Kings come and go but

Kings come and go but 'princes' stay

Drugs

Branding 'kings of opium' to prominent personalities has not helped the cause against drugs in Burma, said experts at a conference held last week in Amsterdam. 

The drug trade, according to Adrian Cowell, who had filmed highly acclaimed documentaries on Shan drugs, including The Unknown War (1964-65), and Opium Warlords (1972-73), is highly 'cellular and flexible', not unlike its political parent. "For the State Department and the DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration), who had to build up a picture at 3rd hand, it is understandable that this cellular character should not have been apparent," he allowed. 

Even with Gen Li Wenhuan of the Kuomintang's Third Army, once dubbed the 'Mr Big of Opium', "the business was more a trading alliance like the European Hanseatic League..", because "To begin with, the majority on any convoy was owned by independent merchants. Less than half was actually bought with KMT capital, or had been collected as KMT taxes. For their protection the merchants paid the KMT 15% or 200 kyat per viss (1.6 kg) of opium. Gen Li also charged for selling and refining opium at his camp at Tamngop. In essence, the KMT's role was that of a security and travel service for independent merchant adventures.. (B)usiness initiative was in multiple hands.. Thus, on a single convoy, there were many consignments of opium, each the work of a separate coalition of sub-contractors. Not only was each coalition unlikely to be affected by the arrest of another, but within coalitions, individuals were equally important." 

Thus when Li was pressured by the United States thought he Thai government in 1972 to abandon his business, what he did was simply to instruct his units to merge their identity with their allies. 

A year later, when Law Sit Han (Law Hsinghan), who had been described as 'The King of Opium' and 'Asia's most wanted criminal', was arrested, he headlines claimed victory over opium. But what actually happened was as Law's army broke up, "the merchants had as little trouble in moving to the Shan United Army of Khun Sa as they had in transferring from the KMT. The trade continued uneffected." 

The result was not surprising. "Overall the State Department admitted that the Burmese never ever captured as much as 1% of traffic in any year." 

But as Khun Sa, the new 'King of Opium', emerged as a growing threat, the Burmese responded by applying, "for the umpteenth time", the old principle: Neutralize one Shan through the opposition of another, by persuading the Kokang, Wa and Eastern Kengtung armies to desert the Communists in 1989 in return for the right to trade drugs. After his surrender, the remaining merchants and their operators moved over to the Wa and their allies. 

"Today, the Wa, in their turn, have become too powerful," he said. 

With regards to the solution to what he termed as 'Opium Anarchy', he reminded his listeners, "The only time the opium trade has been completely wiped out at a single stroke was in 1951 when the Chinese Communists replaced 4 decades of incessant warfare and corruption, just as in Burma, with a completely new system of great promise,". 

"Let's hope that that very determined lady can do the same, but with a little more care for the addicts and the farmers", he concluded. 

The Drugs and Conflict in Burma (Myanmar) Conference was held on 14-15 December by Transnational Institute and Burma Centrum Nederlands. It was participated, on the Burma side, by Chao Tzang Yawnghwe, Aung Moe Zaw, Daniel Aung and others. 

For the full report, please see attachment. 

OPIUM ANARCHY

The Shan Opium Trade and the War on Drugs 1960s-1990s

When Tom Kramer invited me to give this talk on the Shan Opium Trade and the War on Drugs from the 1960s to the 1990s, he ended by asking if I could give some recommendations for the future. Well, by the end of this talk, I hope you will understand why that is a little like asking a blind man to drive through Rome during the rush hour.

When you are operating with guerrillas you remain alive only if they actively want to keep you alive - if they provide enough protection to prevent you from being ambushed, assassinated or kidnapped, especially if there's a price on your head. You are, therefore, absolutely dependent on your protectors, and that - not surprisingly - really concentrates your mind on trying to understand them. Of course, for most of the time we were with the Shan guerrillas you could have said that my state of mind was one of total bewilderment. But, very gradually, I began to perceive certain patterns which I believe helped me understand the very unusual situation we found ourselves in - a situation which I called 'opium anarchy'.

As a film unit, we were taken into Shan State by 3 different guerrilla armies which wanted to project their message through international television. The first journey was during the opium cultivating season of 1964-5 when the Shan National Army took Chris Menges and myself on a five month march that made a complete circle through the poppy growing mountains which surround the Kengtung valley. 

The second journey lasted 16 months in 1972-3 when the Shan State Army tried to capture the opium convoys west of the River Salween, and then acquired a virtual monopoly of the traffic when the Ka Kwa Ye home-guard deserted to their side. First they took us to besiege the KMT base of Bang Pi, and then we went north, through the centre of Shan State, to near Tangyan and the great KMT base of Loi Tse. We finally returned marching down the mountains west of the Hsipaw-Laikha road to Ho Mong. 

In the late 1970s we visited the bases of the Shan United Army of Khun Sa where two of the main opium routes reached Thailand, in the east at Mahintek and in the west at Ho Mong. Finally, in the 1990s, Ned Johnson and I spent quite a lot of time with Khun Sa's Mong Tai Army in the area they controlled south of the River Salween, and once we crossed the Salween to travel into the area around the old KMT base of Bang Pi. What all this means is that we travelled in much of the area controlled by Shan guerrillas, but have no first hand knowledge of the Wa, Kokang or Kachin dominated areas of Shan State.

During these journeys the guerrillas were our primary source of information with all the limitations of bias this implies. On the other hand, we were often living in the same house as the guerrilla commander who hour by hour received radio messages from outlying units and spies. And some very genial commanders provided us with a broad picture of the opium traffic through the extremely professional eyes of its principal protectors or predators - depending on whether the guerrillas were, at that time, defending or attacking the convoys.

From these journeys I got the impression that there were two principal forces operating in Shan politics. One a national, unifying force playing across the whole country. The other a fragmenting, regional force operating through molecular local units of extreme volatility, adapting surprisingly successfully to pressure from outside.

OPIUM POLITICS

When the first British embassy climbed into the Shan plateau in 1885 carrying a somewhat eccentric present of a gramophone and only 2 records for the Sawbwa of Hsenwi, what they encountered was over 30 small princedoms. Usually, the core of the princedom was sited in a rice-growing valley surrounded by mountains inhabited by hill people. At different times, most of the sawbwas in these valleys seemed to be at war with the sawbwas across these mountains. During their wars the hill peoples along the mountains would shift their allegiance from one side to another. The ruling class also increased the instability through the princely custom of having many wives and, therefore, sons. When a son succeeded his father as Prince, he often tried to kill his brothers because they were potential rivals. So they frequently fled to neighbouring states, and this ensured a constant supply of usurper-stepbrothers returning from exile at the head of armies provided by enemy princes. 

What the British encountered in the 19th Century, therefore, was a very fluid mosaic remarkably similar to the anarchic guerrilla situation we found ourselves in during the 1960s and 1970s. And my deduction was that this similarity was not irrelevant - that this volatile condition did not result from a breakdown of the system, but was the reason for its survival, and so the key to its understanding. 

This volatile view of Shan society is not particularly helpful when applied to the frozen politics of the colonial era or the democratic period that followed. But after the coup d'etat in 1962, everything went back into the traditional melting pot. The revolutionaries moved out of the towns and universities, which had been the centres of nationalism and democratic politics, and raised the flag of revolt in regional nuclei, using existing feudal machinery. For instance, in the princedoms of Kokang and Mong Lern, the ex-feudal police simply became the revolutionary army and were led by the prince's brother and son. Even groups that had supra-regional aspirations, such as the Num Sik Han (the first revolutionary group) and the Shan National Army, received their initial funding from the prince of Kengtung. And, of course, the revolution was largely financed by levying the sawbwa's traditional opium tax of 10%.

It was to these regionally based guerrilla units that the university students fled in order to fight for democracy and nationalism. They became political advisers to strong men like Bo Mong and Sao Noie and gave the groups nationalistic titles, for instance, 'Shan State Independence Army' or "Shan State Progress Party', and manifestos somewhat reminiscent of Fidel Castro or Mao Tse Tung. Occasionally, they even summoned all the regional groups to revolutionary parliaments to discuss national objectives. But the realities of guerrilla warfare, its dependence on local taxes and regional loyalties, invariably drove them apart. In a land of small rice valleys with poor transportation, it is virtually impossible to collect enough food for a large body of men for more than a short period of time. In recent Shan history, a standing army concentrated in one place has usually only been made possible by a supply of rice trucked from Burma, China or Thailand - for instance, Khun Sa's base at Ho Mong was close to the Thai border.

What was perhaps more unexpected was that the Burmese campaign against the revolution should also adjust to this feudal, regional pattern. In 1964, we were with the guerrillas when the Burmese attack dissipated into an endless game of hide and seek with the guerrillas. But the Burmese grasped the situation quickly and switched their policy. Loosely, their approach can be summarised as follows: "Attack seldom succeeds because its hard to pin down enough Shan revolutionaries to attack; but one Shan can usually be neutralized through the opposition of another."

In 1963, only one year after the coup d'etat, the government announced that any revolutionary force that chose to change sides, and become a Ka Kwa Ye, or home-guard militia on the government side would be allowed to retain its arms and local authority. And, much more important, it would also receive 'travel permits' - a euphemism for permission to export opium.

Many revolutionary guerrilla forces took advantage of this offer and the home-guard became as notably regional and feudal in character as the revolutionaries. The home-guard of Vingngun and Sao Hin Sao Hpa were simply the old princely armies led by the prince. Khun Sa, whose uncle was the Myosar of Loi Maw, and Sao Hser Noom, son of the prince of Mong Lern changed - with their troops - from revolutionary to home-guard and back again in less than half a dozen years. And in two cases the Burmese can even be said to have employed the old princely stepson-usurper principle. Law Sit Han was let out of jail in 1964 to persuade his friends in the army of the Prince of Kokang to desert to the Burmese. They did - with most of the Prince's guns and gold.

So successful was the Ka Kwa Ye-home-guard policy that by 1972 over 90% of the opium trade was back in the hands of the home-guard. The revolution had been neutralised. But at the same time the Burmese Military Intelligence Office in Taunggyi, which controlled the Ka Kwa Ye, was also re-learning another traditional maxim which the guerrillas often laughed about: "A Shan vassal", they would say, "is almost as much trouble as a Shan enemy."

The Burmese discovered that many home-guard units were selling arms to the revolutionaries, and were paying them protection money not to attack their opium convoys. In addition, the towns were being flooded by contraband consumer goods brought back by returning home-guard convoys, which undermined the entire credibility of Ne Win's austere socialist regime. It was a powerful reminder that, though fluid in its response to the pressures of outside powers, the Shan system usually seems to work to the detriment of the outsider

In February 1973, the Burmese government reversed its policy. They cancelled the legal device of 'movement orders' which made the opium trade possible, and ordered all the home-guard units to surrender their arms. Soon, almost all, had deserted the towns for the mountains to make alliances with the revolutionaries. Completely unexpectedly, the Shan State Army used the opportunity to unite most of the regional groups of Shan State, under Law Sit Han who had the biggest home-guard army, into a coalition to sell the country's opium crop to the United States government for burning. And this only collapsed when the DEA induced the Thais to invite Law Sit Han to negotiate over the opium deal and then handed him over to the Burmese to be sentenced to death. After such a cynical demonstration of the lack of Western interest, group after group began to go over to the Communists.

At this many outside observers began to say that the Shans were too unpredictable to take seriously. In a single decade, many groups had passed from being revolutionaries, to home-guard, to negotiating with the Americans, and, finally, to Communism. Yet if you take into account the very dangerous political situation the Shans were in, their behaviour was not illogical. The advantage of a molecular political system is that the smallness of the units allows it to respond to outside pressure with the minimum of dislocation. For example, Cambodia had a very similar system of regional armies and feudal politics under Prince Sihanouk, and what his deposition and the subsequent polarization of Cambodia under the Americans produced was a bloodbath - exactly what the Shans avoided.

Unlike most other countries in Asia, most farmers in the Shan part of Shan State own their own land and have enough to live on in times of peace. They have, therefore, much less incentive than most Asians to become Communists, and during our time in Shan State, we never came across any pressure in the countryside in favour of Communism. The process which produced the Communist expansion in the 1970s was, in fact, more typical of Shan politics than of Communism. And this was illustrated when Pung Kya Shern joined the Communist Party of Burma. He was one of the officers who remained loyal to the Prince of Kokang when Law Sit Han persuaded most of his army to desert in 1964. Trapped by Law Sit Han and the Burmese against the River Salween with a small number of troops, Pung Kya Shern vowed never to surrender. He swam the Salween, fled to China for guns, and returning in 1968 gradually re-conquered the whole of Kokang. This was the Burmese Communist Party's first established foothold outside the Central Burman valley. Yet no friend of Pung Kya Shern that I have met has suggested that he really understood what Communism was about.

From Kokang, the Communists took their next step south, moving into Wa State by providing arms to Moh Leh and a group in Chorramong who were in trouble because they were being attacked by both the Burmese and local rivals. Over the next 2 to 3 years, these feudal groups helped the Communists spread through southern Wa state offering arms to each military force. Repeated in Kengtung - with Kun Min's force in Mong Yang and the Petkang group in the west - who the communists were winning over were, not the farming people, but regional, military units. 

In the case of the Shan State Army - which in 1972 had taken us into their country precisely in the hope of finding some alternative to joining the Communists by negotiating with the Americans - a majority of their officers voted to join the Burmese Communist Party after Law Sit Han was betrayed. But it is significant that a right wing group with 200 soldiers was allowed to march away to establish itself close to the Thai border, thus facilitating a possible later desertion from the Communists. And this device of a left-right split was to be repeated amongst the Pa-O and the Karenni. 

To sum up, under constant pressure from much stronger neighbours, the Shans have perfected, over the centuries, a chameleon-like process of adjustment to the realities of military and political power. Their acceptance of Communism by a molecular chain reaction rippling through a score of regional groups was remarkably without the bloodshed that accompanied the same transition in most of South-East Asia. And the advantage of an adaptation that does not damage the system, is that an equal and opposite adaptation is always possible in the future - which is exactly what would happen when Kokang, the Wa and the SSA deserted the Communists later on. This was the uniquely fluid political framework in which the Shan opium trade grew and flourished.

THE SHAN OPIUM TRADE

It is hardly a surprise, therefore, that the opium trade developed as cellular and flexible as its political parent. Even during the KMT's classic era of the 1960s - when convoys of a thousand mules, escorted by hundreds of soldiers, travelled down the great chain of forts, according to orders radioed from the headquarters of General Li Wen Huan - the 'Mr. Big of Opium' - the business was more a trading alliance like the European Hanseatic League, than the multi-national it has often been made out to be.

To begin with, the majority of the opium on any convoy was owned by independent merchants. Less than half was actually bought with KMT capital, or had been collected as KMT taxes. For their protection the merchants paid the KMT 15% or 200 kyatts per viss of opium. (A viss is 3.6lbs). General Li also charged for selling and refining opium at his camp at Tamngop. In essence, the KMT's role was that of a security and travel service for independent merchant adventurers. 

This was to be important in the attacks of the future because it meant business initiative was in multiple hands. The merchants' opium was usually bought from small peddlers who travelled through the markets and villages buying from the farmers. The collected product was then stored in home-guard barracks in Tangyan and Lashio, transported by mules and muleteers hired from specialist contractors, and insured by other merchants taking up part of the capital. Thus, on a single convoy, there were many consignments of opium, each the work of a separate coalition of sub-contractors. Not only was each coalition unlikely to be affected by the arrest of another, but within coalitions, individuals were equally independent.

A similar system of sub-contracting soldiers from homeguard armies also operated in the military side of the business. For instance, in 1973 we heard of a case in which 70 soldiers rented from one group were provided with 70 carbines rented from another. 

For the State Department and the DEA, who had to build up a picture at 3rd hand, it is understandable that this cellular character should not have been apparent. But, in February 1972, some months after President Nixon had announced his War on Drugs, the State Department took its first step against the Shan traffic. They put pressure on General Prapass, Chief of Staff and Deputy Prime Minister of Thailand, to force General Li, to abandon the trade. Li agreed for $1 million - ostensibly as a payment for the public burning of 26 tons of opium which we later heard was, of course, heavily diluted with crushed beans. Li then 'abandoned' the narcotics business by ordering opium not to be stored or refined at his Tamngop camp, and by instructing KMT units to merge their identity with their allies, the Shan United Revolutionary Army. 

In the period that followed, we were with SSA troops close to the great KMT base of Nakar monitoring the opium convoys. And an example of what took place can be found in the relationship between the home-guard army of Bo Lai Oo and the KMT. In September 1971, a joint KMT-Bo Lai Oo convoy set out from Nakar consisting of 500 KMT mules, of which half belonged to merchants. The remainder of the convoy was made up of 250 Bo Lai Oo mules, of which 50 belonged to Bo Lai Oo and 200 to merchants paying him an escort fee. In August 1972, however, an almost similar 750 mule convoy set out from the KMT base of Nakar. The same soldiers were escorting more or less the same merchants; the convoy transported a similar proportion of Bo Lai Oo and KMT opium. But now that the KMT were adopting a low profile, the convoy was known as a Bo Lai Oo home-guard convoy. 

This chameleon-like adaptation is a characteristic of the opium trade and also set off the next step in the U.S. campaign. During the 1972-3 season, the most powerful home-guard leader, Law Sit Han, increased his trade to 180 tons a year - from merchants joining him from the KMT. Accordingly, the DEA started a press campaign describing him as 'The King of Opium' and 'Asia's most wanted criminal'. When he was subsequently 'arrested', the headline's claim was "Victory over Opium". But there was absolutely no victory. Though Law Sit Han's army broke up, the merchants had as little trouble in moving to the Shan United Army of Khun Sa as they had had in transferring from the KMT. The trade continued unaffected, and Law Sit Han's soldiers were similarly flexible. Only a few months before Huang Sing Haw, the Commander of Law Sit Han's 3rd Brigade, had killed hundreds of the Shan United Army - in a battle we were involved in. But he and his soldiers seemed to have no problem in merging with their previous enemies.

Enforcement against cellular trading alliances - like military strikes against guerrillas - produces little more than fragmentation, and this was to be illustrated by the next step the State Department took. Between 1975 and 1979, they donated 25 Bell helicopters and 5 Fokker troop-carrying aircraft to help Burmese troops mount more rapid attacks against the Shan United Army. Spies also inserted tiny transmitters into the flesh, or up the anus, of mules hired to the convoys, so that American satellites could track their every movement. But all that this achieved was to encourage greater mobility in the convoys. By 1977 a majority of Shan opium was no longer being converted into morphine base on the Thai border but in the north of Shan State. Then the much lighter morphine travelled in the back-packs of soldiers who split into half a dozen 100 man units whenever the Burmese approached.

$80 million in U.S. aid and aircraft had virtually no effect in halting the narcotics traffic. The Burmese did not capture a single convoy, and their greatest success was the seizure of 10% of the opium on the SUA convoy of September 1975. Overall the State Department admitted that the Burmese never ever captured as much as 1% of the traffic in any year. And during the period of most intensive U.S. aid - when the toxic herbicide 2.4D was being sprayed down on Shan fields from U.S. donated Turbo Thrush spray planes - Buma's estimated opium production rose from 350 tons in 1985 to 1280 tons in 1988 - an increase of well over 300% in 4 years.

On the other hand, by playing the system in the traditional Shan manner, the Communists gained total control of 2/3 of Shan State's opium in the 1970s. And, at first, this was ideal for Khun Sa. For the Communists could not trade opium to a Thailand which was capitalist and allied to the U.S. So the opium was bought by merchants in Kokang and Wa State and taken to Tachilek and Ho Mong under the protection of Khun Sa. He earned so much that he built a capital at Ho Mong where he trained 3-4,000 soldiers most years, and his army eventually totalled 20,000 soldiers. Their armaments factory produced ammunition, mines, mortars and recoilless rifles. They even bought SAM missiles. And by combining with the SURA and some of the SSA into the Mong Tai Army, Khun Sa was able to project a pan-Shan image which culminated in the setting up of a Shan Assembly at Ho Mong.

The Burmese response to this growing threat was, once again, to let Law Sit Han out of jail, for a second time. And, once again, he persuaded the Kokang, Wa and Eastern Kengtung armies to desert the Communists in 1989 in return for the same right as before to travel with permits - in effect, the right to trade opium. And half a dozen years later - when we were with Khun Sa in the mid-1990s - everybody could see that the Wa were sapping his financial strength, by diverting the opium trade away from him, and also neutralising much of his military strength by besieging his fortress of Loi Lang. For the umpteenth time, the Burmese had applied the old principle, "Neutralise one Shan through the opposition of another".

Today, the Wa, in their turn have become too powerful, and the Burmese are playing them off against the SSA South, and hoping to reduce their financial strength through the eradication of their opium crop - to the great detriment of their very poor farmers. The transfer of hundreds of thousands of Wa into the Shan area, in the name of eradication, can only further embitter the people they replace. Most recently, The Wa and the other ceasefire armies have agreed to negotiate over Khin Nyunt's road map, and it is anybody's guess how this will work out. 

Very probably, I am exaggerating the unpredictability of Shan politics because of my own experience. To give one example, we were once close to the River Pang with Sao Hser Hten, the Colonel who eventually led the movement to join the Communists. We only had 4 soldiers with us and two asked one night to go to a fair in a village nearby. They were watching a traditional Shan play when they were suddenly surrounded by 400 Burmese soldiers who had crept into the village. The Burmese asked where Sao Hser Hten was, and the 2 boys bravely lied saying we were in a temple where we had been the week before. That gave the villagers time to warn us, and at dawn we heard the Burmese mortars begin to rain down on that temple. When no-one ran out to be mowed down by the surrounding troops, the boys were beheaded. Except for their great courage - they were 16 and 18 - I obviously would not be talking here today.

My view of Shan politics is, therefore, coloured by the whirlpool chaos of opium anarchy.

And the chaos theory, in both science and politics, depends on constant forces, such as nationalism and regionalism, playing into a highly fluid system. The system maintains an overall constant pattern, but within that it produces infinitely varied and very unpredictable results. In the face of this, it is very hard to recommend anything, except to hope that Aung San Suu Kyi will be able to change the entire system. The only time the opium trade has been completely wiped out at a single stroke was, in 1951, when the Chinese Communists replaced 4 decades of incessant warfare and corruption - just as in Burma - with a completely new system of great promise. Let's hope that that very determined lady can do the same - but with a little more care for the addicts and the farmers.