Burma -- or Myanmar, more formally -- makes the Western news pages mostly for
its repression of the struggling democracy movement led by Nobel peace
laureate Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, who is continually harassed and was recently
physically attacked while trying to address her followers. But those who dare
to take a serious approach to drug eradication are likely to end up in
deadlier trouble with the ruling dictatorship, known as the State Law and
Order Restoration Council, or SLORC, which has incorporated the booming heroin
trade into the permanent economy of the country.
Consider the case of U Saw Lu, a revered leader in the mountainous
poppy-growing region of the Wa territory, one of many ethnic regions in Burma.
Lu, a Wa prince and chairman of the United Wa State Anti-Narcotics and
Development Organization, has waged a risky opium eradication campaign on
behalf of his people since the SLORC seized power in a 1988 coup.
In January 1992, after U Saw Lu informed the U.S. Drug Enforcement
Administration about the drug trafficking activities of a regional SLORC
intelligence chief and a local drug warlord, he found himself face to face
with a torture squad. According to D.E.A. "Sensitive" e-mail, "he was held
upside down for 56 days with 220 current attached to one of his favorite
appendages." A doctor who remained present through the torture sessions
revived Lu when he passed out. Urine was poured on his face and he was beaten
with chains as he lay near death next to a freshly dug grave. His life was
spared after Wa leaders threatened military action during a meeting with
SLORC's head of military intelligence, Gen. Khin Nyunt.
"There were terrible scars all over his body after the torture," said Benjamin
Min, a former SLORC official from Rangoon, who quit the dictatorship and
joined Lu in his war against drugs. "He had internal injuries and he needed
medical attention."
Maj. Than Aye, the intelligence officer Lu had told the D.E.A. about,
supervised the torture sessions. The drug shipment Aye had been overseeing was
on its way to one of the world's most notorious drug kingpins, Lo Hsing Han,
destined to become a key business partner of Burma's emerging
narco-dictatorship. Major Aye has since been promoted to a high-level
government position by the ruling council.
According to Benjamin Min, Lu continued to work on opium eradication although
he was warned during his torture to terminate any relationship with the D.E.A.
In 1993, Lu gave D.E.A. special agent Richard Horn a document titled "The
Bondage of Opium: The Agony of the Wa People, a Proposal and Plea."
In his plea, Lu outlined specific steps that were needed to promote opium
eradication among the Wa farmers, who provide 80 percent of Burma's opium
crop. The Wa, an ethnic minority of 1 million, live in a remote area of
Burma's Shan State where there are no roads, no educational system, no medical
clinics and electricity for less than 10 percent of families. Even though the
Wa farmers grow one of the globe's most sought-after crops, they remain among
the world's poorest peoples. Lu knew that any hope of change had to include a
serious plan for crop substitution. "Like the heroin addicts that result from
the opium, we too are in bondage. We are searching for help to break that
bondage," he wrote in his proposal to the D.E.A.
Communications between the D.E.A.'s Rangoon office and higher officials in
Washington reveal that agent Horn had every intention of working with the Wa
people to implement Lu's proposal. But for reasons that remain unclear, the
Central Intelligence Agency and the State Department had other ideas. D.E.A.
Sensitive e-mails state that former C.I.A. chief of station Arthur Brown
"destroyed this project in one swift move." According to the e-mails, Brown
delivered an early version of the Wa proposal -- signed by Lu -- to SLORC
military intelligence officer Col. Kyaw Thein. When Thein threatened to pick
up Lu once more and teach him a lesson in respect, Horn was able to intervene
temporarily. In Horn's view, the C.I.A. destroyed a unique opportunity for a
dramatic drug eradication program in the poppy fields of the world's biggest
heroin producer. (Horn, now a D.E.A. group supervisor in New Orleans, is suing
the C.I.A., claiming it illegally surveilled his residence in Rangoon to gain
information about his plans, which the C.I.A. went on to foil.)
In September 1993, Horn was forced out of the country by the State Department
under pressure from the C.I.A. The plans of the Wa prince and his chief
deputy, Benjamin Min, were crushed. A year later, Min risked his life to take
the Wa Proposal and Plea to policy-makers in Washington. Before he left, the
SLORC hatched a series of unsuccessful assassination plots. In his sworn
testimony to the Immigration and Naturalization Service, which won him asylum
in the United States, Min states, "Their aim was to assassinate the Wa
leaders, specifically U Saw Lu and myself as his chief deputy."
Dirty Laundry
Burma has more than doubled its illicit drug exports since the SLORC takeover
in 1988. The U.S. Embassy in Rangoon reports that the area used for poppy
cultivation in Burma increased by two-thirds between 1987 and 1990. At a
United Nations Drug Control Program (U.N.D.C.P.) regional conference in
November 1993, French and U.S. satellite surveys showed an explosion of poppy
growing in areas directly under SLORC control.
The U.N.D.C.P. also reported at the U.N.-sponsored Heads of Narcotics Law
Enforcement Agencies international meeting this November that the Asian heroin
trade reaps $63 billion in profits annually. Burma is by far the largest
exporter in the region, providing more than 50 percent of the world's supply.
This booming heroin trade has sent a flood of narco-dollars into Rangoon. "All
normal economic activities, if you can call anything in Burma normal, are
instruments of drug money laundering," says François Casanier, research
analyst with Geopolitical Drugwatch in Paris. "And no drug operation in Burma
can be run without the SLORC." A March 1996 Narcotics Report on Burma by the
State Department points out that the country's "underdeveloped banking system
and lack of enforcement against money laundering have created a business and
investment environment conducive to the use of drug-related proceeds in
legitimate commerce." A study by the International Monetary Fund cites large
expenditures unaccounted for by the Burmese government: Despite the fact that
Burma's foreign exchange reserves for 1991 through 1993 were only
approximately $300 million, the SLORC purchased arms valued at $1.2 billion
during the period.
According to a 1995 report on Burma's drug trade, the Australian Parliament
Committee of Foreign Affairs, Defense and Trade heard testimony that Burma's
"narcotics trade was protected at the highest level of the Government" and
that the SLORC's involvement occurs "on an individual basis for personal
profit, covering areas of responsibility for transport, protection and
patronage; and as a matter of policy, either explicit or covert, in order to
raise government revenue."
The integration of narco-dollars into the national economy is further
highlighted by a new economic report from the U.S. Embassy in Rangoon.
Released in July, the "Country Commercial Guide" states that at least 50
percent of Burma's economy is unaccounted for and extralegal. "Exports of
opiates alone appear to be worth about as much as all legal exports," the
report says. The eighty-eight-page document is based on the SLORC's own
economic data. It goes on to say that investments in infrastructure and hotels
are coming from major opiate-growing and opiate-exporting organizations and
from those with close ties to these organizations. "Barriers between the
opiates sector and the legal economy appear to have weakened in recent years,
a trend that may have accelerated in the last few months," it explains.
A four-year investigation conducted by intelligence analyst Casanier and a
team of researchers found that Burma's national company Myanmar Oil and Gas
Enterprise (MOGE) was "the main channel for laundering the revenues of heroin
produced and exported under the control of the Burmese army." In a business
deal signed with the French oil giant Total in 1992, and later joined by
Unocal, MOGE received a payment of $15 million. "Despite the fact that MOGE
has no assets besides the limited installments of its foreign partners and
makes no profit, and that the Burmese state never had the capacity to allocate
any currency credit to MOGE, the Singapore bank accounts of this company have
seen the transfer of hundreds of millions of US dollars," reports Casanier.
According to a confidential MOGE file reviewed by the investigators, funds
exceeding $60 million and originating from Burma's most renowned drug lord,
Khun Sa, were channeled through the company. "Drug money is irrigating every
economic activity in Burma," Casanier says, "and big foreign partners are also
seen by the SLORC as big shields for money laundering."
Astonishingly, drug money is actually solicited by Burma's state-controlled
banks. The national bank in Rangoon openly provides money-laundering services,
turning drug money into clean money for a 40 percent cut. Occasionally
official announcements run in the state-controlled press promoting specials at
a reduced charge of 25 percent, no questions asked. Bertil Lintner, a noted
authority on Burma's drug trade, says there is a private banking boom in
Rangoon based on the influx of narco-dollars.
Father and Son: A Drug Legacy
The SLORC's close relationship with Burma's most powerful drug traffickers was
revealed to the world at this past spring's wedding celebration of
entrepreneur Steven Law, son of legendary drug lord Lo Hsing Han, who as of
1994 controlled the most heavily armed drug-trafficking organization in
Southeast Asia. It is doubtful that anyone attending this lavish affair was
thinking about the torture suffered by U Saw Lu for trying to impede Han's
drug trade back in 1992. The family's guest of honor was Hotels and Tourism
Minister Lieut. Gen. Kyaw Ba, whose presence, along with three other SLORC
ministers and four Cabinet ministers, lent strong political overtones to the
celebration. Other well-known traffickers were also in attendance. The event
received significant exposure in the New Light of Myanmar, the
state-controlled paper.
Lo Hsing Han's drug links to top levels of the SLORC are well documented. A
memo from the Thai Government's Office of Narcotics Control Board names the
SLORC's military intelligence chief, Gen. Khin Nyunt, as one "supporter." It
goes on to say that in February 1993, Lo Hsing Han was granted the "privilege
from Brig. Gen. Khin Nyunt to smuggle heroin from the Kokang group to Tachilek
[on the Thai border] without interception."
Steven Law is the managing director of Asia World Company Limited, a trading
and development firm in Rangoon whose chairman is his father, Lo Hsing Han.
Founded in 1992, Asia World reports its "authorized capital" to have been $40
million, and it has since invested an estimated $200 million in construction
projects around Rangoon. In a joint venture with the SLORC, Law's company was
given a twenty-five-year contract in April for a new wharf at Yangon Port,
which handles more than 90 percent of Burma's exports. With the SLORC's
blessings, one of the world's biggest heroin traffickers will thus soon own
and operate a port sending ships loaded with cargo to the United States and
countries around the world. (While Steven Law is being honored in Burma, he
has been forbidden entrance into the United States due to "suspicion of
involvement in narcotics trafficking," according to a State Department
official who asked not to be named.)
'Our Own Blood Brethren'
The SLORC's budding relationship with the recently "surrendered" Khun Sa, the
world's most wanted heroin smuggler, was by all accounts a leap forward in the
junta's solidification of the narco-dictatorship. In January of this year, the
SLORC ceremoniously welcomed Khun Sa and his associates into Rangoon as "our
own blood brethren." Intelligence chief Khin Nyunt said in a speech that "we
will look after them well on humanitarian grounds and for the sake of national
spirit." Drug expert Lintner sums up the reality of the situation: "Khun Sa's
'surrender' has brought the last warlord out of the jungles and into Rangoon
-- where he, like everybody else these days, can continue his business.
Millions of dollars have been transferred from bank accounts abroad to Rangoon
since Khun Sa settled there."
The deal for Khun Sa's new alliance with the SLORC was negotiated by the
SLORC's Defense Commander Gen. Maung Aye and Khun Sa's uncle in Rangoon in
December 1995. It was highly fitting that the powerful hard-liner Maung Aye
should serve as negotiator. In his previous post as head of the Eastern
Command, the area in which Khun Sa maintained his drug operations, numerous
sources report that Maung Aye was on Khun Sa's payroll for allowing drug
operations to continue unimpeded. He has since been promoted to Vice Chairman,
the second most powerful position in the SLORC, and is expected to succeed the
Chairman, Gen. Than Shwe, when he retires.
This past spring, Khun Sa was given a commercial bus concession from Rangoon
into Shan State, the location of his drug empire along the China border. His
third son, Sam Seun, is investing $20 million in the development of a
forty-four-acre plot that was presented as a gift to Khun Sa by the SLORC at
the time of their deal. As reported by the Bangkok Post, the tourist facility,
situated along the Thai border, will include a gambling casino, large hotel
and "other forms of entertainment." Thai officials are worried about an
increase in drug trafficking and money laundering from Khun Sa's family
enterprise.
In previous years, the SLORC had claimed it could not crack down on drugs due
to Khun Sa's control of Shan State, and that his surrender would result in a
substantial reduction in drug exports. "On the contrary, there will be more
opium," Khun Sa mused before securing his deal, knowing that it would give the
SLORC access to his refineries in Shan State. Banpot Piamdee, head of the
Northern Narcotics Prevention and Suppression Centre in Thailand, and
international narcotics agents confirmed that Khun Sa's surrender has done
nothing to stem the flow of heroin out of Burma. In fact, the State
Department's annual opium survey shows that this year's harvest was 9 percent
larger than last year's. Winston Lord, Assistant Secretary of State for East
Asia and the Pacific, called the SLORC's new partnership with Khun Sa a
"defeat for the control of drugs in all our countries."
The Shan Herald Agency for News reported on August 2 that heroin refineries in
the jungles of Khun Sa's territory, owned by two of the drug lord's followers,
had stopped functioning for two months when the Burmese occupied the area at
the time of Khun Sa's departure for Rangoon. However, refinery operators were
given the green light by SLORC troops in mid-March and are back in full swing,
"enjoying more freedom than before." The Bangkok Post reported on August 21
that "Rangoon has officially allowed former Mong Tai Army soldiers [Khun Sa's
army] and Shan People at Ho Mong [Khun Sa's former headquarters] to grow opium
poppies to ease poverty in the area."
Along with Lo Hsing Han and Khun Sa, other ethnic drug traffickers have also
benefited from good relationships with the Rangoon junta, according to this
spring's State Department Narcotics Report. Following a list of the names of
eight top traffickers from the Shan, Kachin and Wa areas, the report points
out that the SLORC has given these individuals "significant political
legitimacy" by referring to them as "leaders of national races." Several of
them have even been handpicked to help write the nation's new Constitution. It
is hardly surprising that the SLORC refused a U.S. offer of $2 million to
extradite Khun Sa to stand trial here. (Khun Sa was indicted in a U.S. federal
court in December 1989 on charges of smuggling more than $350 million worth of
heroin into the United States between 1986 and 1988.)
Heroin, Vegetables and Cigarettes
Outside of Rangoon, SLORC local commanders and their brigades carry out
policies that actively promote the expansion of poppy growing. Payoffs,
kickbacks and extortion by the military in connection with opium growing and
drug transport are factors of daily life for most villagers. Due to cease-fire
agreements signed with fifteen ethnic minorities since 1989, the SLORC army
now has full access to every border in Burma and control of border checkpoints
for the first time.
Geopolitical Drugwatch researcher Casanier says that SLORC army officials
extort "taxes" from impoverished opium growers to supplement their meager
salaries. This monthly, per-acre extortion forces villagers to continue
farming opium simply to be able to meet the tax quota, thereby keeping them
dependent on the cash crop. If villagers do not deliver, their livestock is
confiscated, family members are held for ransom or they are taken away and
used as forced labor on infrastructure projects. The less lucky ones, usually
the village headmen, are arrested and tortured.
SLORC Minister for Hotels and Tourism Lieut. Gen. Kyaw Ba, the guest of honor
at Steven Law's wedding, became rich from drug payoffs, according to several
sources, when he served as Northern Commander in Kachin State prior to his
promotion to the SLORC. Like many military commanders, he was the beneficiary
of a portion of the opium taxes and bribes that filter up from battalions and
the payoffs that come down from drug lords. "Khun Sa [has] paid 500,000 kyat
[$5,000] a month since 1992 to one general who was commanding this region,"
one officer of his army in Shan State told Reuters.
Loong Kyong, a 45-year-old Shan farmer who fled to Thailand, told human rights
investigators this past May that Burmese soldiers actually encourage rice
farmers to substitute opium for their rice crop. "The reason the Burmese say
not to grow rice is that if you grow rice you have to give some to the rebel
groups, and to others, and you have to get your rice milled," he said. "So
they say just grow opium and you can easily get money and buy your rice. The
military will buy the opium."
All over Burma, rural communities are succumbing to the supplies of cheap
heroin distributed unchecked in their villages. "Drug users and retail drug
dealers can increasingly be found everywhere," reports the Shan Herald Agency
for News. "Amphetamines and heroin are being bought and sold like vegetables
from roadside peddlers." Rangoon and Mandalay, Burma's second-largest city,
are also facing heroin epidemics.
"Only since the 1988 SLORC takeover have chemicals needed to refine the purest
grades of heroin become available in Burma's most remote areas," states a drug
eradication proposal presented by the people of Wa State to the International
Conference on Drugs in Portugal in March. "Local militia groups, formerly
opposed to the government and long-linked to the heroin trade, now do business
freely through SLORC-controlled frontier areas." The Australian Parliament
Committee of Foreign Affairs was told last year that "opium is warehoused at
Burmese military bases, while trucks transporting narcotics are sometimes
escorted by military vehicles to avoid inspection en route."
In Burma's northernmost Kachin State, things have also taken a turn for the
worse. Three years before the Kachin signed a cease-fire agreement with the
SLORC in 1994, Kachin leaders had mounted an "Opium Free State" campaign that
brought a drastic reduction in poppy cultivation to parts of their territory.
The 1996 report "Current Status of Drug Eradication in Kachin State" by the
Kachin Independence Organization claims a "dramatic... resurgence of poppy
cultivation and opium production in areas that were previously considered to
be 90 per cent contained."
Benjamin Min, formerly with the SLORC Ministry of Mines, and independent human
rights investigators describe the devastating impact of drugs in the jade
mines of the remote Kachin State. Managers of the SLORC-owned mines, some in
joint ventures with Chinese businessmen, are giving their workers the option
of receiving compensation in hard drugs rather than cash. Up to 200,000
miners, who travel from their villages out of desperation for work, can be
found in one mine where drugs are cheap and shooting galleries service
hundreds with one needle. Min reports that two-thirds of the 100,000 workers
at Hpakant Jade Mine, owned entirely by the SLORC, have chosen to be paid by
drugs rather than cash. And the only way large shipments of illegal substances
can find their way into Kachin State is through SLORC-controlled gates. More
than 90 percent of the addicts in the region are H.I.V. positive, according to
a U.N. report.
Kachin leaders and independent analysts believe that drugs are used as a tacit
tool of control by the military to pacify the Kachin population. "In the
Kachin people's minds, the heroin tragedy is a form of cultural genocide for
eliminating large portions of a volatile minority that has strong sentiments
against the government," stated a U.S. human rights investigator who has
managed to penetrate the restricted areas. Michael Jala Maran, executive
director of the Pan Kachin Development Society, returned to Thailand in
September from a distressful visit to Kachin State. "The AIDS situation is a
complete disaster," he said. "I'd call it the result of the deliberate
politics of heroin visited on the Kachin people since the nefarious
cease-fire."
Needle sharing, a proliferation of brothels, a dearth of public education and
virtually no medical care have created an explosion in the number of AIDS
cases, with dangerous implications for the region. The U.N. reports that 60-70
percent of IV drug users in Burma are H.I.V. positive. (Even the SLORC
acknowledges that there are more than 400,000 H.I.V.-positive people in
Burma.) The World Health Organization figure for the overall number of addicts
is close to 500,000, or 1 percent of the population, but other experts say
that a more realistic figure is 2-4 percent. Millions of migrants are pouring
out of Burma into neighboring Thailand, China and India, carrying H.I.V. with
them. The Southeast Asian Information Network points to the dramatic
correlation between the heroin routes out of Burma and the rise of the AIDS
epidemic in the country's neighbors. The highest rates of H.I.V. infection in
both China and India lie right at their border with Burma.
There is a direct correlation between the rise in heroin production in Burma
and a resurgence of heroin use in the past five years in the United States.
Government figures show that the volume of heroin imported into this country,
and likewise heroin consumption, has doubled since the mid-eighties. The
amount of Burmese heroin sold in New York City has tripled since 1989,
according to Jane's Intelligence Review. The March State Department report and
interviews with U.S. officials indicate that more than 60 percent of heroin
seized in the United States comes from Burma.
Madeleine Albright, U.S. ambassador to the U.N., recently described Burma as
closely resembling the Orwell novel 1984. "The authorities there are among the
most repressive and intrusive on earth," she said. "The rule of law so
ardently desired elsewhere has here been perverted, for there is no connection
between justice and law." Yet this is a story that goes beyond the usual realm
of human rights: Burma's ruling junta appears willing to addict an entire
nation to drugs, both by setting up a long-term financial dependency on the
heroin trade and by fostering a massive upsurge in drug usage. And the
enormous financial payout from the SLORC's pro-drug policies helps the
narco-dictatorship secure its hold on power against the struggling democracy
movement.
Meanwhile, the heroin pipeline from Burma to the United States is opened up
full blast, and mainlining has become trendy among U.S. youth. San Francisco
Police Sergeant John Murphy said in July that buying heroin in his city is "as
easy as buying a pack of cigarettes."
Dennis Bernstein, an associate editor with Pacific News Service, is
co-producer of Flashpoints at KPFA-FM in Berkeley, California. Leslie Kean, a
writer based in Mill Valley, California, is co-author of Burma's Revolution of
the Spirit: The Struggle for Democratic Freedom and Dignity (Aperture). This
article was written with the support of the Fund for Investigative Journalism.