The BurmaNet News: April 20, 1998

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The BurmaNet News: April 20, 1998

Issue #987

Noted in Passing: ``The military will not hold onto power for long. Now is
the period when (we) need to build a strong foundation of democracy." -
SPDC Foreign Minister Ohn Gyaw (see REUTERS: MYANMAR SEES EVENTUAL RETURN
TO CIVILIAN RULE).

HEADLINES:
===========
REUTERS: MYANMAR SEES EVENTUAL RETURN TO CIVILIAN RULE 
NYT: WHERE OPIUM REIGNED, BURMESE CLAIM INROADS 
BBC: BURMA READY TO TAKE BACK ROHINGYA REFUGEES
NEWSWEEK: BURMA'S MEN OF GOLD
NEWSWEEK: TOUGH COLD TURKEY
NEWSWEEK: THE NEXT BIG THING IS YA BA
===========

REUTERS: MYANMAR SEES EVENTUAL RETURN TO CIVILIAN RULE 
17 April, 1998

DHAKA - Myanmar's military government would leave power and allow a return
to civilian rule once ``a strong constitution and strong foundation for
democracy'' were in place, Foreign Minister Ohn Gyaw said on Friday. 

``We are trying to create conditions for a disciplined democracy. We do not
want to create a democracy that will create some difficulties for our
people,'' he told reporters after the first round of talks with his
Bangladeshi counterpart, Abdus Samad Azad. Bangladeshi officials said the
Myanmar minister, who arrived in Dhaka on Thursday for a three-day visit,
would continue talks with Azad. 

Gyaw said elections would be held when a strong constitution was
``established.'' He gave no timeframe for the polls or for the return of
democracy. 

``The military will not hold onto power for long. Now is the period when
(we) need to build a strong foundation of democracy,'' he said. 

The National League for Democracy, headed by Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung
San Suu Kyi, won Myanmar's 1990 general elections by a landslide. 

But the military ignored the results of the election and has run the
country with an iron hand since. 

The military government, called the State Peace and Development Council,
has curbed her political activities and harassed opposition party members
with detentions and other means. 

Bangladeshi officials said the two ministers also discussed ways to resume
the repatriation of some 21,000 ``Rohingya'' Moslem refugees from camps in
Bangladesh. Their repatriation to Myanmar has been stalled since April, 1997. 

Some 250,000 Rohingyas fled to Bangladesh's southeastern Cox' Bazar region
in 1992, escaping alleged persecution and forced labour by Yangon's
military junta. 

Most have returned under supervision of the U.N. High Commissioner for
Refugees (UNHCR) following an agreement signed by Dhaka and Yangon in
September 1992. 

Gyaw said his visit aimed to enhance bilateral relations, promote trade and
commerce, and set up a joint-commission. 

When asked about the progress on refugee repatriation, the Bangladesh
minister said: ``Let us wait for further talks.'' 

Azad said expansion of trade and setting up of a joint-commission figured
prominently during the two-hour talks.

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

NEW YORK TIMES: WHERE OPIUM REIGNED, BURMESE CLAIM INROADS
19 April, 1998
By Christopher Wren

Ashio, Burma -- In the remote valleys and rugged mountains here in
northeastern Burma, opium offers more than a narcotic high. For years, it
has provided a livelihood for hill tribes who inhabit the northern expanse
of the Golden Triangle, the lush, lawless area of Southeast Asia that is
the source of much of the world's heroin.

Opium finances daily needs, from rice and cooking oil to assault rifles.
The rifles are used to wage rebellion and to defend the mule caravans
transporting the sticky, pungent opium to be refined into heroin for
American and European drug habits.

Burma produced an estimated 2,600 tons of opium last year, enough to make
more than 200 tons of heroin -- at least 60 percent of the world total. But
the drug trade is changing along Burma's porous frontiers with Thailand,
China and Laos, and one of the most startling shifts may be in the attitude
of the military junta that seized power in this country in 1988.

For years the junta tolerated opium trafficking as the price of its
cease-fires with insurgent ethnic groups. Now it says that it wants to
eradicate all opium within five years. To show what it has accomplished, it
recently allowed three American reporters into an opium-growing region
usually closed to visitors.

Some diplomats in Yangon, the capital, view the eradication claim
skeptically because land devoted to opium cultivation has doubled under the
junta's rule, and the country's mismanaged economy has grown to rely on
laundered drug profits.

The government says it has eradicated 41,000 acres of poppies, one-tenth of
the land under opium cultivation in Burma. "The crop eradication areas are
only small parts of the areas they do control," a Western diplomat said.
'They are window dressing."

Col. Gyaw Thien, the chief of Burma's counter-narcotics program, disagreed,
declaring that the government was being asked to solve a century-old
problem in two weeks without any help. "It's quite unfair," he said. "We
are making much more effective interdictions and seizures than we have in
the past."

Last year, police and army units reported seizing 1.5 tons of heroin,
compared with about half a ton in 1996, though their record seizures amount
to less than 1 percent of Burma's output. "This drug problem is not only
the problem of the United States," Gyaw Thien said. "It's our problem too.
We know that we cannot fight this alone."

The junta's new policy puts Washington in a quandary because the United
States cut off counter-narcotics aid to Burma after the coup in 1988.
Restoring such aid could undercut other American economic sanctions and
lend legitimacy to a dictatorship that stands accused of widespread abuse
of human rights.

"We think we can get rid of 60 percent of the heroin going into the U.S. in
12 months' time if the U.S. cooperates with us," said Hla Min, the deputy
director of the Office of Strategic Studies, a planning branch of military
intelligence.

A Western diplomat who watched the shift concluded: "What this government
wants to do is perpetuate itself in power. They know it's got a bad image.
They looked at drugs and found this is the one asset they have. They'd like
to use whatever they've done to improve their image and try to get
sanctions lifted."

The State Department acknowledges in its latest drug control report that it
has no evidence that Burma's government is trafficking in drugs on an
institutional level.

"However," the report said, "there are persistent and reliable reports that
officials, particularly army personnel posted in outlying areas, are
involved in the drug business."

The government denies this, citing the arrest of 11 army officers last
April for colluding with a heroin refining operation in northern Shan
state. The senior officer, a lieutenant colonel, was sent to prison for 25
years. It also deported Li Yunchun, a fugitive trafficker indicted in New
York, to Thailand, which handed him over to the United States.

But new traffickers, notably the Wa, a fierce hill people whose ancestors
hunted heads, have wrested control of the lucrative heroin business from
remnants of renegade Chinese Nationalist soldiers and rebel militias.

Nearly a million Wa straddle the border between China and Burma. Their
insurgent army has diversified from heroin into methamphetamines, powerful
synthetic stimulants that have saturated Thailand and since turned up in
Japan, Taiwan and Malaysia, Burmese and Western officials say. A Burmese
counter-narcotics official said that the Wa now make more money from
methamphetamines than from heroin and refine both drugs themselves using
chemicals smuggled in primarily from China.

Because of aggressive interdiction by the Thai police, the old trafficking
routes through the Golden Triangle are shifting from Thailand and into
China, or less often Laos and even northeastern India.  Some heroin still
moves by truck down from the Shan highlands market town of Lashio, through
lowland Mandalay to the port of Yangon, as Rangoon is now called.

Eradicating opium could help the military government's strategy of subduing
ethnic insurgents who traffic in opium to finance their wars of
independence.  Government troops cannot enter most Wa-controlled territory
without a battle.

With an army estimated at 15,000 to 20,000 men, the Wa have grown so
strong, acquiring surface-to-air missiles and modern communications
equipment, that government troops complain about feeling outgunned. Last
summer, a 30-man government patrol was wiped out when it ran into a Wa mule
caravan smuggling methamphetamine to Thailand.

"The Burmese would like nothing better than to do away with the drug
trade," another diplomat in Yangon said, "because it would take guns out of
the hands of these armies."

The government's creation of a handful of opium-free zones has upset local
farmers. "What we're talking about is really changing their life style,"
said Jorgen Kristensen, an official with the U.N. Drug Control Program,
which has introduced alternative development projects. "Poppy cultivation
is ingrained in their culture."

At Nam Tit, a Wa town about a half-hour's walk from the Chinese border, Zi
Zi Fa, a farmer in patched shirt and shorts, said that his grandfather and
father grew opium poppies. He earned about $650 for his own annual crop of
12 1/2 pounds of opium, which he did not need to take to market.  "When I
was growing poppies," he said, "the buyer came to me."

Since the government told him to grow soybeans instead, Zi said, he earns
one-tenth of what opium paid, not enough to feed 10 family members. "The
family is barely surviving," he said, echoing a complaint expressed by
opium farmers in Afghanistan and coca farmers in Colombia and Peru.

"If we did not grow poppies, our income would not last more than one or two
months," he said. 'In the high mountains, rice doesn't grow, and it's too
cold. The corn is fit only for the pigs."

In the nearby border town of Chin Shwe Haw, Kyan Ti Jy, a farmer from the
ethnic Chinese Kokang minority, said, "We earned more money growing
poppies, but our leader said to stop growing opium."  Kyan obediently
planted lichee trees and sugar cane. Now, he complained, "nobody's buying
sugar because there's no mill." Construction on a sugar refinery is not
expected before September.

With their incomes slashed by more than half, "the farmers are not very
happy," said a local official, Kyan Tin Wan.

"But the government is giving out rubber plants and lichee trees almost
free of charge, and free fertilizer," he said.

It will take at least three years for the lichee trees to bear fruit. In
the meantime, Kyan Tin Wan said, "large families who cannot stand it are
going out of designated opium-free areas to where the government cannot
touch them."

The official conceded that even farmers who gave up opium as a crop "still
might be growing a little bit here and there for medicinal purposes."

At his base in Lauk Kai, the Kokang political leader, Peng Jiasheng, said
it was hard for his people to stop growing opium.

"We admit there is poppy growing in this area to a certain extent, but not
the way we've been portrayed," he said. "It's not that the leaders are
buying opium and taking it down to the Golden Triangle. We're not involved
in that."

Before the Kokang concluded a cease-fire with the Burmese government in
1989, Peng trafficked in opium himself.

"When we were insurgents, we needed to expand our army and we needed
weapons and food," he said. "For that we needed to grow more poppies."

His troops did not cultivate opium, Peng said, but levied a 40 percent tax
on what local farmers produced. "Seventy percent of the people in this area
were supporting us financially for the insurgency," he explained. "But now
there's no more fighting and our troops are drastically reduced."  At the
height of the rebellion, he said, the Kokang and Wa could field 60,000
soldiers between them.  Now, he insisted, his troops have dwindled to 500.

"Today it's peaceful, so we don't need to grow poppies," the Kokang leader
said, waving a hand adorned with a heavy gold bracelet and gold rings. "If
my people can have their stomachs full and something appropriate to wear,
they are happy enough. They don't need anything more."

Taking the profit out of opium may be the toughest challenge because when
the leader of a drug operation quits, contenders jockey to replace him. For
years, Khun Sa and his narco-army dominated the heroin trade under the
guise of fighting for Shan self-determination. After some of his troops
mutinied, Khun Sa negotiated his surrender in January 1996 and lives
comfortably, but in poor health, under government observation in Yangon.

"We were fighting him for years," Hla Min of the Office of Strategic
Studies said, justifying the government's accommodation with Khun Sa. "We
were not gaining much ground because he was well equipped, well dug-in, and
the terrain was terrible. We were sacrificing too many casualties."

"Khun Sa is a walking encyclopedia regarding the drug issue," Colonel Hla
Min said. "Everything he knows, we know. But this is a multibillion-dollar
business."

The vacuum left by Khun Sa was soon filled by Wei Hsueh-kang, a Wa
commander who is said to have 7,000 troops protecting his heroin and
methamphetamine operation. "All information is that he's getting larger by
the day," said a Western official who follows narcotics matters.

For all the heroin they export to the United States and Europe, such
leaders do not tolerate its use in their own ranks. Khun Sa detoxified
errant soldiers in cages exposed to the blistering sun or in soggy holes in
the ground. While older Kokang people may use opium as medicine, Peng said,
heroin "is not medicine, so there's no excuse."

"Trading in heroin is a serious offense," he said. "We shoot the person."

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

BBC WORLD SERVICE: BURMA READY TO TAKE BACK ROHINGYA REFUGEES

The Burmese Foreign Minister, Ohn Gyaw, who is visiting Bangladesh, says
his country is ready to take back the remaining Burmese Muslim refugees -
known as the Rohingyas -- who are living in camps in southern Bangladesh,
but no date has been set for their repatriation. 

Mr Gyaw was speaking after talks on the refugee problem with his
Bangladeshi counterpart, Abdus Samad Azad, in Dhaka. 

The two foreign ministers also agreed to set up a joint trade commission. 

There are about twenty five thousand Burmese refugees left in Bangladesh --
many of them have been refusing  repatriation.

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

NEWSWEEK: BURMA'S MEN OF GOLD
20 April, 1998
By Tony Emerson

Rangoon cuts a deal with the opium warlords; peace in exchange for a share
of the nation's legal treasure. 

It is a game of spy versus spy, and both are tailing Lo Hsing Han. As the
former warlord steps into the Traders Hotel in Rangoon, he marches past a
Burmese military intelligence man trying vainly to look inconspicuous among
potted palms in the marble lobby. The Burmese agents who shadow Lo even in
his own hotel are there not so much to watch him, diplomats say, as to
protect him from his many enemies, including Western agents who suspect he
is still godfather of Burma's opium trade. Upstairs in a private dining
room, Lo says he knows he's being followed. He says he retired to
legitimate enterprises long ago, wagging his finger (and a diamond-studded
Rolex) for emphasis. "I don't care whether the whole world says I'm the
King of the Golden Triangle," says Lo, 64. "I challenge anyone to prove it.
If they can, I'll give them a reward of at least U.S. $5,000."

It is often hard to tell who is up and who down in Rangoon, a city of
palpable intrigue ruled by an Orwellian military government. Everyone
important here is watched, and no one is likely to get a clear grip on a
well-connected man like Lo Hsing Han. He is too valuable an asset to the
generals, who cut a deal with him in 1989. Lo persuaded fellow leaders of
his Kokang hill tribe to defect from the Burmese Communist Party, breaking
the back of the largest insurgency threatening military rule. 

Soon more than a dozen ethnic warlords had cut the same deal as Lo: peace
in exchange for immunity from prosecution and valuable government
concessions in timber, gold and gems. The warlords are now prospering as
tycoons. But for the military junta, it may prove a Faustian bargain: it
has gained control in the hinterlands, but the shadow of drug money now
hangs over Rangoon.

As quiet fell on the battlefields of the Golden Triangle, the poppy fields
flourished as never before. Proceeds of the opium trade began pouring into
Rangoon real estate as well as into roads, ports, bus lines, amusement
parks, even a casino in the northern jungle. One embassy in Rangoon
estimates that in the 1990s, the drug traffickers have invested more money
in Rangoon than they have made from the sale of heroin. In March, a report
by the U.S. State Department complained that Burma was not only the world's
chief supplier of heroin but also "systematically encouraged" money
laundering. Drug money, said the Americans, plays a "significant" role in
the national economy.

Burma is now fighting accusations that it has become a "narco-state." Early
this month, NEWSWEEK accepted an invitation from the government to join
other journalists and diplomats on a rare helicopter tour of "Pacified"
areas of the Golden Triangle, where even the Army dared not tread as
recently as a year ago. There, we saw Army regulars posted nervously
alongside the storied rebel armies, including boy soldiers of the fierce Wa
tribe. In villages of the Wa, Kokang and Kachin tribes, the
opium-trafficking headmen swore they were ready to become "mainstream"
businessmen and to press villagers to switch from opium to rubber, tea,
mango and other cash crops. 

All of them said they were eager participants in the junta campaign to rid
Burma of opium by the year 2000. In his home base at Lauk Kai, warlord Peng
Jiasheng, cited by the U. S. State Department as one of the top drug
traffickers in Burma, vowed to fight the "scourge" of heroin. Can he mean
it? "We have to ask how much of this is theater and how much of this is
real," says one in Rangoon. "If they are serious, why don't they arrest the
drug warlords?"

The reasons may be found in Rangoon, amid the mildewing British colonial
buildings and billboards threatening to "crush" foreign troublemakers. The
xenophobic junta has mishandled Asia's financial crisis, resigning itself
to what one diplomat calls "a period of self-reliance and hibernation." 

In December Burma shut its borders to trade, hoping to defend its falling
currency. Instead, it triggered a bout of hyperinflation; prices are now
rising by 19 percent a month. Rice exports have been banned to stave off
food shortages. Foreign investors are pulling out, leaving unfinished
hotels and a rubble-strewn lot outside the Traders. "Opium is the only
growth area left in the economy," says a Western diplomat in Rangoon. The
fear now: as the economy crumbles, the generals will become ever more
reliant on drug money.

Burma has an old tradition of farming revenue from the Golden Triangle.
Opium was brought to Burma by hill tribes migrating south from China and
later encouraged by British governors, who licensed opium dens to
supplement their funds from London.

After independence in 1948, Burma's northern reaches were occupied by
retreating Chinese nationalists, who were the first to commercialize the
opium trade and tax the hill tribes to finance their army. In response the
growers of Kokang, one of 145 ethnic groups in Burma, turned to the son of
a local farmer for protection. He was Lo Hsing Han.

At the time, Lo was a platoon commander under the local Saohpa, or headman.
(In this case, according to Burma scholar Bertil Lintner, actually a
headwoman: the pistol-toting lesbian "Opium Queen," Olive Yang.) Lo says he
started out by protecting Kokang drug caravans under legal license from the
Burmese government. Each caravan of six trucks carried roughly 32 tons of
opium from the Kokang hills to the Thai border, where the fishy-smelling
bricks of opium paste were exchanged for gold bars and cash -- hence the
name "Golden Triangle." "It was very, very good profit," says Lo's brother
and long-time chief of operations, Lo Sin Ming.

Lo became the model for the Golden Triangle warlords, using "protection
fees" to finance private armies. Many of these rebels claimed to be
fighting for freedom from Burma's increasingly oppressive socialist regime
-- and some actually were -- but Lo was fighting alongside it. By the early
1970s, U. S. officials were calling Lo the king of the opium trade. The
embarrassed Burmese regime lifted his opium license. Rather than abandon
the trade, Lo threw in his lot with a rebel army. Now he was an
internationally notorious fugitive from Burmese law. To hide his convoys,
Lo says, he switched to caravans of up to 1,000 mules with as many armed
guards -- a procession that stretched through the rugged hills for three
miles.

Lo did not survive as a fugitive for long. In 1973, he offered the United
States a remarkable deal: an end to the opium trade in exchange for
millions in subsidies for Kokang. He was lured to a Thai jungle rendezvous,
expecting to meet U.S. officials. It was a trick. Thai police grabbed Lo
and extradited him straight to Rangoon's Insein Prison, where he was held
on charges of insurrection against the state and violation of Burma's
"socialist economic law." But as a reward for his former services, Lo was
confined in a house with a garden -- far from the old dog kennels used for
dissidents. "I don't think a prisoner was ever treated better than me,"
says Lo.

The beleaguered regime was concerned less with opium than with 25 rebel
armies who occupied much of the countryside. In 1980, Burmese leader Khin
Nyunt released Lo from jail in exchange for a promise that he would work to
split the Communist Party. It took nearly a decade, but in April 1989, Lo
coaxed his old Kokang rival, Peng Jiasheng, to break with the communists;
and other ethnic factions soon followed. Lo had helped break the
insurgency, and became the first of the drug warlords to be welcomed into
the mainstream.

Now apparently a businessman, Lo founded the Asia World conglomerate in
1989. Starting from a small confectionery, his visible holdings have grown
to include real estate, roads, teak and gems, including a mining stake in
the northern "jade rush" town of Phakent -- said to harbor a 300-ton jade
boulder, buried so deep in the jungle it can't be moved. Run now by Lo's
eldest son Steven, Asia World holds shares in the treasures of Burma worth
an estimated $600 million, and Lo estimates his company's yearly profit at
"more than a million dollars." Col. Kyaw Thein, the junta's anti-drug czar,
says its all part of "market" reform of the old state-run economy: "Because
of what his father did for the country, if two people bid about the same
for a concession, we are happy to give the favor to Steven Lo."

Those favors have made Asia World a presence throughout Burma, including
Lo's old haunts in opium country. In Lashio, the starting point of his mule
caravans in the late 1970s, Lo still has a rambling home, and villagers
remember his generosity with a mixture of respect and awe. "People there
will do whatever he says. No one will mess with Lo Hsing Han," says a
Rangoon diplomat. Lo built the local Chinese temple, and in December his
son Steven finished repaving the old Burma Road between Lashio and China,
one of the main drug routes out of the Golden Triangle.

Asia World has also become the most prominent partner for foreigners
investing in Burma, landing more than 15 percent of all joint-venture
investment. This despite the fact that Steven Lo has been barred from
entering the United States on suspicion of drug trafficking, and at least
one other Western embassy has issued warnings to investors to steer clear
of Asia World. Western law-enforcement agencies have spent much time trying
to find direct evidence that Lo Hsing Han is still involved in the drug
trade, so far without turning up a "smoking gun," says a Western diplomat
with intimate knowledge of the Burmese drug scene. He adds that if Lo is
involved, it is not in trafficking, but in "investing and moving money" for
old allies in the trade.

Northeast of Lashio in a wide valley surrounded by poppy-covered hills,
Lo's former rival Peng Jiasheng is living in peaceful isolation in his old
redoubt at Lauk Kai. As peace spread through the Golden Triangle after
1989, poppy fields blossomed on old battlefields, and Burma's potential
opium yield quickly doubled to 2,500 metric tons. By last year, satellite
photos revealed that fields in Peng's territory were "lush" with poppy.
"Even the Burmese Army were stunned," says a Rangoon diplomat. Peng is said
to have seven wives, and his gold watch and fleet of fancy cars stand out
among the huts and water buffaloes. But he swore he had never refined
heroin, indeed that he has joined the drug war as only a warlord can: "We
have our own simple way of dealing with heroin traffickers," he said. "We
can just shoot the culprit."

Surrounded by bodyguards, Peng, who has been sentenced to death himself in
Thailand, said that most of his 7,000 soldiers are now working the fields.
Like ethnic leaders of the Wa and Kachin in nearby towns, Peng said his men
were busy ripping up poppy plants and planting soybeans, limes and other
cash crops. To help demonstrate his sincerity, the Army flew journalists to
Par Sin Kyaw, an opium village on a 5,200-foot mountaintop outside Lauk
Kai. There was a specially built helipad, and a reviewing stand where
diplomats watched villagers beat down their own poppy fields under the
watchful eye of Burmese and Kokang troops. There was one problem, said a
knowledgeable witness: the plants had already been drained of opium.

Is the military junta putting on a show to attract international aid? One
Rangoon diplomat dismisses crop eradication as "window dressing." But Burma
does have a solid incentive to halt the flow of heroin, the main source of
financing for its crazy quilt of ethnic armies. A top Western diplomat says
intelligence sources in the Golden Triangle confirm that Rangoon has made
real advances in wiping out poppy fields and seizing heroin shipments - no
matter how clumsy its public relations. (One drug warlord recently opened a
"Museum of Drug Suppression" deep in Shan state.) The only propaganda
battle Rangoon refuses to fight is against retired warlords. The generals
say they cannot go after these leaders, for fear that their ethnic armies
will return to the field and Burma will once again become the war-torn"
Bosnia of Asia."

So, without apology, Rangoon has become a haven for retired opium warlords
and their money. They are all over the capital, leaders of the Kokang, the
Palaung, and so on. Perhaps the most famous is Khun Sa, who took over as
King of the Golden Triangle in 1973, after Lo was jailed. When Khun Sa
finally surrendered to the Burmese military in 1996, he was welcomed by the
Rangoon generals as a "brother." Now he lives quite comfortably under heavy
armed guard in a Rangoon military compound, protected from the $2 million
bounty U.S. prosecutors have placed on his head. "What these guys fear, in
their paranoid little minds, is that the U. S. will send the Fifth Army in
to grab him," says a diplomat in Rangoon. "He is the most-wanted man in the
world, because of what he knows about drugs," says government spokesman Hla
Min. "Why should we give him up? We won the game, and he's our trophy."

Meanwhile, Khun Sa's family is slowly building a legitimate business empire
under various companies, including the Good Shan Brothers in Rangoon. The
family is involved in a bus line and a road project connecting Rangoon with
Mandalay. Khun Sa's eldest son has become governor of his old jungle
headquarters at Ho Mong, and is developing rock quarries and timber mills
there. Diplomats find it hard to believe the junta's claim that Khun Sa
started these businesses with the help of a $16 million government loan.
Not only is the regime broke, but Khun Sa's daughter is under investigation
in Hong Kong for allegedly laundering $34 million. A Western diplomat there
describes this as "the tip of the iceberg" of Khun Sa's fortune.

Even the wild Wa tribe is looking for business deals in Rangoon. Its
members gave up headhunting in the late 1960s and are now the leading drug
traffickers in Burma. Several Wa traffickers recently approached Western
embassies in Rangoon, asking for "help" to leave the drug trade, a request
widely read as a veiled extortion attempt. "I sat across from three of
these guys, and it was scary," says one envoy.  "They are criminals." The
heavily militarized Wa tribe had put money into downtown gift shops and the
Jade Garden Amusement Park while revolutionizing the business of the Golden
Triangle by diversifying into methamphetamines, the new drug scourge of Asia.

In Burma, the generals are always willing to forgive drug warlords who
"return to the legal fold." History will no doubt demonstrate that some
were real "freedom fighters," as most claim, but that doesn't mean they
will make responsible managers of Burma's economy. If nothing else, the
warlord tycoons are the most egregious case of the crony capitalism that
has brought Asia's financial system to its knees. Some warlords are even
trying to get into Rangoon banking, which would only entrench its growing
reputation as a money-laundering center. Cutting deals with the warlords
may buy peace; it won't buy prosperity, or the clean image the junta is
looking for.

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

NEWSWEEK: TOUGH COLD TURKEY
20 April 1998
By Tony Emerson

Hill tribes don't hug addicts; they toss them in a pit

Nhkum Yaw is the richest man in Kung Sa, deep in the roadless heart of the
Golden Triangle. He would be richer still if he didn't smoke so much of his
wealth. Last year, he produced four pounds of raw opium and smoked it all
himself. Of the 15 men in this thatched-hut town, 12 are addicts. 

They cluster around the Baptist church, and everyone cracks up when Nhkum
Yaw dismisses a few neighbors who claim a religious temperance. "That's
nonsense. They just haven't tried it," says Nhkum Yaw, 56, who has been
smoking since he was 15.	"I'll die if I stop."

Opium was part of life for hill tribes in northern Burma long before the
missionaries arrived a century ago. It is a ritual part of weddings and
ceremonies, a medical cureall, and so cheap here that many growers have
extraordinarily heavy habits (chart). "Our addicts are notorious," says Ba
Thaung, director of substance-abuse treatment at the Rangoon Psychiatric
Hospital. Among hill tribes, heavy drug use has inspired equally
heavy-handed methods of rehab. Ba Thaung calls it "cruel" cold turkey.

The Wa villages hold "rehab festivals," when the headman rounds up users in
a temple or school, sometimes at gunpoint. They are offered ever-smaller
doses of opium water over four days -- a rapid detox that kills some older
addicts, says Ba Thaung. Harsher still was the drug warlord Khun Sa, who
threw addicts in cages or into a pit in the ground. Toughest of all are the
Kachin, known to drop addicts in a riverside pit for four hours a day,
giving them only a spoon to bail themselves out. "They call it water
therapy," says Ba Thaung.

Opium was the only drug available in the Burmese hills until about 1970,
when traffickers opened the first refineries for heroin, which is far
stronger. As addiction problems grew, the government opened 30 treatment
centers around the country, only to find that addicts could stay clean upon
return to heroin-filled hometowns. 

The most notorious addicts are in the town of Phakent, a fast-money jade
mining center where an estimated 70 percent of the itinerant, mostly male
population are hooked. Ba Thaung worked there for five years and recorded a
90 percent relapse rate.

Even a hospital stay is relatively hard time in the more remote regions of
Burma. At a substance-abuse treatment clinic in Lashio, a major drug
trafficking center in Shan state, three young addicts in maroon pajamas sat
in a barren ward, with puckering masonry and bars on the windows. Two were
truckers who had begun "chasing the dragon" -- inhaling wisps of opium
smoke -- at the insidious suggestion of pushers who work the road from
Mandalay to China.

In fact, they said, most of the truckers are addicts. "They all say they
will never be back, but they always are," said the center's director.

Ba Thaung is now moving Burma's addiction treatment out of hospitals. He
calls it the "snowball method." He first approaches the village elders,
educating them about addiction. They identify all the users in town, and
the users identify the pushers. Addicts are all entered into rehab on the
same day, with counseling and follow-up, and "the pushers are rehabilitated
as well," says Ba Thaung. So far, this mass treatment has lowered relapse
rates to as little as 5 percent for users, he says. And the pushers? In one
town, says Ba Thaung, recovering addicts went to the home of a recalcitrant
pusher and burned it down. Now that's real tough love.

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NEWSWEEK: THE NEXT BIG THING IS YA BA
20 April 1998
By Tony Emerson in Namtit with Ron Moreau in Bangkok

Opium runners are moving into meth, the 'crazy drug'

The Burmese Army helicopter touches down in the village of Namtit and is
quickly surrounded by the boy soldiers of the Wa tribal army. This is a new
cease-fire zone on the northern edge of Wa territory, and the boys are on
alert. They maintain a floating circle around visiting journalists and eye
their military escorts warily. At the dusty town hall, village chief Lu
Shin Jia says he is cooperating with the military to eradicate opium.
Indeed, the surrounding fields look like a topographical map, lined by
curving rows of newly planted rubber trees. But south of Namtit, where the
Army still dares not tread, a new Wa drug king is introducing what may be
the real future of the Golden Triangle: methamphetamine.

Meth is the hot new narcotic of the opium warlords. At the end of l995, the
Wa diversified into meth, a potent upper that is far easier to make and
more profitable than heroin. The dominant drug traffickers in Burma, the Wa
are set up like a militarized corporation, with special divisions for
illicit trade in everything from timber to opium, and now meth. "It was a
natural business move for the Wa, like Warner Lambert moving from mouthwash
into deodorant," says a U. S. expert on drug smuggling. According to Col.
Hkam Awng of the Burmese national police, meth is now making "two or three
times more profit for the traffickers than heroin. The whole nature of the
Golden Triangle is changing, as traffickers realize heroin is not the future."

The new Wa enterprise poses a huge new challenge to authorities throughout
Asia. Last summer, 400 Wa soldiers running meth south out of the Golden
Triangle ran into a Burmese Army patrol of 30 and killed them all. The
confrontations are often violent, but Burmese seizures of meth pills have
risen from zero in 1995 to more than 5 million in each of the last two
years. They are having less success finding the hidden meth labs. Unlike
heroin, meth requires no heat, water, or weather-dependent crops to
manufacture, which means the labs are much harder to detect. 

Two men in a jungle hut can make 10,000 pills a day for about 10 cents
each, and sell them for 50 cents at the Thai border. "The profit margin is
truly frightening," says Hkam Awng.

The leading meth trafficker is a Wa commander named Wei Hsueh Kang. He was
quick to spot rising demand next door in Thailand, where Sorasit
Sangprasert of the Narcotics Control Board says meth is now "a much bigger
problem than heroin." Meth became popular first among low-wage laborers
trying to work a second job, then among everyone from truck drivers to
students. Thais call it the "horse drug," because the nine-hour high makes
you as hardworking as a horse. Police call it "Ya Ba," or "crazy drug." 

One Bangkok rehab center says it gets 100 calls a day from parents seeking
help for kids hooked on the colorful pills.

Now the telltale signature of Wa meth is spreading. The Wa often mark their
bags with offcolor pills -- say, two blues in a bag of 1,000 reds. At a
drug conference this month in Rangoon, experts said Wa meth had surfaced in
the last three to six months from Japan and Malaysia to China and, in a
lesser way, Vietnam. (The U. S. meth problem is North American-made.) One
diplomat said there have been reports of construction workers' shooting up
meth in Tachilek, a rowdy drug gateway from Burma into Thailand. Indeed,
meth seems to be emerging in many societies that are undergoing rapid
urbanization and seeing a growing market for "designer" drugs. 

Unfortunately, that now means virtually all of Asia  -- and portends a rich
future for Wa Narcotics, Inc.

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