BKK Post article may have been a pl

[strider@xxxxxxxxxxx]

Subject: BKK Post article may have been a plant

Earlier this week, the BKK Post ran an article in which a source claimed 
that Khun Sa and the Karen National Union had struck a deal on military 
cooperation.  I don't have the original of the article but if someone 
else here does, please post it.

Two things about the article struck me as odd when I read it.  First, it 
claimed that according to the terms of the agreement, the KNU would 
receive financial help in exchange for allowing safe passage of Khun Sa's 
heroin through their territory.  There are at least a few reasons for 
being suspicious of this claim.

First, the geography doesn't make sense.  Why would Khun Sa want to move 
heroin from Shan state across hundreds of kilometers of territory held by 
various Karenni groups and the Burmese army, only to send it on from 
Karen state.  The present system of sending it directly through Thailand 
has worked fine for more than twenty years.  (Despite massive shipments 
of heroin through Thailand every year for the last two decades, there has 
NEVER been a prosecution of a major trafficker.  A very rough estimate of 
the amount of heroin shipped through Thailand this year will be about 100 
tons and yet only about 1-2 tons will be seized.)  For twenty years, drug 
dealers have been successful at moving heroin through Thailand by paying 
off high ranking Thai political and military  officials (it was revealed 
in May that one MP had been indicted in the U.S. for shipping 47 tons of 
marijuana there, another had been refused a visa for suspicion of drug 
trafficking (heroin) and 17 present or former members of parliament were 
on a US watch list because of narcotics involvement.

Second, the Karen won't allow alcohol in their territory much less 
narcotics.  It is true that they are desperate right now, but I'm not 
sure they would ever be desparate enough to allow heroin through.  It 
just doesn't fit with their religious fundamentalism.  I could more 
easily see them staging a Waco-style last stand than surrendering or 
permitting heroin to pass through.

There is a certain logic to a Khun Sa-KNU cooperation, but it isn't to 
move heroin.  Khun Sa wants legitimacy and he doesn't want to fight it 
out with SLORC alone.  The KNU wants money to pay for their revolution.  
A KNU-Khun Sa alliance gives both sides what they want; Khun Sa gains a 
measure of respectability and keeps 4000-5000 KNU soldiers in the war.  
The KNU gets the money to keep fighting (they have lost most of their 
sources of revenue in the last few years).

The American government has been quick to warn Karens that cooperation 
with Khun Sa would not be in their interest, but given that 
the Americans have never given any help to the KNU, their warnings don't 
carry much weight.

My suspicion that the article was dodgy was heightened when it claimed 
that the supposed route for getting the heroin from Shan state down to 
Karen-held areas was the Salween River.  You can't navigate the Salween 
between the Karen and Shan areas.  Can not, c'aint, no way no how.  The 
reason Khun Sa has been able to hold out so long is that it is nearly 
impossible to cross the Salween, much less navigate it and any "source" 
who was close enough to know the terms of the Khun Sa-KNU deal would be 
aware of this.

I'll repost an article that I put up a few weeks ago in response to 
former-Sen. Tim Wirth's silly comment that the U.S. should reconsider 
anti-narcotics aid to Burma:




 /* ---------- "US Calls on Burma" ---------- */
Just a guess here but I suspect Wirth's motive is to drum up business for 
the DEA.  The DEA provided anti-narcotics aid to Rangoon for many years 
before it dawned on them that Rangoon was the problem, not the solution.
It is only fairly recently that the US has cut off aid and for a long 
time before that, you had a running fight between the DEA and the State 
Department over Burma.   State was saying "cut them off" while DEA was 
coaching Burma on how to stage drug-burning ceremonies so that Washington 
would see that they were doing something.

I'm a bit surprised to see that the State Dept. in the person of Tim 
Wirth has suddenly gotten dumb.  As for the argument that giving money to 
SLORC to fight drugs is effective, well, as the old saying goes, "that 
dog just won't hunt."

Here's something from Bertil Lintner on the past wisdom of U.S. drug 
policy on Burma:

 [From a conversation with a US narcotics official in Bangkok]
 He had suggested, apparently in all seriousness, that drugs leaving 
Burma via the southern Tenasserim coast in route for Malaysia and 
Singapore, were transported on bamboo rafts down the Salween River.  I 
remarked that this was surprising given that the river was far too 
hazardous to risk transporting ordinary goods, let alone a commodity as 
valuable as opium.  The key to success for any opium trader, I added, was 
to hold the few points at which it is possible to cross the Salween.  As 
far as commerce went, the river was navigable for only 150 kilometers 
upstream from its estuary at Moulmein on the Andaman Sea--or exactly as 
far as the government controls its banks.

 Evidently taken aback, the official then began interviewing me:

 "But what about the dry season?  Wouldn't it be easier then?"

 "It is even more dangerous then," I replied.  "You'd risk smashing a raft 
against rocks just beneath the surface."

 "But what about the river banks?  Surely, the traffickers can use the 
course of the river and send drugs along its banks."

 In deference to the niceties of diplomacy, I refrained from couching my 
answer in the terms I would have like:

 "Not unless you have especially trained mountain goats as pack animals 
and can direct them by remote control.  No sane person would attempt to 
walk along the banks of the Salween unless he were trying to set a 
long-distance rock-climbing record."

The encounter went to reflect much of the ignorance surrounding 
narcotics suppression activities in the area.  Foreign officials sat in 
air-conditioned offices in Bangkok and Rangoon with a little experience 
of, or feel for, local conditions.  Their information depended largely on 
official contacts with their host countries, who had their own axes to 
grind, and reports from local informers less interested in the War on 
Drugs than in making a quick dollar supplying dubious intelligence that 
foreigners had no means of cross-checking.  And on these uncertain 
foundations conclusions were reached and grand strategies drawn up.  
Little wonder that the volume of heroin flooding Southeast Asia, 
Australasian and the United States continued to grow.

>From "Land of Jade" (p 216-217)  
The reporting is Lintner's, the typos are my own contribution.

-Strider

*****************************************************

After checking with a usually well-informed source, the local official 
in Thailand with his own  axe to grind is allegedly Xuwicha Hiranprueck.  
Xuwicha is a close advisor to the Thai National Security Council chief 
and is associated with the current Thai move to pressure the ethnic 
groups to sign cease-fires with SLORC.  According to my source, Xuwicha's 
motive in linking  the KNU (and every other ethnic group) with Khun Sa is 
to convince the Americans that the opposition to the Rangoon regime is 
interested in drug money, not democracy.

Strider