Blood brothers, p.33
Blood Brothers, page 33
When Khun Sa was only 33, he decided to challenge the supremacy of the much more senior opium warlords, Guomindang generals Li Wenhuan and Duan Xiwen. In May 1967, he set out from the hills of northern Shan state with a large contingent of soldiers and a massive, 16 ton opium convoy, destined for an Khwan, a small Laotian lumber village across the Mekong River from Chiang Saen in Thailand. More traders joined his convoy, so by the time it reached the town of Kengtung, its single-file column of 500 men and 300 mules stretched along the ridges for almost 2 kilometres.118
The convoy crossed the Mekong River on 14 and 15 July—and the Guomindang rushed to intercept it. Hundreds of fighters came down from Tam Ngob and Mae Salong on the Thai-Burma border and, on 29 July, they attacked. Fierce fighting raged for several days, and wounded soldiers from both sides were treated in hospitals in Chiang Rai, where they often ended up in the same wards, chatting with each other and sharing cigarettes.119 The outcome of the battle is still somewhat obscure. General Ouane Rattikone, the commander-in-chief of the Royal Lao Army, ran several heroin refineries in the nearby Ban Houey Sai area at this time, and he sent the Lao air force to bomb the battle site. Officially, he cheated both Khun Sa and the Guomindang, and made off with the opium. Other sources say the opium had already been sold, and that Khun Sa subsequently made his first significant investment in Thailand.120 And, despite his ‘defeat’ at Ban Khwan, Khun Sa grew stronger and more powerful by the day. In 1969, he was eventually arrested by the Burmese government, not because of his involvement in the opium trade—which he was doing with official blessings anyway—but because he had been in touch with the very forces he was supposed to fight: the Shan rebels.
Khun Sa spent four years in gaol, until his men, who had gone underground following his arrest, managed to negotiate his release in exchange for two Soviet doctors, who had been kidnapped from the hospital in the Shan state capital of Taunggyi. Khun Sa returned to the Thai border, where he set up a new camp at Ban Hin Taek northwest of Chiang Rai, actually well inside Thailand, where a powerful new armed force emerged: the Shanland United Army, or the SUA. The force was dominated by ethnic Chinese opium merchants, and— somewhat ironically, given the battle-lines at Ban Khawn in 1967—ex-Guomindang officers. But by adding ‘Shan’ to the name of their army, they evidently hoped to gain favours from the closely related Thais, who refer to the Shans as ‘Thai Yai’, or ‘Big Thais’. The new base was developing fast—too fast—and it became an embarrassment for the Thais. In January 1982, the Thai army attacked Ban Hin Teak and drove Khun Sa back across the border into Burma. However, within a year, Khun Sa had not only rebuilt his shattered forces, he had also extended his influence right along almost the entire border between Thailand and Burma’s Shan state. He established a new headquarters at Homöng, until then a small village of about a dozen ramshackle bamboo huts. Homöng was soon transformed into a bustling town boasting well-stocked shops, spacious marketplaces and a neatly laid-out grid of roads, incuding street lights. The township’s 10 000 or so inhabitants lived in wooden and concrete houses amid fruit trees, manicured hedges and gardens adorned with bougainvillea and marigolds. Huge sign boards indicated where travel permits to Mae Hong Son across the border in Thailand were issued.121
Khun Sa also managed to capitalise on Shan nationalism, and recruited thousands of young Shans into his army, which he now called the Möng Tai Army, or the MTA (Möng Tai being Shan for Shan state). But the organisation, especially its drug business, remained firmly in the hands of ex-Guomindang officers and other ethnic Chinese. The chief of staff of both the SUA and its successor MTA was Zhang Suquan, who used the Shan name Sao Hpalang, or ‘General Thunder’. But he was actually a Manchurian who had joined the Guomindang during World War II. He was among the Guomindang Chinese who had retreated to Burma after Mao Zedong’s victory, and then evacuated to Taiwan in 1952. He served briefly as an intelligence officer in Korea, but returned to Southeast Asia in 1960 to join the CIA-supported Bataillon Spécial 111 in Laos. He later linked up with Khun Sa, and became his most able commander. Number two in the SUA/MTA’s military hierarchy was Liang Zhongyin, or ‘Leng Seün’ in Shan, a former Guomindang officer from Beijing.122 The drug business had become a far more serious affair in the 1960s and 1970s, as new refineries had been set up in the Golden Triangle where raw opium was processed into white, Number Four heroin, which is very addictive and far more dangerous.
To get away with his drug trafficking activities, Khun Sa played up not only Shan nationalism but also anti-communism, which struck a chord with the Thais and others. His army, and his ‘liberated area’ along the Thai–Burma border, was the buffer that blocked any attempts by the CPB to move south, and possibly link up with other Communist Parties in Southeast Asia. Although Khun Sa lived with a million-dollar reward on his head, courtesy of the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), he remained throughout his career the most unwanted wanted man in the world. His connections with high-ranking Thai and Burmese military officers were impeccable, and the Unification Church of South Korean religious maverick Moon Sun Myung contacted Khun Sa to establish churches inside his territory. This was turned down, the Shans being ardent Buddists and not Christians, but ‘missionaries’ from the Reverend Moon’s church became frequent visitors to Homöng. The related Sasakawa Peace Foundation, founded by former Japanese war criminal Ryoichi Sasakawa, also expressed interest in Khun Sa’s activities, maybe with the prospect of supporting educational projects in the area then under Khun Sa’s control. ‘Rich people’ in Taiwan supported a Chinese language school at Homöng.123 None of them seemed to be bothered by the fact that they were dealing with the word’s biggest opium and heroin dealer. But soon the days of the swashbuckling Khun Sa were to be over—though not because of any crackdown on his trafficking activities by international police agencies.
Burma’s annual opium production in the 1980s was in the order of 400–600 tonnes annually. In the late 1980s, however, production shot up to over 1000 tonnes and by 1995 it had increased to 2340 tonnes. Satellite imagery showed that the area under poppy cultivation increased from 92 300 hectares in 1987 to 142 700 in 1989 and 154 000 in 1995.124 The potential heroin output soared from 54 tonnes in 1987 to 166 tonnes in 1995, making drugs the impoverished and mismanaged country’s only growth industry.125 At the same time, a string of new heroin refineries were set up in Kokang and the Wa hills, conveniently located near the main growing areas in northern Burma and, equally important, close to the rapidly growing Chinese drug market and seemingly easier routes through Yunnan to the outside world.
In the early 1990s, the same laboratories in northern Burma began to produce methamphetamines. Khun Sa’s old network was effectively undermined, and it was further affected when, in December 1993, several divisions of government troops encircled Homöng, placing an effective stranglehold on his operations. In January 1996, Khun Sa eventually surrendered to the authorities in Rangoon without a fight. He abandoned Homöng, moved to the capital, and left his 15 000-man strong army to fend for itself. Many soldiers went home to their villages, while others continued to roam the hills of the Thai–Burmese border, some as bandits while others claimed to be fighting for some nationalist ideal. Zhang Suquan established himself as a prominent businessman in Rangoon, while Khun Sa went into retirement in the capital with three new wives, all teenage girls from the Shan hills.
These dramatic changes in the pattern of opium production and the location of heroin refineries, the introduction of new drug scourges and the opening of new smuggling routes have all emerged in the wake of two recent political events in Burma: the crushing of a popular uprising against military rule in 1988, and an unrelated mutiny the following year among the rank and file of the CPB.126
In August and September 1988, millions of people from virtually every town and major village across Burma took to the streets to demand an end to 26 years of stifling military rule and the restoration of democracy which existed before Ne Win’s army took over in a coup d’etat in 1962. The protests shook Burma’s military establishment, which responded fiercely. Thousands of people were gunned down as the army moved in to shore up a regime overwhelmed by popular protest. The crushing of the 1988 uprising was more dramatic and much bloodier than the better publicised events in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square a year later.
In the wake of the massacres in Rangoon and elsewhere in the country, more than 8000 pro-democracy activists fled the urban centres for the border areas near Thailand, where a multitude of ethnic insurgencies, not involved in the drug trade, were active. Significantly, the main drug gang operating along the border, Khun Sa and his private army, refused to shelter any dissidents who had fled the urban areas; his main interest was business, not to fight the government.
The Burmese military now feared a renewed, potentially dangerous insurgency along its frontiers: a possible alliance between the ethnic rebels and the pro-democracy activists from Rangoon and other towns and cities. But these Thai border-based groups—Karen, Mon, Karenni and Pa-O—were unable to provide the urban dissidents with more than a handful of weapons. None of the ethnic armies could match the strength of the CPB, whose 10 000 to 15 000 troops still controlled a vast base area along the Sino–Burmese border. Unlike the ethnic insurgents, the CPB also had vast quantities of arms and ammunition, which were supplied by China from 1968 to 1978. Although the aid had almost ceased by 1980, the CPB had enough munitions to last through at least ten years of guerrilla warfare against the central government in Rangoon.127
Despite government claims of a ‘communist conspiracy’ behind the 1988 uprising, there was at that time no linkage between the anti-totalitarian, pro-democracy movement in central Burma and the orthodox, Marxist-Leninist leadership of the CPB. However, given the strong desire for revenge for the bloody events of 1988, it is plausible to assume that the urban dissidents would have accepted arms from any source. Thus it became imperative for the new junta that had seized power on 18 September 1988—the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC)—to neutralise as many of the border insurgencies as possible, especially the CPB.
A situation which was potentially even more dangerous for the SLORC arose in March and April 1989 when the hill tribe rank-and-file of the CPB, led by the military commanders who also came from the various minorities in its northeastern base area, mutinied against the party’s ageing, mostly Burman political leadership. On 17 April 1989, ethnic Wa mutineers from the CPB’s army stormed party headquarters at Panghsang on the Yunnan frontier. The old leaders and their families—about 300 people—escaped to China while the former CPB army split along ethnic lines and formed four different, regional resistance armies. The biggest was the United Wa State Army, or the UWSA, but another powerful faction maintained control over the hills north of Kengtung in easternmost Shan state. This group was led by Lin Mingxian (Sai Lin) and Zhang Zhiming (Kyi Myint), two former Red Guards from Yunnan who had joined the CPB as volunteers during the Cultural Revolution and stayed.
Suddenly there was no longer any communist insurgency in Burma, only ethnic rebels, and the SLORC worried about potential collaboration between these four new, well-armed forces in the northeast and the ethnic minority groups along the Thai border, as well as the urban dissidents who had taken refuge there. The ethnic rebels sent a delegation from the Thai border to Panghsang to negotiate with the CPB mutineers soon after the breakup of the old party—but the authorities in Rangoon reacted faster, with more determination, and with much more to offer than the ethnic rebels. Within weeks of the CPB mutiny, the chief of Burma’s military intelligence, Major-General (now Lieutenant-General) Khin Nyunt, helicoptered up to the border areas to meet personally with the leaders of the mutiny.
Step by step, alliances of convenience were forged between Burma’s military authorities and various groups of mutineers. In exchange for promises not to attack government forces and to sever ties with other rebel groups, the CPB mutineers were granted unofficial permission to engage in any kind of business to sustain themselves—which, in Burma’s remote and underdeveloped hill areas, inevitably meant opium production. Rangoon also promised to launch a ‘border-development programme’ in the former CPB areas, and the United Nations and its various agencies were invited to help fund those projects.
The success in striking those deals with the ex-CPB forces was largely due to the efforts of Lo Hsing-han, a Kokang Chinese ex-warlord who acted as an intermediary with the mutineers. Lo, another former KKY commander who controlled the drug trade before Khun Sa took over, had been arrested in 1973 and sentenced to death. But Rangoon had been farsighted enough not to execute Lo, despite the death sentence against him; that would have been tantamount to destroying a useful political tool. He was released during a general amnesty in 1980 and given two million Kyats in Burmese currency to build a military camp at the so-called ‘Salween Village’ in the Nampawng area southwest of Lashio. This became the base for his own private militia.128
But it was several years before Lo Hsing-han regained his former strength and prominence. The 1989 mutiny within the CPB came at the right time, and on 20–21 March 1989, only a week after the first uprising in the CPB’s Northern Bureau headquarters at Möng Ko, a small town on the Sino-Burmese border opposite Mangshi in Yunnan, Lo Hsing-han paid his first visit to his native Kokang area, which had been under CPB control since 1968. This visit paved the way for Khin Nyunt’s first meetings with the mutineers—and the remarkable ceasefire agreements which were struck between Burma’s military government and thousands of former insurgents. Another intermediary who helped initiate contacts between the CPB mutineers in Kokang and the government in Rangoon was Olive Yang, the old warlady who had been instrumental in building up the opium trade in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
The CPB mutiny also provided Lo with a golden opportunity to rebuild his former drug empire, which he had lost to Khun Sa more than fifteen years earlier. Apart from being a local home-guard commander, Lo had until the mutiny been little more than a small-scale entrepreneur, running bus companies, video parlours and liquor franchises. Since the CPB mutiny, and his role as a mediator between the government and the former CPB forces, he and his son Steven Law have grown to become two of Burma’s most prominent businessmen with interests in the hotel industry, transport, road construction, timber, gems, and the import and export of various legal commodities. The evidence may be circumstantial, but it is beyond doubt that the initial capital for their legitimate businesses must have come from the drug trade; there is simply no other possible source, and the timing of their rise from obscurity to prominence seems far more than a coincidence.
Within a year of the CPB mutiny, intelligence sources were able to locate at least seventeen new heroin refineries in Kokang and adjacent areas, six in the Wa Hills and two on Lin Mingxian’s area north of Kengtung, where the town of Möng La opposite Daluo in Yunnan developed into one of the most important drug-running centres in the country. The ceasefires had enabled the CPB not only to rapidly increase poppy production, but also to bring in chemicals, mainly acetic anhydrite—which is needed to convert raw opium into heroin—by truck from India. The heroin trade took off with a speed that caught almost every observer of the Southeast Asia drug scene by surprise.
Ironically, at a time when almost the entire population of Burma had turned against the regime, scores of former insurgents rallied behind the ruling military, lured by lucrative business opportunities and unofficial permission to run drugs with impunity. With the collapse of the communist insurgency in 1989, several smaller ethnic armies also gave in and signed a formal ceasefire deal with Rangoon in February 1994.
The threat from the border areas was thwarted and the regime was safe, but the consequences for the country—and the outside world— have been disastrous. Enormous quantities of heroin, and now also methamphetamines, are pouring out of Burma in all directions, providing incomes for criminals way beyond the country’s own borders. Furthermore, what began as alliances of convenience between a beleaguered government and various political and ethnic insurgents in Burma has over the past three years been compounded by a new, totally unexpected regional crisis: the Asian economic meltdown. Private companies and banks may be faltering all over East Asia and unemployment is on the rise. But the drug trade, it seems, is the only really lucrative business that is left in Burma and elsewhere in a crisis-hit region. The inevitable outcome is that the drug trade will continue to grow in magnitude and importance, despite international criticism and efforts to curb the menace.
In April 1999, the UWSA and the Burmese junta, now renamed the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC), decided to invite a group of journalists to attend the 10th anniversary celebrations of the CPB mutiny and the subsequent ceasefire agreement between the rebels and the government. The foreign visitors were taken first to Möng La, and then to UWSA headquarters at Panghsang, where they were introduced to Möng La commander Lin Mingxian and Wa leader Pao Yuqiang. The purpose of the trip was to show the foreigners that great headway had been made in the war on drugs. Officially, they were eradicating drugs, not dealing in them. According to Reuters, whose reporter was present at the occasion, Lin and Pao denied any involvement in the drug trade, and claimed that ‘our consciences are clear’.129
