The early October massacre of 13 Chinese barge crew on the Mekong River near
the tri-border of Thailand, Laos and Myanmar has thrust the lawless region's
problem of criminality and drug trafficking once again into brutal relief. The
killings underscored the failure of regional states to cooperate in
safeguarding river traffic despite repeated warning signs over recent years in
the shape of attacks on shipping, protection rackets and kidnap for ransom
incidents.
Embarrassingly for Thailand's government, already all but overwhelmed by a
national flood disaster, the latest killings were finally tied to a rogue unit
of the Royal Thai Army (RTA) apparently caught up in the web of corruption
spawned by
narcotic trafficking along the kingdom's northern border.
Exactly how Bangkok and Beijing settle a case which has received widespread
publicity - and prompted considerable popular anger in China - remains to be
seen. But on this occasion, as in the past, it is unlikely that efforts to
cobble together improved security cooperation in the form of joint river
patrols and intelligence exchanges will have much impact on either narcotics
trafficking or the rampant official corruption it encourages.
Even before the bodies of the dead Chinese boatmen had been retrieved from the
river, the fog of disinformation which swiftly descended on the circumstances
of the massacre suggested that clumsy efforts at a cover-up were already
underway. And predictably enough, Thai press reports dutifully quoting local
officials served to amplify the confusion rather than clarify it.
Initially the only undisputed facts to emerge were that on the afternoon of
October 5 the two Chinese barges, the Hua Ping carrying fuel oil and the Yu
Xing 8 carrying garlic and apples, were brought into the port of Chiang
Saen in Chiang Rai province just south of the Golden Triangle tri-border area
by Thai authorities.
On the deck of one vessel was the body of a man, later identified as a crew
member, who had been shot dead and was found with a Kalashnikov-type assault
rifle beside him. Found in sacks divided between both vessels was a shipment of
920,000 methamphetamine, or ya ba, tablets worth an estimated 46 million
baht (US$1.5 million).
Over the following days, the bodies of 12 other crew members, including two
female cooks, were found washed ashore or floating in the river. Most had been
blind-folded and gagged with duct tape, hand-cuffed and shot. By the time the
last body, that of Yang Deyi, captain of the Yuxing 8, was retrieved some 10
days after the attack, the international repercussions of the incident were all
too clear.
A delegation headed by Guo Shaochun, deputy director-general of the Department
of Consular Affairs in the Chinese Foreign Ministry, had already arrived in
Chiang Rai to join Chinese diplomats from Bangkok and Chiang Mai and assist the
Thai police in an investigation that cynical observers believed might otherwise
have proved inconclusive.
Significantly in the light of later developments, the first account of what had
occurred was floated by senior Thai officers of the RTA Third Army's Pha Muang
Task Force (PMTF), a front-line border security force tasked primarily with
stemming the flood of narcotics into the kingdom from Myanmar's Shan State.
According to this version of events, the barges had been hi-jacked and the crew
killed north of the Thai border where the river flows between Myanmar and Laos
by "drug smugglers" who were planning to use the vessels to smuggle drugs into
Thailand.
As they entered Thai waters around 1:30 pm on October 5, they were intercepted
by a PMTF unit "acting on a tip-off". A fire-fight reportedly lasting half an
hour between the PMTF and the smugglers erupted during which it appeared the
dead man on the deck had been shot and killed while all his associates escaped
overboard.
Leaps in logic
Bolstering this version of events was the person of Naw Kham, an already
notorious former Myanmar militia commander with a long history of drug
trafficking, extortion and river piracy - much of it directed against Chinese
vessels plying the Mekong. Operating between the tri-border and the Lao village
Xiang Kok to the north, the 51-year-old Shan bandit and his band of 30 to 50
hill-tribe gunmen have successfully evaded capture for years moving easily
between the remote Lao, Myanmar and Thai banks of the river seldom disturbed by
local security officials.
Even to a casual observer, let alone hardnosed Chinese investigators, this tale
suffered from two major flaws, however. First, it was never explained why the
pirates purportedly fleeing in the water - presumably with the rifles they had
used in the fire-fight, as these were not found on the barges - were neither
captured nor shot by Thai forces equipped with at least one speedboat.
Secondly, and more basically, it was unclear why drug smugglers with access to
their own speedboats needed to seize the barges in the first place and would
find it necessary to transport drugs into Thailand on much larger, slower and
more conspicuous Chinese vessels. The failure in broad daylight of Chinese
barges crewed by hijackers to dock at Chiang Saen might have been expected to
arouse the suspicion of Thai port authorities.
Interestingly, in the days that followed the widely-reported battle on the
river morphed slowly into a different account in which the two barges were
found drifting down river after a violent encounter much further north. On
October 11 the New York Times reported that China was suspending passenger and
cargo traffic on the river after the vessels were found "adrift" by Thai border
police carrying a single corpse and the narcotics.
On October 13 a ranking police officer in Chiang Saen interviewed by Asia Times
Online insisted emphatically that there had been no clash in Thai waters.
An alternative explanation of events that attempted to impose some logical
coherence on the known facts had river pirates targeting vessels which they
knew to be carrying narcotics south to Thailand, killing one armed crewman in a
fire-fight and summarily executing the rest. And, indeed, the possibility that
some - if not necessarily all - of the Chinese crew might have been less than
innocent actors in the drama has been a real one from the start.
Many Chinese barges moving south to Thailand from the Chinese river ports of Si
Mao or Jing Hong routinely dock at the Myanmar port of Sop Lui not far south of
the Chinese border where the Lui River flows into the Mekong. A straggling
village of ramshackle shops, restaurants and brothels, Sop Lui is situated at
the end of the road from Mong La, "capital" of Shan State's Special Region 4 in
Myanmar.
Its large concrete wharves constitute the only Mekong port serving not only
Special Region 4, administered by former insurgents of the National Democratic
Alliance Army (NDAA), but also the far larger Special Region 2 to the west run
by the United Wa State Army (UWSA). Sop Lui has grown as a key transit point
for narcotics shipped out of the two special regions, and a range of other
products - notably second-hand Japanese motor vehicles, fuel and, on occasion,
weapons - shipped in.
Once elements of the now-defunct Communist Party of Burma (CPB), the NDAA and
its ally the UWSA have maintained uneasy ceasefire agreements with Myanmar's
military since 1989. But in the last two years Myanmar government demands that
the former rebels subordinate their forces to central control and mounting
military tension have increased the strategic importance of access to the
Mekong. Sop Lui and the river today offer a far safer conduit for moving
narcotics south to Thailand than land routes which cross military front lines
and multiple Myanmar government road check points where bribes no longer
guarantee the cooperation of the past.
Extenuating circumstances
Nonetheless, the theory of a pirate attack on barges known to be carrying
narcotics still remained problematic. Not least, it failed to explain why the
pirates would have left some or all of the valuable shipment they knew to be on
board. Further, the cold-blooded slaughter of the entire crew, including women,
was both unnecessary and out of character: in the past Naw Kham's men have
preferred to release crews they have robbed or in the case of some Chinese take
them hostages for ransom.
This fog of disinformation and speculation was swept aside on October 28 when
nine PMTF soldiers - a major, a lieutenant and seven other-ranks - turned
themselves into Thai police in Chiang Rai and were charged with murder and
tampering with evidence. The nine have reportedly denied the charges but
statements from senior Thai government officials, notably Deputy Prime Minister
Chalerm Yubamrung, suggest the evidence against the soldiers is compelling.
For its part, China has said the case is "basically cracked". Chalerm has added
that the Thai soldiers were acting "on an individual basis" rather than in
their official military capacity. Meanwhile, a statement by RTA spokesman
Colonel Sansern Kaewkamnerd cautioning against "rushing to judge" the case was
also telling: he appeared to be pointing obliquely to extenuating circumstances
rather than dismissing the charges outright.
If the police charges are supported by evidence, then there are arguably only
two broad scenarios in which the PMTF units would have been operating in a
rogue capacity. Both very probably involve the troops - described significantly
by military sources as "long range patrol" special forces - operating in a
covert or semi-covert role beyond Thailand's borders.
This would be nothing new: it is hardly a secret that for at least a decade
Thai special forces have gathered intelligence and carried the war on drugs
into the lawless southern Shan State where the Myanmar military has either been
unable or unwilling to control and when necessary used force.
It is conceivable but highly unlikely that the unit seized two innocent Chinese
vessels at random, brought narcotics on board with them, silenced the crew and
then staged a "seizure" complete with one dead "smuggler." They might thus have
emerged covered both with credit and also able to claim a cash reward made to
counter-narcotics units based on the amount of narcotics seized. But the
pay-off would hardly have been worth the trouble and sheer brutality. A fake
seizure could have been staged on land at much less risk and with much less
bloodshed.
Almost certainly closer to the truth is a scenario in which the troops targeted
vessels which they knew on the basis of good intelligence to be carrying a
shipment of narcotics from Sop Lui into Thailand. By definition such accurate
intelligence would have come from a source working with the rogue RTA team with
inside knowledge of the shipment and an interest in betraying the cartel moving
it. Asia Times Online sources have heard several separate but unconfirmed
reports all of which have implicated a wife of senior UWSA commander and
indicted drugs-trafficker Wei Xuegang.
Complex relations
Given the complexity of the operation and the systematic brutality involved,
one Chiang Mai-based analyst familiar with drug trafficking operations on both
sides of the border was inclined to draw two conclusions. The first was that
the original shipment was actually far greater than the 920,000 tablets finally
retrieved at Chiang Saen and that the bulk of it was likely taken ashore either
on the Lao or Myanmar bank well north of the tri-border area.
What was left was a credible minimum for which the Thai troops could claim
credit and a cash reward in addition to a share of the loot. The second
conclusion was that the systematically conducted slaughter allegedly carried
out by the Thai troops was intended as a calculated and unmistakable message
from one criminal group to another as much as a means of disposing of
witnesses.
Because neither Thai nor Chinese police investigators are likely to release
their findings, such conclusions can only be speculative. Indeed, it remains a
decidedly open question whether the accused will ever face a court of law.
Chinese government calls for justice and prosecution of those found guilty have
now apparently come to rest at the door of the RTA, an institution long
accustomed to the benefits of impunity while carrying out its operations.
The soldiers are being held in army custody and RTA commander General Prayuth
Chan-ocha was quoted in the English-language Thai press saying the series of
events before and after the attacks was "highly complicated" and that "when use
of force is involved, there will be casualties." He said the Thai soldiers
reported to police investigators in "good faith" and that it was "not fair" to
report as fact that they had killed the men while the investigation was still
pending, according to the report.
The situation is further complicated by the probability that the PMTF team,
albeit in a rogue capacity, was operating beyond the nation's borders. In the
light of China's far weightier political, economic and security interests in
Thailand, it remains to be seen how hard Beijing will seek to push the RTA in
the pursuit of justice.
It would be unsurprising if, as the murders slip from the news, a quiet
out-of-court settlement sees Bangkok offering generous compensation payments to
the families of the dead, while the RTA is spared the embarrassment of rogue
soldiers being publicly arraigned. Such an arrangement would also spare China a
public airing of its dirty linen, including possible revelations that
Chinese-flagged vessels and at least some of their crew were involved in
shipping large quantities of narcotics into Thailand.
China has already moved fast to use the incident to demand its southern
neighbors - Thailand, Myanmar and Laos - cooperate more forcefully in
implementing practical measures to ensure security along the Mekong where
Sino-Thai trade was last year measured at 12 billion baht (US$387 million). On
October 31, following a meeting in Beijing, Chinese Public Security Minister
Meng Jianzhu announced all four countries would establish a mechanism for joint
river patrols and intelligence sharing.
It is possible that Chinese pressure and a flush of newfound resolve may
finally prompt the hunting down of Naw Kham, a figure who has made the mistake
of becoming a poster boy for lawlessness on the Mekong. For many local
officials in all three countries on the Golden Triangle tri-border, the Shan
river pirate may now be more of an embarrassing liability than a profitable
asset.
In the longer term, however, the goals announced in Beijing will inevitably be
constrained, if not buried, by three factors: entrenched drug-related official
corruption; long-standing cross-border suspicions; and, in the case of Myanmar
and Laos in particular, limited on-the-ground capacity.
China, the aggrieved party in the latest incident, will also need to confront a
far broader problem if it seriously seeks to reduce the violent criminality
along the Mekong: the future of Myanmar's Special Regions 2 and 4. Having
emerged in the 1990s as regional centers for industrial-scale narcotics
production and trafficking, these administrative black holes on China's
south-western border owe their continued survival to Beijing's insistence on
"border stability", which translates practically into facilitating cross-border
investments and sales of weapons, fuel and other strategic goods.
To this extent, the narcotics-driven criminality and corruption spreading south
along the Mekong and now impacting violently on Chinese citizens and commercial
interests are in large measure the bitter fruit of China's own foreign policy
decisions.
Michael Winchester is a journalist specializing in Southeast Asian
affairs.
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