at one stage
said she was going to sponsor a Shan human rights
foundation. In Thailand, Khun Sa's representatives
enjoyed a close and cordial relationship with that
country's intelligence services, and, on the
Myanmar side, his organization maintained an
official trade office in Taunggyi.
The
head of the eastern command of the Myanmar army at
that time was General Maung Aye, now the
second-highest ranking officer in the ruling
junta. Not a single shot was fired between Khun
Sa's army and Myanmar government forces while
Maung Aye was in command. Perhaps those high-level
contacts inside the Myanmar army influenced his
decision to give it all up in January 1996, when
he surrendered and disbanded his private army. He
moved to Yangon with four young Shan women, who
served as his mistresses in his retirement.
In return, his three daughters and five
sons were allowed to enter into business in
Myanmar. His favorite son now runs a hotel with a
casino near the border town of Tachilek, while one
of his daughters is well established in business
in Mandalay. Many ethnic Shan nationalists, who
had joined his organization believing that he was
a devout Shan patriot, were devastated by his
decision to lay down arms.
Remnants of his
20,000-strong army refused to honor the agreement
with the government and went underground as the
newly formed Shan State Army (South). They are
still fighting for their ideals in the hills
around Homong, now a government-controlled town
and still a bustling center for the local drug
trade.
Khun Sa's surrender and new deal
with the Myanmar government was interpreted
differently by one unexpected quarter. Barry
Broman, the Yangon CIA station chief in the 1990s,
said in an interview with the Asia Times newspaper
edition on June 3, 1997, that "on their own, the
Burmese [Myanmar] effected the capture of Khun Sa.
They made a major dent in the drug trade and we
gave them no credit."
In reality, Khun Sa
was never "captured"; he gave himself up in
exchange for a lucrative deal for himself and his
family. And there was never any "dent" made in the
narcotics trade he promoted. If Khun Sa's
surrender proved anything, it was that the
networks that controlled the trade were able to
survive even without their so-called "kingpins".
In the 1960s and early 1970s, Lo Hsing-han
was the designated "king" of the Golden Triangle.
Following his capture and arrest in 1973 - also
for treason, not drug trafficking, which he
likewise as a government-approved KKY commander
was permitted to engage in, Khun Sa filled the gap
and rose to drug dealing prominence.
Nowadays, it's the United Wa State Army's
Wei Xuegang who controls the bulk of the illicit
trade. The bottom line is that the drug trade
could never flourish without those networks and
official complicity in Myanmar, Thailand and
elsewhere. Khun Sa may be gone, but that makes
little difference. It is business as usual in the
Golden Triangle, only with a new cast of
characters.
Bertil Lintner is a
former correspondent with the Far Eastern Economic
Review. He is currently a writer with Asia-Pacific
Media Services.
(Copyright 2007 Asia
Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
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