THE SUNDAY TIMES: JUNTA FORCES FARMERS TO GROW OPIUM (LONDON) 10 May, 1998 By Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark Burma's military junta is evicting thousands of villagers from previously drug-free areas for refusing to transform their rice fields into poppy plantations as part of a United Nations-backed "drug control" programme. The regime has told its UN sponsors that it is moving villagers away from regions where drugs are being produced and uprooting the poppy fields left behind. However, an investigation by The Sunday Times and two independent human rights organisations, has found that the junta is secretly expanding the number of opium farms in these designated drug control areas. Video footage of burning poppy fields presented to the UN in support of funding applications for schemes worth millions of pounds has been faked. In interviews with dozens of farmers, soldiers and retired civil servants, in areas where the UN has been told there is no poppy cultivation, it emerged that the Burmese regime now controls vast networks of opium producing villages. In areas where the UN is funding eradication programmes, officials of the military government are running trafficking syndicates, which target addicts in Europe and Asia. Burma has now overtaken Afghanistan, which for many years supplied the majority of the world's heroin. While the Afghanis last year produced 123 tonnes of the drug, the military junta in Burma manufactured more than 250 metric tonnes, according to the US State Department's International Narcotics Control Strategy Report (published last month). Robin Cook, the foreign secretary, quoted in a forthcoming report on Burma's narco-economy by the South Asian Information Network (SAIN), said: "The failure of the regime to address this issue [the production of heroin] - indeed their apparent willingness to abet and profit from the drugs trade - deserves the strongest condemnation." The military government's abuse of its UN-aided drug control programme to expand rather than reduce heroin production first emerged in January. In the remote Arakan Yoma mountain range, in central Burma, 330 miles west of Rangoon, the army issued written orders to 5,000 villagers from Ngape Township. People were told to leave the area immediately, with the government publicly claiming that they were opium farmers who refused to destroy their crops. Many were sent to Burma's border with India. They told how they had been forced from their homes for refusing orders to grow opium after poppy farmers from other parts of Burma had been brought to their communities by the army. "We had never grown opium before but the soldiers said we had to plant poppies or lose our land," one said. A 34-year-old woman, who had left her home and possessions behind, said that only the opium farmers were left alone. "This was not a drug clearing scheme; the army hi-jacked our land to grow drugs." Many told how the army issued orders for villagers to grow a second, smaller crop. "We were told by the soldiers that they would film the burning of this area to show the foreigners that poppies were being destroyed," a 52-year-old man said. The main crop would be left untouched. The Arakan relocation was not an isolated incident. Refugees from Shan State, in the north east of Burma, where the UN has spent several million pounds on drug control programmes over the last three years, told how they were ordered back to areas previously cleared of poppies. "The army told us we had to cultivate opium again. If we refused, we were told we would have to pay compensation to the government which would also confiscate the land," a 45-year-old man told The Sunday Times. The orders were later publicised in the government's newspaper, which claimed that the opium was needed for "compounding indigenous medicine". However, villagers said that the use of opium for herbal compounds was insignificant and that all the opium was taken by soldiers. In Chin State, on the north west border with India, Burma's ruling State Peace and Development Council advised the UN that there was no opium production. But, according to retired police officers in the state's northern Tiddim Township, interviewed by Images Asia, a human rights organisation based in Thailand, video footage of villagers destroying the poppy fields had been faked. Officials from Burma's Central Drug Control Bureau, a UN-funded government department, had filmed the fields being weeded but claimed the footage showed farmers uprooting the plants. While the film was being shown to the UN in Rangoon, the army in Tiddim Township supervised poppy cultivation schemes. More than 15 acres of land in every village was set aside for the crop and each grower paid an annual licence of 10,000 kyat (£25) to the Drug Control Bureau and 5,000 kyat (£13) to the police. Each acre of land yielded six kilograms of opium paste sold for 90,000 kyat (£220). It takes the yield of 10 villages to produce more than 80 kilograms of pure heroin in hi-tech refineries, which would fetch £15 million on Britain's streets. It is alleged that Burmese army battalions now guard many of these chemical factories. Farmers and former couriers told Images Asia that six new refineries had recently opened on the banks of the Chindwin River, which runs parallel to Burma's border with India, in the neighbouring Sagaing Division. The British Chindits, an elite force of soldiers and Gurkhas, who forged it to fight the Japanese in World War Two, made the river famous. Today army bases, including the headquarters of the 52nd, 89th, 222nd, 228th, 235th regiments, have been established next to large heroin refineries. After refining, pure heroin is packaged under one of four brand names, Tigerhead, 555, Two Lions and Double UO Globe and transported by police officers and soldiers. One former army officer, living near the Indo-Burma border, told Images Asia that his superior had recently taken 35 kilograms of heroin in his car, which he sold for £500,000, at the Burmese border town of Tamu, near Manipur in north east India. Myo Min, a border trader, said he had seen many military officials transporting drugs. "Army officers and soldiers willingly participate in the drug trade and I saw high ranking military personnel buying and carrying opium and heroin. I have never seen them arrested." The South Asian Information Network, which has monitored the army's involvement in drug trafficking, also carried out interviews with traders and drivers on the Indo-Burma border, for a report to be published later this year. Many said they had been issued with military passes, signed by Khin Nyunt, one of the most powerful men in the junta. The authorisations were stuck to the windscreens of the vehicles used to transport drugs. The same stories emerged on the Thai-Burma border where a checkpoint guard, in eastern Shan State, told The Sunday Times how he stopped a trailer loaded with heroin and was shown a pass signed by Khin Nyunt. He phoned the general's office in Rangoon and was told to let the trailer pass as the drugs were allegedly being transported to a destruction centre. The load was never seen again. In Rangoon, the regime has created legislation to help launder the proceeds of drugs and introduced an investment scheme where Rangoon banks, in exchange for a 25 per cent fee called a "whitening tax", wash dubious money. According to the International Monetary Fund and the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, in 1996 there was £250 million of unexplained investment attracted by the scheme. The US State Department narcotics strategy report concluded that Burma's economy was now heavily reliant on drug profits: "There is reason to believe that the laundering of drug profits is having a substantial impact on the Burmese economy." The victims of the burgeoning narco-economy can be seen in the bamboo huts of villages in Chin, Shan, Kachin and Arakan States where opiate addiction is endemic and killing hundreds of thousands. Some addicts are so young they can barely lift their opium pipes. Aung Than was only seven, but spent much of the day intoxicated. In the house next door, the women of the Nhkum family were quietly mourning their three sons. The boys, aged 13, 17 and 21, friends of Aung Than, had all died of heroin overdoses. Death now came so frequently to Pang Sak village, sometimes twice a day, that it passed almost without note. The community, in northern Burma's Kachin State, had become known as the Village of Widows. In the last three years, all the male adults, including Aung Than's father, had died of drug addiction after families were ordered by the military to cultivate opium poppies instead of rice. Now the sons were following their fathers. The decimation of the community was recorded in a secret health report smuggled to Thailand: "There are drug addicts in every house here, all of the village boys from seven to 25-years old, and the older ones are already dead." In Pang Sak village, Aung Than was sick again. "I want to stop using the pipe but our fields are full of poppies, not rice, and the smoke makes my hunger go away," he said. ****************************************************************