No. 10 - 10/2005
13 October 2005

Drugs

With Beijing breathing down Wa necks

Despite the mishap last month when more than 400 kilograms of their heroin consignment was seized by the Burma Army, the Wa on the Sino-Burma border are doing their best to live up to their pledge of establishing a drug-free zone, according to sources from Panghsang:

As vowed several years earlier, Wa chairman Bao Youxiang declared all areas under his control along the Chinese border to be free of drugs beginning 26 June, the International Day Against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking. Prior to that, he had also ordered all refineries and stocks of output north of Panghsang to be transferred to the south by the end of May and "sold out as quickly as possible," according to a written report received by S.H.A.N.

Bao Youxiang

Since then, a 250-men strong HQ security unit was transformed into an anti-narcotics force and, under the watchful eyes of Chinese officials who are in Panghsang to monitor the campaign, are being dispatched in small teams to each township to see that Chairman Bao's solemn word is being honored by his people.

Bao, 56, had sworn that if a single poppy plant were still found in his bailiwick after 26 June, he would have his head chopped off.

"Fields found in the Wa-controlled areas are being razed to the ground by his troops," said a Shan businessman in Panghsang. "Offenders are either being jailed or fined."

He admitted that the later push by Panghsang, also known by its new name Pangkham, has been tough on the people. "They have saved some from last year's harvest," he said. "But I don't know how they are going to fare in the long run."

By contrast, poppy fields are in full bloom in areas under the control of the Burma Army units, such as Manghseng and Mawfah, along the Salween.

A source who recently returned to the border confirmed the fact saying the season's poppy areas are more in the west than in the eastern part of the Wa region.

The Transnational Institute (TNI), an international network of activists-scholars based in Amsterdam, had warned on 25 June that an estimated 350,000 households, about 2 million people, stood to suffer from the opium bans.

In the case of the neighboring Kokang, where the ban was implemented in 2003, a number of people are reportedly trying to survive by eating tree bark, selling off daughters, withdrawing children from school, selling off homes and land and moving off to other regions when the opium ban is yet to be implemented.

The World Food Program that has been running food assistance operations in Shan State since 2003 has targeted 100,000 people in the Wa region for this year's project which ends in May 2006.