[burmanet2-l] AP-Smugglers claim Bu

[dawnstar@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]

Subject: Re: [burmanet2-l] AP-Smugglers claim Burma Road

If anyone of you find this period of history interesting, as I do, you
wish to read, if not already having done so, a highly captivating and
very well documented book by the former State Department China expert,
John Paton DAvies, Jr 'Dragon by the Tail'; he was purged by the Dulles
CIA post war Cold war pro Chiang KMT bunch of drug dealing fools, and
you will find especially illuminating the conversations with Mao and
Chou En-lai, as well as Chennault and Stilwell; a bit like Kennan's two
volume history about how the US blew it in Soviet Russia during the
Lenin days, here, how the US blew it in China and gave us McCarthy and
Dulles and all the rest right through Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and today
Burma. Good reading. ds 

TIN KYI wrote:
> 
> Smugglers claim Burma Road
> Posted on 9/22/99, 09:21 AM CST. Email this story to a friend.
> Source: .
> Posted by: ShweInc NEWs
> 
> WWII route to China now lifeline to corrupt Myanmar's government
> 
> By Patrick McDowell / Associated Press
> 
> LASHIO, Myanmar -- In the early years of World War II, the dusty outpost of
> Lashio was a key junction on the Burma Road, the intravenous drip that fed
> Allied supplies to the beleaguered government of China.
> 
> The mountainous route in northeastern Myanmar retains a whiff of danger and
> mystery, but these days it's because the old road is one of the world's
> biggest smuggling routes.
> 
> The cargo moving up and down treacherous switchbacks and over rickety
> bridges in smoke-belching trucks is a lifeline for the bankrupt military
> regime of Myanmar, as Burma is now known. But it also is fanning ethnic
> tensions and feeding the world's drug habit.
> 
> "The border is completely wide open now," says Sterling Seagrave, who
> endured Japanese bombing raids five decades ago as a boy living along the
> road, when Burma was a British colony.
> 
> Myanmar is one of Asia's poorest nations, and commerce is badly needed. The
> country has been hammered by the region's economic crisis, which has choked
> off investment from its neighbors, and by Western sanctions supporting Nobel
> Peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi's persecuted pro-democracy opposition.
> 
> But the traffic also includes heroin and amphetamines from Southeast Asia's
> Golden Triangle region.
> 
> It goes to China's Yunnan province, where drug use has mushroomed in recent
> years, and elsewhere for transshipment to the United States and Europe.
> 
> >From overpopulated China come illegal immigrants seeking cheap land and
> opportunity in a relatively empty country. More innocuous traffic includes
> gems, teak, farm produce and raw materials heading to China and electrical
> goods, fuel and auto parts coming out.
> 
> This has never been an ordinary road.
> 
> Hacked out of the mountains by Nationalist Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek's
> forces in the late 1930s, it connected besieged China with a rail network
> and seaport in Rangoon after China's ports fell into Japanese hands.
> 
> The main junctions -- Rangoon, Mandalay, Lashio -- were taken by the
> Japanese in their steamroller victories after Pearl Harbor. Reopening a land
> route to China became America's objective for the rest of the war so Chiang
> could pin down a large part of the Japanese army.
> 
> Today's trucks are mostly rugged Japanese Hinos that don't look much
> different from models a half-century ago -- big-fendered, low-geared, goods
> piled above the cab and held down by a tarp. A dozen or more passengers
> might ride on top.
> 
> Trucks still miss turns, rolling into a ravine or teetering precariously on
> a cliff edge, front wheels hanging in space.
> 
> Wartime Americans described the road as a trail of corruption, where
> bribe-hungry officials would hold up convoys for weeks. A modern trucker,
> Wang Lee, says only the goods have changed.
> 
> Heading to Mandalay from the frontier, Wang, a border Chinese, is stopped at
> one of four customs checkpoints along the route. His Nissan diesel awaits
> inspection while he sips a soda outside a dusty gas station where hill-tribe
> girls sell freshly cut fruit.
> 
> Wang begins talking about how bribery and smuggling are the way of life on
> the road. In confirmation, the owner of the station slips him a payment for
> four drums of smuggled gasoline.
> 
> "This is a trafficking road," Wang says. "I've been doing this kind of work
> for 15 years and I have only one truck. If I was engaged in other kinds of
> activities -- narcotics, or people -- I'd have 10 or 20 trucks and be rich."
> 
> Pointing to mammoth customs docks across the road, Wang points out the big
> boys. Their trucks and shiny four-wheel-drive utility vehicles get the
> required five stamps -- narcotics, immigration, customs, police and
> forestry -- within an hour.
> 
> The rest -- trucks, cars, buses -- have to pile their goods on a siding,
> where they are slowly inspected. "Sometimes it takes a week when the
> checkpoints try to squeeze us," Wang says.
> 
> Part of the money is kicked upstairs to regional commanders, who need wealth
> and the patronage it can buy to improve their careers and get posted closer
> to the capital.
> 
> Western diplomats say Myanmar's cash-strapped government has reached deals
> with drug lords to invest part of their gains in roads and other
> infrastructure. For the regime, it's a form of development. Critics call it
> money laundering.