Drugs And Cultural Survival

[Joel Barlow]

Drugs and Cultural Survival in the Golden Triangle

Nations, countries, are artificial, boundaries more wishful thinking on the part of moneyed power-mongers than dividing, restricting realities; one must learn of important regional neighbors to understand any specific place. China without knowledge of Mongolia or Russia would be a confusing picture which Confucianism certainly can’t explain; examining Spain without acknowledging Islamic influences from North Africa would be like looking at a Hollywood-movie wild-west town false-front. Many think the USA is its own thing, dominating Canada and Mexico but hardly influenced by them, but that’s less than silly.

Unfortunately, there is little morality in big business or international politics. Governments protect business and wealth, usually little more than feigning concern with public welfare; even disease and education are poorly managed. Governments seldom encourage indigenous self-sufficiency, close-to-nature and/or obdurately traditional; only occasionally are governments far-sighted. Power doesn’t like to share, so certain essential vitality doesn’t come to it. And indeed, the meek remain when power is gone (although always, new replacement powers come along).

With the financial backing of the Dutch government, writer Guy Horton says he’s documented slave labor, systematic rape, conscription of child soldiers, massacres and deliberate destruction of villages, food sources and medical services, along the Myanmar side of the Thai frontier and most especially in Shan and Karen States. He presented evidence meeting the standards of international law in a 600-page report, “Dying Alive: A Legal Assessment of Human Rights Violations in Burma” (2005). “Typically,” Horton said, “the army will move into a village, confiscate anything of value, slaughter the animals, and destroy the cooking pots and looms. The village is burned and usually mined. The inhabitants are relocated to a new site, usually with inadequate food and water, where they’re forced into labor schemes such as road-building. In the long run, many just can’t survive.” Horton also ran across numerous Burmese army defectors. International reaction remains lame.

Sanctions against Iraq before the second U.S. invasion caused as much death as Saddam Hussein and both recent USA vs Iraq wars – deaths mostly of babies, at that. Israel, perhaps more hypocritical for being a state more based on religion, gladly offers Myanmar dangerous weapons while bemoaning Palestinian barbarity. Thailand has used its weapons successfully only on its own people (excepting Thai airmen of WWI fighting in France; some served in Korea, and well over 10,000 in Vietnam, but Thailand has been a laudably peaceable neighbor – whilst in the few clashes it has had, not militarily dazzling), yet because media is owned by businessmen doing business with other businessmen who are often in government, the need to purchase more powerful and larger quantities of weapons isn’t questioned (also, now one doesn’t need an external enemy; there are always ‘terrorists’). International Law has become less meaningful since the USA became the sole ‘Superpower’ (international bully) - in the mode of Japan’s Greater East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere, soon to be espoused by China. The world’s largest, and perhaps shakiest, democracy, India refuses to impose sanctions on Myanmar; China, with few pretensions to morality, is a major Myanmar trading partner; so also are Thailand, Korea and Singapore. Japanese invested heavily until they found funds brought in had to stay, but their government still gives aid. Sanctions in Iraq didn’t work, and Myanmar is considered ‘isolated’ (like North Korea), but without the considerable (and indefensible) support from other countries (and mega-corps), the (literal) rape of Myanmar by its rulers could not continue. It’s estimated the military regime has inflicted over 10,000 violent deaths every year since 1988.

The supposed cultural hegemony which Thailand advertises and Myanmar’s Burmese warlords try to ‘promote’ begs acknowledgement of refugees, overtly racist acts common at almost all levels, and Islamic discontent. While many Muslims and tribal people are well adjusted and even well integrated, there are substantial numbers who are not. The problem seems to rest primarily on insidious greed and economic colonialism: self-reliant/self-sufficient farmers (or herders, or hunter-gatherers for that matter) just don’t pay much tax, or much provide for, or pander to, power! Something artificial and destructive is being imposed – in the name of progress. The volatile situation in Thailand’s south, where Yawi-speaking people of close cultural similarity to their Malay neighbors have been treated like second-class citizens and are now subject to separatist or government-inspired violence, gets major (albeit misguided) attention, while a potentially more dangerous circumstance festers to the north. Both situations seem to give possible justification for unneeded indulgence in giant military purchases (big toys for big boys).

When Britain annexed the Shan States in 1887, colonialists pushed opium production, producing it under license in Kokang, Loimaw and the Wa States (where it was already grown for local consumption): making about 40 tons per year up to 1950, when arrival of Kuomintang (KMT) troops beaten by Communists caused increased production. A famous quote by KMT General Tuan Shi-Wen goes:  “To fight [communists] you must have an army and an army must have guns, and to buy guns you must have money. In these mountains the only money is opium.” A CIA website says leading producers of opium are hill-tribe people of Southeast Asia who “live under very primitive conditions with no electricity and no running water. They are very poor - opium is their currency, and it is sold or traded for basic necessities like food, clothing, and utensils. Opium is also used locally as a substitute for modern medicines because few medical supplies are available in these remote areas.” Well, that’s changed - amphetamines have become “ya kai”, medicine you sell, among people north of the Thai border.

In 1962 the ‘Burmese Way to Socialism’ of General Ne Win ruined private business outside the black market (which expanded); manufactured goods remained available only from trade of opium and heroin for Thai products. Daw AungSan SuuKyi returned in 1988; rallies against despotism erupted; the junta ordered demonstrators fired on, killing thousands. In reasonably fair elections (1990), the National League for Democracy won 82% of seats in the national assembly - support for Daw SuuKyi was overwhelming, except within the military and in Shan State, which voted for Shans. SuuKyi’s father, independence hero Aung San, persuaded independent ethnic leaders to accept his negotiation for terms ending British colonial rule by promising choice for secession, after ten years, to the Shan, Karen and Kachin. Then he was assassinated, just before independence, and his promises became void. SuuKyi is English educated; her husband (now deceased) was English, her children are in England. This English influence worries Myanmar’s generals, who suspect English complicity in the assassination. As with many things in Myanmar, the military’s intentions in holding an election remain hard to comprehend, but it seems they failed to take Daw SuuKyi’s great charisma into account.

Power shortages plague Myanmar, with power off late at night and frequent all-day outages in many parts of the country. Infrastructure is substandard, most gasoline is purchased on the black market (from the military), and the currency worthless not only outside the country but many places in it as well. Than Shwe (pronounced “shoo-ee”), Chairman of the State Peace and Development Council, which took over government as SLORC (State Law and Order Restoration Committee) 16 years before making this outrageous proclamation, says, “The Tatmadaw {armed forces, pronounced tah-mah-doe} will systematically hand over state power to the public, the original owner.” Sure. Burma may be about to implode the way the communistic Eastern European regimes did, but the populace is cowed, demoralized, terrified.

Way underdeveloped, but frequently charming and picturesque, like a place somehow out of another time, Burma is potentially rich. The hospitality industry barely achieves a low standard, education and healthcare are abysmal, but Burmese culture thrives, magnificently free of commercial globalization. This will change though, as deforestation is proceeding faster even than in the Amazon. Thaithe jungles are gone; landslides cover roads, houses, people… rainfall and river levels are down, cement has become regarded as a positive aesthetic, and as things get hotter, the potential for virulent disease spreads. SLORC acknowledged over 400,000 HIV-positive people in Myanmar in 1996 – more realistically it’s over a million and possibly 4% of population (in 2003 over 2% of military recruits were). The highest rates of HIV infection in both China and India are along their Myanmar borders.

Burma has about 135 ethnic groups (over twice as many as China). Besides Myanmars or Burmans, there are Kachin, Karenni (Kayan), Karen, Chin, Arakanese, Mon and Shan, for which States have been named, related tribes, tribes of Tibetan or Mongoloid origin, including Mizo, Lahu, and Palaung, and the indigenous Naga and Wa. Most maintain their own armies for protection from the Burmese Tatmadaw. Other armed forces include descendent remnants of the KMT and Burmese Communist Party, an ‘All-Burma Students Democratic Front’, totally mercantile drug-trade protection organizations and armed bandits (in the last few decades, several hundred groups). The total number of rebel armies was once 26; most accepted cease-fire with the government, in hopes of development-help or other economic gains. Non-governmental armed, trained and organized are about 125,000 (some merely boys), but figures for insurgent fighters are lower as they exclude commercial armies. The Shan, largest of Burma’s ethnic minorities, once comprised a third of the country’s population (now about 48 million); 10% of Shan men may be HIV positive, and many Shan have fled to Thailand. With little else available to them, they’re reliant on traditional herbal understandings, and often have but unreliable access to even that form of help. The potential for survival of Shan culture, and that of other minority cultures in Myanmar, is becoming as ify as in/with next-door Thailand, under globalization.

The Yangon junta’s Tatmadaw has expanded to 350,000 soldiers, despite no imminent external threat. For a couple decades, almost half of Myanmar government monies have gone to the violent, terrorizing Tatmadaw, but moral is low, with little civilian support outside families dependent on army money. Still, conflicting politics, lack of geographic commonalty, historic animosities, communication difficulties, religious differences, and incompatible financial support bases make rebel unification, or victory, unlikely. In addition to Buddhist, Moslem and Christian rivalries, there are animistic and charismatic cults, and feuding clans. The Karen and Mon are anti-narcotic, but sometimes provoke each other. Internal strife led to the fall (after almost 40 years) of the Karen headquarters at Mannerplaw (not far from the Thai town Mae Sam Laep, on the Salween River) - Buddhist soldiers were dissatisfied with Christian leadership.

China sold the SLORC junta F-7 fighter-bombers (copies of the Soviet MiG21) and two frigates (to be fitted with surface-to-surface missiles), in return asking for a naval base, or at least refueling rights for submarine and aircraft carriers, in the Bay of Bengal, on Coco Island in the Indian Ocean and at Zedetkyi Kyun (St Matthew’s Island) off Tenasserim, close to the Straits of Malacca. They got the refueling rights. Growing influence of large oil and gas companies, some of which China is buying into if not trying to buy outright (Unocal), could add to Chinese political pressure in the area. SLORC didn’t rig the ‘election’ (not that it mattered…), yet spends more on ‘defense’ than any other country in the Asia-Pacific region. Its air force has helicopters, fighters, ground attack, transport and training aircraft, mostly from China, but even Israel is happy to sell to the less-than-questionable despots. In 2003 North Korean technicians installed surface-to-surface missiles on Burma Navy vessels. India sold Myanmar eighty 75mm howitzers (mountain guns) in 2003. Russia, eight MiG-29B-12 combat aircraft and two MiG-29UB trainers; its Ministry of Atomic Energy (Minatom) is contracted to construct a nuclear reactor. North Korea shows ready willingness to help with matters nuclear, too. China gives special “friendship prices” for arms, and overlooks payment deadlines. Myanmar exports gas, gems, timber, agricultural produce and other natural resources, yet cannot get along without drug money. Trade sanctions imposed after the 1990 election fiasco exacerbated this dependency: Tatmadaw units in tribal areas operate under a self-support policy, and so rely on drug trade. Opium spread to places which prior to 1962 had had little or none: Karenni (Kayah), Kachin and Chin States, plus Mandalay, Sagaing and Magwe divisions of Burma Proper. But amphetamines are now the bigger earner.

The USA plays typically hypocritical games in the region: it trys to keep Taiwan defended while pumping investment into China, its main currency supporter, with whom it has a trade deficit of over $100 billion a year. China has shored up the dollar with bond purchases of about a trillion dollars. It utilized American policies and trade to grow, while acquiring US-made jet engines for warplanes it sold Myanmar. Peasant uprisings in China take ever more violent turns, with rural communities becoming less credulous and submissive, and abandoning hope of economic trickledown… Burmese know their government doesn’t help them (for them, government always has always been oppressive, but many accept a necessity for unresponsive authority), while Thais, Chinese and even Americans (yes, Mexicans and Canadians, surely) are learning how dangerously – even to their small lives – power corrupts…

A decade ago the largest insurgent force in Southeast Asia was the Mong T’ai Army (MTA), headed by Zao Khunsa (referred to in media usually as Khun Sa, originally Chan Cheefu or Zhang Qifu, hereditary Loimaw headman). He made America’s “Most Wanted” list, ‘though he’s never been to America: a Brooklyn, New York court indicted him on heroin trafficking (narcotics racketeering) charges. Prosperous KhunSa now lives in a Inya Lake villa in Yangon…

Brief background: Lo Hsing-han/Law Sit Han, a major warlord/drug-lord, started in the early 1960s as a gofer, assisting notorious Olive Yang, camouflage-fatigue wearing, gun-toting daughter of Kokang State’s last royalty. Lo got command of a ‘KKY’ junta-sanctioned militia, and while KhunSa was in jail (from late ’69 to ’74), he worked with KMT General Li Mi (of the KMT 3rd Army or 93rd Division - I find it reported both ways), sending opium to Thailand. Olive Yang’s infamous brother (General) Jimmy Yang managed the ChiangMai Rincome Hotel in 1969 and ’70; the Yangs have retired, but Lo, although old, remains important. In February 1993, General Khin Nyunt (long head of Burmese Intelligence but now under house arrest) assured him safe-smuggling of heroin from Kokang to the Thai border at Tachilek. Tachilek has the only airport in Burma within walking distance of another country; flights from Rangoon or Mandalay still bring Burmese officers with parcels of bank notes which get carried over the Mai Sai bridge, Tachilek’s link to international banking. Mae Sai, Thailand’s northernmost point, is an ultimate in proverbial border towns; the area’s Shan, Tatmadaw, Wa and Thai soldiers have frequently clashed; all of these and more rake untaxed income from dodgy dealings, but who should judge? Golden Triangle drug barons are hardly less moral than Europeans who “settled” the American West, the CIA or many Americans working prisons… Now frequently used for Thai-visa extension purposes, the border was only opened to tourists in fall, 1994. Although non-Thai visitors weren’t allowed beyond the town itself, I went to take a look. It seemed poor but light-hearted; I saw kids playing on stilts, and small roadside gambling hovels. There were antiques and handicrafts, but nothing distantly approximating what was available in Mae Sot (on the western border Salween River). The only well-organized business I noticed was the Mae Sai gem market. Burmese currency, kyat, was not then, nor is now, used in Tachilek; only Thai baht. It was rumored, then discounted in the Thai press, that the Wa had opened a gambling casino in Tachilek; Paradise Casino and Resort, just east at the Golden Triangle River Confluence, in operation several years now, is Thai owned. Tachilek reportedly had as many as 14 heroin refineries in the past; now it has a Tatmadaw base and a busy market with a plethora of cheap Chinese goods, some jungle products and carved teak, and pirated CDs and DVDs. On my first visit, I was amazed to see a man in fatigue jacket which instead of a name above the pocket, said “It takes balls to rule the world.” Of many postcards I sent out from there, none arrived.

Lo (or Law) Hsing-han has moved to Yangon to live with a son doing active business with Singaporians, but is reported to still own poppy fields in the Tang-yang area. In 1973 he led the largest of the opium militias and formed a coalition with most of the Shan rebel groups. He sent a proposal to the US government inviting American experts to Shan State to plan poppy eradication, and buy the current crop for US$12 million. Shortly after the proposal reached the DEA in Bangkok, a Thai helicopter came to take Lo for negotiations. Once away from his army, he was arrested, deported to Burma and sentenced to death - later commuted to eight years in jail. The DEA suppressed the proposals. Khun Sa, freed after supporters kidnapped two Russian doctors and got Thai General Kriangsak Chomanan (soon to be prime minister) to negotiate his release, revived the proposals. He invited members of a US Congressional committee on narcotics to visit his base at Ban Hin Taek, Chiangrai Province, Thailand. US officials did visit, but President Carter’s administration preferred to start an $80 million gift program (over 14 years), to the junta.

For a decade Khun Sa had about 4 thousand armed men: the Shan United Army (SUA). The DEA planted tracking devices up the asses of opium caravan mules, but the Burmese, given precise coordinates, intercepted nary a convoy. In January 1982, Prime Minister Prem Tinsulanan had Thai troops launch an attack on Khun Sa at Hin Taek (which subsequently became Ban Thoed Thai); after three days, the SUA scattered. Khun Sa and remnant troops drove some KMT and Lahu soldiers out of borderland Doi Lang, and temporarily settled there, but a Chinese officer who later become SUA chief of staff proposed something better: setting up headquarters at Ho Mong, across the border from sparsely populated MaeHongSon, Thailand, and practically inaccessible from anywhere else. A road from Thailand was put in, and troops rallied back. In 1985, 10,000 soldiers of the Shan United Revolutionary Army under Col. YawdSerk joined to form the Mong T’ai Army (MTA), which in 1993 had its first sustained, concentrated attack from the Tatmadaw. The situation looked serious, so Khun Sa adopted a more fervently nationalist posture. On December 13, 1993, he declared an independent Shan State. More soldiers joined; the MTA grew to 25,000. The DEA commenced “Operation Tiger Trap” in 1994; Thai authorities arrested 11 Khun Sa associates and sealed the border, cutting off not just drug and weapons flow but also easy access to rice and other essential supplies. By then, HoMong had grown to 20,000 and even had facilities for overseas phone calls (Christopher Cox of the Boston Herald says 10,000 people, but he also says Chiang Saen means “trumpeting elephant” and that “Sun Yat-sen overthrew the Manchu empire”). Surely well over a hundred journalists, photographers, NGO staffers and adventurers traveled to the Thai/Myanmar border to see Khun Sa, as did Chris Cox, and as also did I (earlier than Cox, who wrote Chasing the Dragon, 1996 Henry Holt and Co., about his visit).

Khun Sa offered to eradicate Shan opium/heroin supply in return for security and stability for his people, who were violently threatened by the Burmese. The price would have been a tiny fraction of the “street value” of the product, or American tax dollars spent on surveillance, interdiction, incarceration, rehabilitation, hospitalization, etc. “Persuade the government of Burma to return to the legal constitution of Burma, because the drug trade can only flourish in a state of anarchy”, he asked.  Thirty years later, the anarchy, and drug trade, still flourish.  The Shan request for help with crop substitution, schools, hospitals, and infrastructure met little response, but captivated my interest. I decided to see if I could do anything to help.

My Trip to HoMong

After attracting Khun Sa aide Khernsai Jaiyen’s attention through newspaper letters-to-the-editor supportive of Khun Sa’s independence posturing, and a trip to Khun Sa’s office in MaeHongSon (I just flew up, then asked a motorcycle taxi driver to take me there, using my not-yet very good Bangkok Thai), I received an invitation to visit Ho Mong, and even a piece of paper to serve as provisional passport.

MaeHongSon wasn’t yet a vast urban wasteland of excess cement – most houses were still of wood, and many were very beautiful. There were five 5-star hotels without customers, and many two dollar a night backpacker guest-houses (much more convivial and entertaining places than expensive hotels). Interesting regional delicacies like deep-fried bird were common, and standard fare available along a short row of places oriented to backpackers. There was an upstairs dance-hall, dime (B10) a dance; my next-door neighbor at the guest-house I found to be of the taxi-dancers! The pace of life was slow, modern vulgarity had begun encroaching, but much serene magnificence truly charmed. Vegetation was thick, mornings cool, almost cold, and nowhere did anything feel intimidating, except perhaps the 5-star hotels. No one seemed shy about Khun Sa having an office there, at all, but neither were they going to discuss the trucks with huge teak trunks loaded on, standing along the road outside of that office, despite official logging ban.

I met Kernsai there, at the office, and was told where to catch a ride early in the morning. I did so, and after an hour and a half trip, found myself at a small Chinese village of low brick houses. There I mounted a mule bred for the difficult job of traversing rugged mountainous terrain. The mule’s caretaker led us along a mountain stream for a couple hours, crossing it, back and forth, many, many times. Along the first few miles of the path were impressive water-works, earth constructed runnels carrying water from a creek to fields lower down. It was nice and easy, breezy and beautiful for a while, then for a second I thought the horse was going out from under me, down a cliff-side. We quickly descended 8 or 10 feet while progressing on perhaps hardly a yard. The creek fell to 60 feet below us sometimes; the trail was seldom level. It was often so steep that the mules used long holes a foot or more deep, sometimes 40 or more in close rows, doing a kind of high-step.

We frequently went up, way up high slopes, the porter-guide-muleteer after a while pulling in front to help the mule, and my spine going almost parallel with that of my mount. When the slopes became too extreme we began using switchbacks, some 10 or 15 yards long, others reversing quite quickly. The horse sweated profusely, horseflies buzzing about its eyes. I tried with little success to swat them away with my quart (crop). We saw no-one for over five hours, until after resting on a level area we reached after topping three previous ridges. They were gorgeous to look back upon, but we were soon engulfed again in trees. We then encountered two men bearing ancient long-barrel rifles, and acting as if they were hunting. An hour later we met another man, at a very refreshing small waterfall.

Parties of international journalists, whom we saw evidence of in their trash leavings (Tablerone chocolate boxes given free on international flights, cigarette packs, pop cans), were said to have done the route in eight hours. I’d hoped to do it in less, and did, but to little advantage. My guide hobbled the horse outside a small dusty village, then left me in a room that resembled a small barracks, outside of which were tunnels into a hillside. I was exhausted and not unhappy to rest while waiting for a vehicle. I fell asleep, and someone woke me, offering to share smoke of some #4. I wanted to see it, but politely declined to partake. He took out a small vial of white powder and a cigarette, unrolled the cigarette and mixed in powder, rolled it back up, partook, then nodded off. Shortly after, I was directed to a pickup, which took me to the headquarters of Khun Sa’s administration, where I was given a room at the VIP quarters. I’ve no idea how things would have gone had I been narcoticized.

A treaty had just been negotiated with elders of the Lisu tribe, and I was invited to the celebratory dance at Khun Sa’s residence. I was fed first, and had time to pour ladles of cold water over myself in my room’s private bath (equipped with an electric light), and to put on decent clothes. I was soon holding hands between two beautifully bedecked Lisu maidens, with green-uniformed but unarmed soldiers to either side, dancing in a circle that soon included Khun Sa. He sang out enjoyable verses of voluble song, but I understood nary a word. I forgot my tired feet and legs, and tried my best to follow along in dance with my fellows. Khun Sa made what was clearly a jest, and people laughed. A European crew went about with TV cameras and bright lights, recording the event.

My host Khernsai Jaiyen, the aid to Khun Sa most quoted in English-language newspapers, used his self-taught English fluently, and I found his manner friendly and intelligent. He introduced me to several other English speakers, including two gentlemen of Shan descent purportedly based with the UN in New York. We were served candy and “whiskey” (which should really be called rum), after the dancing stopped. My new friends and I considered visiting HoMong’s karaoke lounge, but chose instead to visit the drinking stall of a woman who had a bit of English. There we had Carlsberg beer, tasty Shan/T’ai food, and a pretty good time. The electricity in Ho Mong, however, went off at ten, and I had to prepare for bed by candlelight.

Early in the next day’s dawning I was shown around a bit after breakfasting with the UN guys, at a charming outdoor market. I was saw a lake, schools, a church, garment factory, printing department, pharmacies, a new neighborhood and road construction. Half a year after his declaration of independence, Khun Sa’s efforts in Ho Mong showed results: he’d established mushroom and silkworm farms, pineapple plantations, textile and garment production, a hydroelectric dam, a jewelry factory and a gem emporium. In the pleasant main market and well-stocked stores, dry-goods were mostly Thai, and only Thai money was used. Schools and medical facilities were readily in evidence, and two small hotels. There were no door-locks, nor need of, as there was virtually no crime. Rugged terrain, logistics insufficiencies (especially in transportation), and strained political relationships limit economic potential, but the Mong T’ai capitol Ho Mong (a mileor so from Mong Mai, more readily identifiable on maps, ‘though sometimes as Mong Mau - about 50 kilometers due north of MaeHongSon City, but over twice that far in actuality, due to the mountains) had thousands of new pre-formed reed-mat houses creating dozens of neighborhoods along the main road through a long mountain valley. Women mostly wore modern clothing; men and boys uniforms.

Kernsai explained that Khun Sa wanted me to become his “Propaganda Minister” for which I would be given room and board; would I care to review his troops with him in the morning? I didn’t think so. Unfortunately it quickly seemed I had little time left… I chose to walk back, rather than wait for another rough ride on a mule.

Walking took the same amount of time, and brought me closer to things. I still had a guide; he could hardly believe how slow I was, and at one point reached into an almost invisible hole in the ground and pulled out a colorful bird. This he put in a pocket for a while, then took out and flung into the air. It flew off making joyful noises, and I knew the difficult walk had been the right choice. But it left me tired immensely, and with sores on my feet still visible two months later. Arriving in the little brick town where I could catch a ride, just before dark, I made it to MaeHonSon in time to be informed at the airline office that I should report for standby very early in the morning. I was very lucky I did so, as no subsequent flights were able to leave for the nest two days, due to fog.

I’d gone to offer some ideas for alternate income sourcing and possibly support in crop-substitution programs, and remain hopeful of helping provide viable substitutes for dependency on drug production for people in Shan State, through use of solar and wind power, and 12-volt pumping systems. I also had ideas for Angora rabbits… and it interests me to use this situation as a case example helpful in elucidating many problems in present political and economic frameworks and realities. Too much is ignored or wishfully swept temporarily out of sight, only to fester until erupting into danger to society at large. The absence of much available information on this situation is but one symptom of the problem; organized crime and drug-use epidemics are others. As important, of course, are general human rights, respect for nature and tradition, and awareness of history and resultant responsibilities. My hopes of encouraging profitable handicrafts production have come to little; dreams of promoting wind-energy utilization and water-storage have come to even less. There clearly needs to be a total paradigm shift of people in general, before we lose our heritage, and future.

When well entrenched and popular, the MTA had heavy artillery and surface-to-air heat-seeking Stinger missiles, and SAM-7 anti-aircraft missiles (made in USA). Traditionally Shan, Kachin, Pa-0, Palaung and Lahu accept cultural pluralism as a fact of life, despite occasional necessity for violence. Farmers not protected by a local army then, as now, ran high risk of being press-ganged into work as porters &/or land-mine detectors for the Tatmadaw, without pay, even in food, and forced into situations of extreme danger without protective gear, acting against the interests of their own people. Thousands of porters have died and thousands more become severely mutilated while engaged in this work, supposedly for the good of their nation.

The main enemy was soon to change, though, from Khun Sa to neighbors not far from his original base-town of Lashio: the ‘wild’, or ‘red’ Wa. Some of these Wa can still remember ancestors who were headhunters, living inaccessibly in small villages surrounded by impenetrably thick thorn strands. For two decades most Wa were Communist Party supporters; then they became capitalistic poppy cultivators and now protect the manufacture of amphetamines. The Wa fought against Khun Sa’s Mong Tai Army until his surrender, and now are avowed supporters of the junta, while using Chinese money and acting under the orders of Chinese advisers. They want back lands Shans ‘civilized’ 850 years ago…

These Wa kept Burma separate from China; the rugged Wa ‘states’, located in the far northeast of Shan State, are the poorest territory in Burma, indeed, Wa farmers are among the world’s poorest peoples. Wa have fought lowlanders for centuries, vehemently. China had no problem absorbing all of Yunnan, with its many tribal peoples, and many Chinese passed on through into Shan State, but the Wa Hills remained frontier. Until just recently, there were few roads in the area (none paved), no educational system and no medical clinics. Only 10% had electricity. After Aung San’s assassination, the Burmese Communist Party (BCP) revolted; its most successful recruiting was among the traditionally warlike Wa. In March, 1989 the BCP collapsed; the leaders fled to China. The United Wa State Party (UWSP) and United Wa State Army (UWSA) requisitioned BCP uniforms, arms, ammunition and soldiers, and merged with a smaller non-communist Wa army, soon having 20,000 troops with additional militia. They quickly struck a cease-fire deal with the junta, so kept all weapons and, free to run its region as a semi-autonomous state, expanded trade in heroin – remember, the Wa hills were once legal opium-growing territory. Starting in 1993, they added methamphetamines.

Dreams of an independent Shan State were shattered by a mutiny in June 1995 (at least for the time; it keeps, quixotically, popping up again, chauvinistic in the sense of hopeless). The MTA’s officer-training school’s second in command, Kan Yot [Gun Yod or Kan Ywet], revolted. He and 200 soldiers, incensed at despotism and racial discrimination by those with Chinese blood, left. 1500 MTA soldiers went to negotiate with the mutineers, hardly 10% returned. Rumors of Khun Sa’s ill-health were becoming believed (there were so many, so absurd rumors before, such as the killing of a barber for a bad hair-cut, that they often weren’t taken seriously); weariness was showing in his face. When the Wa launched their winter ‘95 offensive, desertions caused outpost after outpost to fall; some claim the central headquarters would have also, within days, if surrender hadn’t brought in the Tatmadaw - but that’s conjecture. Khun Sa’s surrender caught most observers by surprise, and it’s clear not all weapons were turned over – Stinger and SAM-7 missiles widely believed to be there weren’t. One version of the story has Khun Sa calling a session of the Shan parliament to make a surprise announcement of immediate retirement; it seems he betrayed those who hadn’t betrayed him torevengo those who had, demonstrating the correctness of their suspicions (and meanwhile destroying the Shan cause). However it went, Khun Sa moved to Yangon New Years Day 1996, renounced his Shan name and took a Burmese one. According to the ‘New Light of Myanmar’, 1,894 recruits and 138 heavy arms were handed over to the Tatmadaw on 12 January 1996, and on 14 January, 9,749 MTA soldiers surrendered with 6,004 heavy and small weapons, 197 HoMong-made launchers, 13,452 (or 24,452) grenades, 10,346 (or 18,346) mines and 7,407 (or 17,027) heavy arms rounds on 14 January. 9,749 MTA soldiers surrendered, or maybe ‘over’ 4000 surrendered, in return for 50,000 sacks of rice. Khun Sa was given a commercial bus concession from Rangoon to Shan State, a casino at Myawaddy (near the old Karen National Union headquarters at Mannerplaw, which has become a notorious ‘yaba’ – meth - transit point) and more; the junta steadfastly refuses a US offer of $2 million for his extradition. The USWA took over many of the border strongholds: “They have real capabilities and a growing infrastructure,” Shan Herald Agency for News (S.H.A.N..) quoted a diplomat. “This has the appearance of an emerging state.” In Mong Yawn valley north of ChiangMai’s Mae Ai district, the Wa have built roads, dams, an electricity-generating plant, underground fuel tanks, military compounds, schools, a hospital and modern town, employing 6,000 Thai laborers – with the only money they have, drug money.

A settlement built in 2000 by southern Wa boss Wei HseuhKang (Wei Xuegang), about 6 km from the border opposite Chiang Rai Province, reportedly has shoulder-launched anti-aircraft missiles (ones Khun Sa got from Cambodia and mujahadeen?). Plans to enlarge Mong Yawn - population around 10,000 early in 2004 - to about 120,000, involve a shifting Wa southward: part of a mysterious plan for ending opium cultivation by forced depopulation instead of crop substitution. Perhaps it’s really about allowing (unassimilatable) Wa from Yunnan to move into evacuated old Wa areas. Settlers on both sides of the Thai border are planting hundreds of thousands of fruit trees, but Mong Yawn can’t support even another 50,000 people through just agriculture and livestock breeding.

“The Burmese are playing with fire,” S.H.A.N. quotes a Western analyst. “By diversifying their forces and territory, the Wa are gaining strength and influence.” Many Wa leaders are actually ethnic Chinese; north of the Wa “States” is Kokang State, where most people are ethnic Chinese. The enmity between the Burmese government and Wa has resulted in a mini-arms race, and it’s doubtful the ethnic minorities will ever feel, or be, secure without having their own military capability. The UWSA has become one of the world’s largest drug-trafficking organizations, well able to procure powerful munitions. The US Justice Department indicted eight senior Wa officials in January 2005 (in absentia), on narcotics charges, but is really little threat to them. By forcing impoverished people to migrate, the UWSA has greatly increased its influence in Shan State, particularly in areas new to it where the Shan State Army (S.S.A., successor to the MTA) also operates – mostly along the Thai border.

Complicating the picture are proposals from international business consortiums and the Asian Development Bank, for new roads and infrastructure arrangements to make a “growth quadrangle” expanding the “Golden Triangle” of Burma, Thailand and Laos, to include Yunnan, China. This big area has many people with common ethnic backgrounds: Shans, Dai/Zhouang, Laotians, Lawa and Yi/Lolo hill-tribes. The proposals mean to boost tourism, encourage economic imperialism, and facilitate repressive political control. “The formation of the Golden Rectangle is inevitable because of the geo-economic advance of China toward the south,” Thai political scientist Sukhumbhand Paribatra told the Bangkok Post. “One has to be very careful, because this advance will be linked to the region’s powerful local Chinese communities.” Kunming officials have expressed hope that Bangladesh and China will work together: “Yunnan is China’s southwest province... and we want to develop a framework to enhance economic cooperation between China, Myanmar, Bangladesh and India,” Shi Minghui, deputy director general of the Foreign Affairs Office of Yunnan, was quoted as saying. China’s relations with Bangladesh bear major politico-economic implications; China has begun using the Bay of Bengal for military purposes, and wants to access it overland to increase commerce from land-locked Yunnan. Meanwhile, overcrowded Bangladesh poses a refugee problem – regular flooding dislocates its citizens, but more refugees come in – particularly Rohingya, Islamic people from Myanmar’s Arakan State – than leave. That that could change surely conserns Indian authorities.

Myanmar’s SPDC has initiated more “War on Drugs,” baning opium. Over a wuarter of Kokang’s population left; rigid enforcement keeps half the remaining poor, with food security only six months a year. Some try eating tree bark, as in North Korea. Throughout Shan State, 350,000 households, about two million people, are losing their primary source of earnings, indeed, 70 percent of cash income, because opium is now prohibited. People are withdrawing children from school and passing up health services, selling off livestock, land and daughters. “The reversed sequencing of first forcing farmers out of poppy cultivation before ensuring other income opportunities is a grave mistake,” warned Martin Jelsma of the Trans­national Institute (TNI, an international network of activist-scholars based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands). “Aggressive drug control efforts against farmers and small-scale opium traders, and forced eradication opera­tions in particular, will have a negative impact on prospects for peace and democracy in both countries.” Alternative livelihood programs should have been in place before eradication, as reductions in income will result in malnutrition and poor health. But about a hundred drug refineries remain, and a fully successful ban seems unlikely. Raids on refineries carried out in a “War on Drugs” target only smaller players. Control of all aspects of the huge business is now in the hands of a few major players, most prominent among them, the USWA. 

Some refineries in northern areas or UWSA areas close to the Thai border have been relocated, to ‘safer’ areas.  According to S.H.A.N., a “raid by UWSA on a heroin refinery being run by a local Lahu militia in western Mongton on March 30, 2003, is a clear example of a small player being ousted out. The refinery in Mongjawd had been set up by Kya Nu, leader of a militia group numbering only about 30-40 men. After the raid, Kya Nu was arrested and jailed in Kengtung, and his militia disbanded. The raid was publicized by the SPDC in the state-run press, as an example of UWSA cooperation in drug eradication efforts. Yet the reality is that the UWSA has now simply monopolized the drug trade in Mongjawd, and has since set up new refineries in the same area.” SPDC is a newer acronym for what once was SLORC; military personnel remain involved in all aspects of the drug trade. The junta condones such involvement as a means of subsidizing army costs at field level.

Roads now link Mae Sai with Jinghong, Yunnan, and thus Kunming, through Sipsongpanna (the “twelve kingdoms” or 12,000 rice fields legendary birthplace of the T’ai race). Soon there should be easy passage through Laos, and someday maybe even northern Burma; so far most roads in Northern Burma and Laos are barely passable for 4-wheel drive vehicles, but serious commercialization of the region appears imminent. Burma’s northernmost state, Kachin, bordering Tibet in the foothills of the Himalayas, is one of the world’s most mineral-rich areas, with gold and high-quality jade. Opium production was substandard, and is no longer attempted. Kachin State remains poor and sparsely populated, with some rugged sub-Himalayan areas labeled ‘uninhabited.’ Still, teak and other hardwoods flow from those mountainous areas through Thailand to Japan, alarming rainforest preservationists. Thai prime-minister Taksin Shinawatra (pronounced Sin-awat or Chin-awat) spoke of developing ski resorts there, with flights from Chiang Mai.

Along the north-south Thai-Burma border, some Karen and Mon remain insurgent, with just a bit of international media attention and a little outside aid, but the possibility of their cultural survival seems as much in question as that of the Shan and small hill-tribes. An extremely controversial natural-gas pipeline (Yadana, Kanchanaburi, Unocal) was put in to supply a questionable Thai electricity-generating factory, disrupting much; Baptist and other fundamental Christian Church organizations, non-governmental relief organizations and global mega-corp business interests (Big Pharma, carbonated beverages, electronics) also have on-going, questionable, impact. Perhaps in all as disruptively exploitative are the many international tourists who go to “undeveloped” hill-tribe villages to photograph “long-necked women” (from the small Padaung tribe, perhaps one born under a full moon, whatever, one with many brass rings covering the neck and depressing the collar-bone). Such tourism seldom benefits the ethnic people, especially financially. What little they might gain they are certain to soon lose. Exploitation and manipulation by the rich and influential in the area involves little governmental interference. Now many long-neck villages (human zoos) are reachable by car, and advertised.

For over 20 years refineries in Shan State produced half the world’s supply of heroin, whihch was the area’s primary hard currency earner. The product traveled through China and/or Thailand, as documented by Alfred McCoy in “The Politics of Heroin” (1972, Harper & Row), often in the care of Chiu Chau (Teh Chiu) dialect speakers whose ancestors came from Swatow, the port of Kwantung in SE China. The Teh Chiu are said to have arrived in Hong Kong via Shanghai, and to be a dominant part of Thai politics. They’re scattered around the world, and suspected of extensive ‘Triad’ (secret society) involvement. Ethnic Yunnanese Muslim Panthays, called by the Thai “Haw”, are also blamed (but poorly identified, except as expatriate Yunnanese), and one runs across mention of new “triads” like 14K, competing strongly with the legendary Chinese secret societies. However supplied, illegal heroin remains available virtually worldwide, flowing not only from the Golden Triangle, but equally from Afghanistan (and especially the Pakistani border area). It also comes from Laos, Lebanon, Columbia, Mexico, Sudan, and recently, southern ex-Soviet states (“-istans”). It’s questionable why American law enforcement thought capture of Khun Sa might have any impact on narcotic availability or price. It’s also questionable why crop substitution or eradication is deemed necessary, as there is important medical utility, and even internationally sanctioned narcotic production - in India, Iran, Turkey, and Tasmania, Australia. Poppy seeds are used as food, on buns and bagels. In Burma they’re widely used for one of the country’s delicacies, Bein Mon (pancake made of rice flour, palm sugar, coconut chips and peanuts, garnished with poppy seeds), and are traded openly. With use of a bit of intelligent imagination, alternative income sources could be found: ganja/cannibis seeds also have great value, and are easily transported, but are irrationally suppressed. Drugs burned in public displays are suspected of adulteration by addition of food poppy, gum, sap and pods emptied of seeds; no-one can investigate thoroughly. Lashio officials were quoted as saying that as soon as foreign guests and reporters left, national security officials doused the fire and retrieved residue for the next round of bonfires – it’s all a farce, all about control.

In the 1970s, the Burmese opium crop was 250 to 400 tons per annum. It rose from 350 tons in 1985 to 1,280 tons in 1988, and in ‘89, was 2,000 tons, maybe more. For the ‘90s, US State Department figures show between 2,000 and 2,500 tons a year. DEA estimates for year 2000 were about 1,200 tons. The UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) put Burma’s 2003-2004 output at 370 tons, down from 2002’s 800 plus, due to bad weather. In peak year 1993, Laos produced 210 tons of opium. In response to Rangoon officials’ claim that opium output had dropped in 2001 to 865 tons from 1,065 tons in 2000, noted Shan scholar Dr. Chao Tzang Yawnghwe commented that official figures were “arbitrary.” Population, especially AIDS, statistics vary a lot, and government, like bureaucracy, is more self-protecting than altruistic. S.H.A.N. reports Dai officials in Yunnan’s Dehong Autonomous Prefecture, opposite northern Shan State, questioning the annual output figures given by the UN and US, which have been shrinking each year. “What we are seeing here in Mongmao (Ruili) is a rise not only in trafficking but also addictions,” it quotes a drug enforcement source who posits more than 3,000 users in Ruili’s Zegang neighborhood alone, at least 10% of them female. “If there is really a drop in the production then the logical question is from where are we getting all the dope?” Chinese authorities are also displeased by Myanmar’s failure to hand over 24 of 34 drug fugitives who took refuge there.

Specialists from the USA have provided satellite and other intelligence about opium convoys, yet narcotics seizures have never reached 1 percent. During the period of most intensive US aid, ’85-‘88 - opium fields were sprayed with 2.4-D herbicide, from planes given by the USA - but estimated opium yield doubled. US aid was typically ineffective in achieving what it was purportedly intended to do. Khun Sa’s surrender didn’t lower heroin production, but the SPDC claimed it incinerated 625 kilos of opium, 759 kilos of heroin and 3 million methamphetamine pills, 2000 kilos (over 2 tons) of drugs, on June 26, 2005: Yangon’s 19th propagandistic destruction of narcotics (in one they bulldozed bottles of ‘Krakingdaeng’ Thai energy drink).

“The junta’s token attempts at crop substitution, often with international assistance, have also failed miserably, due to poor planning, coercive implementation and complete disregard for the welfare of local populations. Under the so-called “New Destiny” project launched in April 2002, farmers in many townships have been forced to plant a new strain of rice from China, which has failed in each locality,” according to S.H.A.N. Opium takes only three months and is a cash crop. Nothing else yet compares, as “ya ba” doesn’t require farmers. Constant terror, atrocities and warfare make opium cultivation still the only choice for many.

Early last century, Shan were selling opium to the Yunnanese, who transported it down the Yangtze and sold it to the French. The Shan were then divided into 34 small principalities, but had no concept of rigid border demarcation. Warlords demanded to receive ‘taxation’ on all that passed by (as Khun Sa says is all he did), and thus discouraged much farming of food for market. Trade was ruined to the point where salt became expensive and goiter a widespread problem. Without the drug business, the consumer economy of Burma might grind to a halt, as much of the little for sale is funded through it. Shan people wish to enter the modern world with the respect and the dignity merited by capable and industrious people, which indeed they are, but commerce in narcotics hasn’t helped much, except insofar as it kept at bay, for awhile, Burmese military madness. The Maynmar ‘government’ has, unintentionally or not, limited big business concerns that eventually may present an even more disruptive danger to Burma’s various peoples and cultures. Modern infrastructure can be doubly dangerous in this area, tending as it does to bring governmental repression and corporate exploitation. A direct relationship clearly exists between poverty and the narcotics problem, but Khun Sa’s aide Khernsai Jaiyen expressed no interest in the parallels with problems in South America, or in contacts there, when I asked. Shan State may never be able to have more impact on the world beyond it than it had through narcotics, and it’s unclear how much outside people should feel obliged to become involved in internal Shan State affairs. But with drug addiction a problem of increasing magnitude, especially due to AIDS, it can easily seem to be a problem of either influencing the situation, or being influenced by it.

The emerging situation

Most refineries in the eastern Shan area are controlled by Wei HseuhKang, wanted by both Thai and United States law enforcement. In 2003 he moved from near Monghsat to a northern area of Tangyan, given to him in 2001 by then SPDC Secretary-1 Khin Nyunt (the supposed master-spy elevated to Prime Minister then put under house arrest, who proposed turning Ho Mong into a tourist attraction – an idea sure to be revived). Wei’s refineries in Mong Ton and Monghsat are run by Yunnan Chinese, Chao Ching and Li Hsen. His brothers Wei HsuehLong and Wei HsuehYing (also Yunnanese) fled to the Wa States when Communists took over China, and were connected to the KMT-CIA spy network along the Burma-China border until the 1970s. Wei HsuehKang served as Khun Sa’s treasurer at Ban Hin Taek (now Thoed Thai) just south of the Thai-Burmese border (in Chiangrai). After 1989, the Wei brothers linked up with Wa president Bao Youxiang’s United Wa State Army (UWSA), but remained little known until named by a New York court, among eight senior Wa leaders indicted on charges of smuggling heroin and amphetamine to the USA. Xiao Minliang, Vice Chairman to Bao Youxiang, Ai Lone, Chief of Staff of the United Wa State Army, Zhao Wenxing, deputy Chief of Staff, Li Chengwu, a Kokang-Chinese hard-liner against Yangon serving as Bao’s military adviser, Vice-chairman Bo Lakham, who knows little Burmese but headed the Wa delegation to two sessions of the National Convention, are reported by S.H.A.N. as top cadre. These people are worrisome to both Yangon and Beijing, as they speak of themselves as a government. Wa’s don’t want to be Chinese anymore than they want to be Burmese, or under either’s authority. Important Chinese business communities in Mandalay and Yangon are growing rapidly; both Than Shwe and USWA are dependent on Chinese arms, and neither can stay isolated and intrangent much longer, regardless.

Methamphetamines, “yaba” (“crazy pills”) in Thai, are “ya kai” in Shan, according to S.H.A.N. translatable as “hard-working pills”. In many rural communities, people use the drug openly if they want to stay up to help at a ceremony or temple festival, or if they want extra “energy” for work in the fields. There have been no public campaigns about the dangers of the drug, and in Shan State, no social stigma for those who use it. In the past few years, it’s become common for polite hosts in Shan State to offer visitors methamphetamines, with the traditional tea. This isn’t weird: varieties of drugs are accepted socially everywhere, and natural kinds are used pleasantly and successfully, within appropriate social context.

Amphetamines are dangerous, but are known to have been used in moderation (doctors in the USA prescribed them freely when I was young, and many people took no more than their doctor recommended). Nasu Lahu-na (my wife) remembers when most people along the border were engaged in the drug trade: there were many rivalries, there was much pride, gossip and back-stabbing. She says people would burn with urges for revenge, and report rivals to police… Once somebody caught their favorite enemy out alone on a jungle path, cut his head off and hung it up. Nasu’s father forbade her to go out there, but she couldn’t resist, and snuck a look. There was easy money to be made, but it wasn’t, isn’t, a good trade. The Thai Ministry of Health estimated 2,650,000 meth addicts in 2001 (4.3% of population total and 91% of the total addict population); mornings on the way to work I’d see herds of thin post-adolescents with brightly colored hair standing around filling-station lots, after the discos closed at 7 a.m. Even today, entertainment places for Thai youth close later than tourist-oriented venues, with no explanation forthcoming.

Around Kengtung, farm hands sometimes now get paid in meth pills instead of money.  In 1994, a group of Thai dealers approached Khun Sa, but he spoke against meth: ‘Heroin is okay’, he reasoned, ‘our main customers are across the ocean. But, with yaba, we only have Thais for customers. If we start producing it, we’ll come face to face with Thailand. That’ll make our position more difficult.’ His uncle Khun Hseng (Chang Ping-yuan) was won over by the Thais, though, and soon yaba produced in HoMong was of top quality. Drug producers in Shan State tried expanding into Extasy, but their chemists haven’t made a popular product (maybe good chemists don’t want to live in back woods). Wa and Kokang leaders could only abandon heroin by establishing labs and markets for meth; which they liked for not needing to worry about weather. Labs can be moved, and farmers engaged in other production give a more stable economic base. Opium may make a temporary disappearing act, but other drugs are entering the market (‘date rape’ drugs have certainly made a name for themselves). The yaba market proved large and lucrative until Taksin’s Drug Wars, but customers remain in the Bangkok area, in India, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, China and Korea – amphetamines reach the populace of many of Myanmar’s armaments suppliers and other enablers. The Thai “War on Drugs” which started in 2003 with the murder - in just a couple of months - of thousands of possible small-timers (with minimal subsequent investigation, at best), has made Shan State traffickers avoid the northern Thai border, and sell only to long-term, well-trusted Thai contacts.  Thai newspapers still regularly report busts, but trafficking drugs into China has become preferable to down through Lashio and Mandalay to Moulmein, Kanchanaburi and Bangkok (though that still happens), due to increased bribe costs. Beijing replaced paramilitary police with five regular army regiments, to patrol the northern Shan-China border.  Endemic corruption among local law enforcement officers in border towns has contributed to the problem, in particular at Zegao and Ruili, opposite Muse, but many fewer Chinese officials currently enjoy the high-life in the gambling town of MongLa (on the border), than did just a few years ago. Taksin’s ‘War on Drugs’ forced drug operators to reroute their products, but a Chinese attitude that it’s better to die than be poor, means there are many eager replacement traffickers available. The 25 March, 2005 Bangkok Post reported 1.14 million addicts in China, equally divided between heroin and methamphetamine (quoting Yang Fengrui, spokesman for the Ministry of Public Security, as saying, “he situation has begun to deteriorate.”). The Wa have long been a Chinese ally, Shan State’s becoming Wa State, Beijing’s ruled by eager, perhaps desperate, expansionists.

Many Wa have recently relocated, or been relocated, to areas just north of the Thai/Myanmar border. Perhaps as many as 150,000 of these Wa are currently in the limbo of displaced people; tens of thousands of these were born in China and many of the new settlers are Han Chinese. One report says 300,000 people have been relocated to cut off support for the SSA-South. Certainly, many Shans and Lahu have been evicted to space for arriving Wa, but as the government in Yangon has cultivated good relations with China and Thailand, this has not resulted in a new ‘refugee crisis’. The Wa region along the Chinese border has passed another deadline to become drug-free; how else are they to survive? What crop substitution projects and possibilities are there? What can be done towards sustainable community-based development and strengthening civil society to enable farmers to participate in decision-making processes about their future? Poppy cultivators escape enforcement measures; like when a balloon is squeezed, air just pushes out elsewhere – and many people have hidden poppy seeds.

An Akha displaced from just south of Mong Hsat by Wa newcomers asserted that Chinese were easily distinguishable from Wa: “There were some Chinese with them (the Wa settlers). They set up shops and sold various food items. They also made whiskey to sell from corn. I also saw some Chinese soldiers and officers with the Wa Army. They wore Wa uniforms, but they were whiter-skinned than the Wa, so it was easy to tell them apart. They spoke no language other than Chinese.” A report from the Mong Karn, east of Mong Hsat, mentions that among 300 new Wa households moving into Mong Karn village, were 30 Chinese households. New Chinese are particularly concentrated at Ban Hoong, south of Mong Hsat. There, about 1000 Chinese are help conduct Wei Hsiao Kang’s military and economic affairs.

The Wa area on the Chinese border is now pressured to become drug-free, but how are poor ex-cultivators to replace their lost income? What crop substitution projects and possibilities are there? Will there be reliable markets for the substitute crops? What can be done towards sustainable community-based development and strengthening civil society to enable farmers to participate in decision-making processes about their future?

In the Panghsang area, rubber, tea and oranges are being grown extensively. Gem and zinc mining are expanding, as is cigarette production. Expanded road infrastructure and consequent growth in trucking has led to Chinese marrying love-for-hire, and more cultivation of corn, sesame, soybeans, peanuts, fruit and cabbages. Success in alternatives depends largely on China. Thailand doesn’t impose tariffs on import of fruits grown under the UWSA control, to help the Wa renounce so much that is counter-productive in their way of life, but farmers remain with little voice in decision-making processes affecting their livelihoods. Both opium prices and wages rose at least 50% between 2003 and 2005; seasoned observers expect little else to change, but even right on the border, in April 1006, both opium and amphetamines are hard to find.

The Shan Human Rights Foundation estimated Shan refugees denied refugee status, but arrived in Thailand from 1996 to 2002, at over 230,000. Sunai Phasuk, a Thai academic and consultant for Human Rights Watch (HRW) said, “These people are not just fleeing war, but also forced labor, executions, mass relocations and systematic rape;” and Thailand is “violating international law” for denying basic humanitarian assistance to the Shan. A recent report by the New York-based NGO also documents the murder, rape, enslavement and brutal displacement of hundreds of thousands of civilians during the Burmese army’s long-running assault on Karen insurgents; some 650,000 people, says HRW, have been made homeless in eastern Burma alone. It is pointless to discuss whether Karen or Shan suffer more, but Mon I met in Rangoon, and even Burmese I met in Pagan, also told horror stories of murder, mayhem and suppression by “governmental authorities.”

The UN World Food Program is supplying rice and cereal grains to Wa and Kokang ex-poppy farmers, particularly in Kokang, Panghsang and Lashio and to some of the other many needy in the potentially wealthy country, but also reports inflation. A million ‘Internally Displaced Persons’, 42% in eastern areas and on the run from “scorched earth” policiesHuman Rights Watch calls ethnic cleansing… 140,000+ arein refugee camps along the western Thai border, many for 20 years now. Political reform and better economic management are more needed than charity; Burma lacks intelligent logistics, not rice.

Yangon isn’t the capital anymore (although Than Shwe doesn’t stay in the mysterious new place), and neither is there really a junta now. Than Shwe has become “father of the country”, and wants control of the Chinese border, for which purpose divisions among the frequently-feuding Wa would come in handy. China’s stake in the relocation program is unclear, but it has provided much towards the huge costs of Wa relocations to the southern border of Shan State. Chinese authorities may want tribal people who show no propensity towards assimilation as Chinese to relocate from Yunnan to a place where they may serve some political purpose. Wa leaders want to use their areas in the north for resettling Wa villagers from China… but the world, it seems, is more interested in profits and oil.

Meanwhile, displaced populations bring to the generally porous border a huge increase in dangerous disease: pneumonia, dysentery, hepatitis, malaria, dengue, smallpox, TB, typhoid, typhus, cholera, yaws, polio, yellow fever, blackwater fever, influenza, scabies, meningitis, leprosy and even humans infected with anthrax! One with anthrax was a Chinese “Wa” leader - hospitalized in Tachilek. Despite Thai law, tea pickers and other laborers daily cross the border, and traders and even big businessmen do regular, though often officially unsanctioned, cross-border commerce. The environment is being ruined, individuals lose integrity through involvement in drugs, others lose all sense of decency through systematic rape (certainly not helpful for containing HIV), cultures crumble – all for the sake of egotism among the small-minded wealthy and powerful. Ideals may seem anachronistic, and political involvement suspect; one becomes tempted to turn ones back to quietly just tend ones own garden, but meanwhile immune deficiency offers germs and viruses chance to rapidly develop new forms...

Burma has never known good governance, and drug trade and genocide in Shan State won’t stop without it. The governmnet of China doesn’t care about genocide or cultural extinction(s); it’s become focused (like the West) on exploitation

[tayto]

With respect.

Edited July 22, 2006 by tayto

[farangsay]

Monumental post !

Panorama and detail staggering !

[chang35baht]

Thanks Joel, but I think I read this article already.

[erg]

I am free on monday, Jeeeeezus Joel, are you trying to kill us.

[my friend I]

The last line says it all. Look how China used its veto in the U.N. to stop any action taking place in Sudan. Just happens that 12% of Chinas oil comes from Sudan.

Now that China has those naval bases they have priceless access to the I.O. & will no want to give them up.

For a country like Burma with little international exposure can only mean not much chance of things improving.

So much for the experts who suggest the way to democracy is free trade.

[chownah]

The last line says it all.

If the last line says it all....then.....what the heck was that HUGE build up to the last line all about?

[In the Rai!]

buddy you have to be taking the piss.

Maybe you should consider summarising your posts.

[Joel Barlow]

as the end of that didn't get included (and while Kurt Cobain sings "Here we are now, entertain us"), and to celebrate the good political news today:

The emerging situation

Most refineries in the eastern Shan area are controlled by Wei HseuhKang, wanted by both Thai and United States law enforcement. In 2003 he moved from near Monghsat to a northern area of Tangyan, given to him in 2001 by then SPDC Secretary-1 Khin Nyunt (the supposed master-spy elevated to Prime Minister then put under house arrest, who proposed turning Ho Mong into a tourist attraction – an idea sure to be revived). Wei’s refineries in Mong Ton and Monghsat are run by Yunnan Chinese, Chao Ching and Li Hsen. His brothers Wei HsuehLong and Wei HsuehYing (also Yunnanese) fled to the Wa States when Communists took over China, and were connected to the KMT-CIA spy network along the Burma-China border until the 1970s. Wei HsuehKang served as Khun Sa’s treasurer at Ban Hin Taek (now Thoed Thai) just south of the Thai-Burmese border (in Chiangrai). After 1989, the Wei brothers linked up with Wa president Bao Youxiang’s United Wa State Army (UWSA), but remained little known until named by a New York court, among eight senior Wa leaders indicted on charges of smuggling heroin and amphetamine to the USA. Xiao Minliang, Vice Chairman to Bao Youxiang, Ai Lone, Chief of Staff of the United Wa State Army, Zhao Wenxing, deputy Chief of Staff, Li Chengwu, a Kokang-Chinese hard-liner against Yangon serving as Bao’s military adviser, Vice-chairman Bo Lakham, who knows little Burmese but headed the Wa delegation to two sessions of the National Convention, are reported by S.H.A.N. as top cadre. These people are worrisome to both Yangon and Beijing, as they speak of themselves as a government. Wa’s don’t want to be Chinese anymore than they want to be Burmese, or under either’s authority. Important Chinese business communities in Mandalay and Yangon are growing rapidly; both Than Shwe and USWA are dependent on Chinese arms, and neither can stay isolated and intrangent much longer.

Methamphetamines, “yaba” (“crazy pills”) in Thai, are “ya kai” in Shan, according to S.H.A.N. translatable as “hard-working pills” (as in kayan: industrious, assiduous). In rural Shan State, people use the drug openly, to stay up to help at a ceremony or temple festival, or for extra “energy” in the fields; there’s no social stigma for those who use it. In the past few years, it’s become common for polite hosts in Shan State to offer visitors methamphetamines, with the traditional tea. This isn’t weird: varieties of drugs are accepted everywhere, and natural kinds are used pleasantly and successfully, within appropriate social context. Amphetamines are dangerous, but are known to have been used in moderation (doctors in the USA prescribed them freely when I was young, and many people took no more than their doctor recommended). Nasu Lahu-na (my wife) remembers when most people along the border were engaged in the drug trade: there were many rivalries, there was much pride, gossip and back-stabbing. She says people would burn with urges for revenge, and report rivals to police… Once somebody caught their favorite enemy out alone on a jungle path, cut his head off and hung it up. Nasu’s father forbade her to go out there, but she couldn’t resist, and snuck a look. There was easy money to be made, but it wasn’t, isn’t, a good trade. The Thai Ministry of Health estimated 2,650,000 meth addicts in 2001 (4.3% of population total and 91% of the total addict population); mornings going to work I’d see herds of thin post-adolescents with brightly colored hair loitering in filling-station lots, after discos closed at 7 a.m. Even today, entertainment places for Thai youth close well after tourist-oriented ones, no explanation offered.

Around Kengtung, farm hands sometimes now get paid in meth pills instead of money.  In 1994, a group of Thai dealers approached Khun Sa, but he spoke against meth: ‘Heroin is okay’, he reasoned, ‘our main customers are across the ocean. But, with yaba, we only have Thais for customers. If we start producing it, we’ll come face to face with Thailand. That’ll make our position more difficult.’ His uncle Khun Hseng (Chang Ping-yuan) was won over, though, and soon yaba produced in HoMong was of top quality. Drug producers in Shan State tried expanding into Extasy, but their chemists haven’t made a popular product (maybe good chemists don’t want to live in back woods). Wa and Kokang leaders could abandon heroin by establishing meth labs, and thn not need to worry about weather. Labs can be moved, and food farming gives a stabler economic base. Opium is making a temporary disappearing act (locally), but other drugs substitute (‘date rape’ drugs have certainly made a name for themselves). The yaba market was lucrative until Taksin’s Drug Wars, but customers remain in the Bangkok area, and India, Malaysia, Singapore, China and Korea. Amphetamines go to many of Myanmar’s armaments suppliers and other enablers. The Thai “War on Drugs” which started in 2003 with the murder - in just a couple of months - of thousands of possible small-timers (with minimal subsequent investigation, at best), has made Shan State traffickers avoid the northern Thai border, and sell only to long-term, well-trusted Thai contacts.  Thai newspapers still regularly report busts, but trafficking drugs into China has become preferable to down through Lashio and Mandalay to Moulmein, Kanchanaburi and Bangkok (though that still happens. Beijing replaced paramilitary police with five regular army regiments, to patrol the northern Shan-China border; corruption among border officials was contributing to the problem, espicially at Zegao and Ruili, opposite Muse (on the ‘Burma Road’). Many fewer Chinese officials currently enjoy the high-life in the gambling town of MongLa (on the border), than did just a few years ago. Taksin’s ‘War on Drugs’ forced drug operators to reroute their products, but a Chinese attitude that it’s better to die than be poor, means many replacement traffickers will be available. The 25 March, 2005 Bangkok Post reported 1.14 million addicts in China, equally divided between heroin and methamphetamine (quoting Yang Fengrui, spokesman for the Ministry of Public Security, as saying, “the situation has begun to deteriorate.”). The Wa have long been a Chinese ally, Shan State’s becoming Wa State; Beijing’s ruled by eager, perhaps desperate, expansionists.

Many Wa have recently relocated, or been relocated, to areas just north of the Thai/Myanmar border. Perhaps as many as 150,000 of these Wa are currently in the limbo of displaced people; tens of thousands of them were born in China and many of the new settlers are Han Chinese. One report says 300,000 people have been relocated, to cut off support for the SSA-South. Certainly, many Shans and Lahu have been evicted to make space for arriving Wa, but as the government in Yangon has cultivated good relations with China and Thailand, this has not resulted in a new ‘refugee crisis’. The Wa region along the Chinese border has passed another deadline to become drug-free; but what are viable alternatives to drug production? What can be done towards sustainable community-based development and strengthening civil society to enable farmers to participate in decision-making processes about their future?

An Akha displaced from just south of Mong Hsat by Wa newcomers asserted that Chinese were easily distinguishable from Wa: “There were some Chinese with them (the Wa settlers). They set up shops and sold various food items. They also made whiskey to sell from corn. I also saw some Chinese soldiers and officers with the Wa Army. They wore Wa uniforms, but they were whiter-skinned than the Wa, so it was easy to tell them apart. They spoke no language other than Chinese.” A report from the Mong Karn, east of Mong Hsat, mentions that among 300 new Wa households moving into Mong Karn village, were 30 Chinese households. New Chinese are particularly concentrated at Ban Hoong, south of Mong Hsat. There, about 1000 Chinese are help conduct Wei Hsiao Kang’s military and economic affairs.

The Wa area on the Chinese border is now pressured to become drug-free, but how are poor ex-cultivators to replace their lost income? What crop substitution projects and possibilities are there? Will there be reliable markets for the substitute crops? What can be done towards sustainable community-based development and strengthening civil society to enable farmers to participate in decision-making processes about their future?

In the Panghsang area, rubber, tea and oranges are being grown extensively. Gem and zinc mining are expanding, as is cigarette production. Expanded road infrastructure and consequent growth in trucking has led to Chinese marrying love-for-hire, and more cultivation of corn, sesame, soybeans, peanuts, fruit and cabbages. Success in alternatives depends largely on China. Thailand doesn’t impose tariffs on import of fruits grown under the UWSA control, to help the Wa renounce so much that is counter-productive in their way of life, but farmers remain with little voice in decision-making processes affecting their livelihoods. Both opium prices and wages rose at least 50% between 2003 and 2005; seasoned observers expect little else to change, but even right on the border, in April 1006, both opium and amphetamines are hard to find.

The Shan Human Rights Foundation estimated Shan refugees denied refugee status, but arrived in Thailand from 1996 to 2002, at over 230,000. Sunai Phasuk, a Thai academic and consultant for Human Rights Watch (HRW) said, “These people are not just fleeing war, but also forced labor, executions, mass relocations and systematic rape;” and Thailand is “violating international law” for denying basic humanitarian assistance to the Shan. An HRW report documents the murder, rape, enslavement and brutal displacement of hundreds of thousands of civilians during the Tatmadaw’s long-running assault on Karen insurgents: 650,000 made homeless in eastern Burma alone. It’s pointless to discuss who suffers more, Karen or Shan; Mon I met in Rangoon, and Burmese in Pagan, also told stories of murder and mayhem by “governmental authorities.”

The UN World Food Program is supplying rice and cereal grains to Wa and Kokang ex-poppy farmers, particularly in Kokang, Panghsang and Lashio and to some of the other many needy in the potentially wealthy country, but also reports inflation. A million ‘Internally Displaced Persons’, 42% in eastern areas and on the run from “scorched earth” policiesHuman Rights Watch calls ethnic cleansing… 140,000+ are in refugee camps along the western Thai border, many for 20 years now. Political reform and better economic management are more needed than charity; Burma lacks intelligent logistics, not rice.

Yangon isn’t the capital anymore (although Than Shwe doesn’t stay in the mysterious new place), and neither is there really a junta now. Than Shwe has become “father of the country”, and wants control of the Chinese border, for which purpose divisions among the frequently-feuding Wa would come in handy. China’s stake in the relocation program is unclear, but it has provided much towards the huge costs of Wa relocations to the southern border of Shan State. Chinese authorities may want tribal people who show no propensity towards assimilation as Chinese to relocate from Yunnan to a place where they may serve some political purpose. Wa leaders want to use their areas in the north for resettling Wa villagers from China… but the world, it seems, is more interested in profits and oil.

Meanwhile, displaced populations bring to the generally porous border a huge increase in dangerous disease: pneumonia, dysentery, hepatitis, malaria, dengue, smallpox, TB, typhoid, typhus, cholera, yaws, polio, yellow fever, blackwater fever, influenza, scabies, meningitis, leprosy and even humans infected with anthrax! One with anthrax was a Chinese “Wa” leader - hospitalized in Tachilek. Despite Thai law, tea pickers and other laborers daily cross the border, and traders and even big businessmen do regular, though often officially unsanctioned, cross-border commerce. The environment is being ruined, individuals lose integrity through involvement in drugs, others lose all sense of propriety through systematic rape (certainly not helpful for containing HIV), cultures crumble – all for the sake of egotism among the small-minded wealthy and powerful. Ideals may seem anachronistic, and political involvement suspect; one becomes tempted to turn ones back to quietly just tend ones own garden, but meanwhile immune deficiency offers germs and viruses chance to rapidly develop new forms... The most popular of Taksin’s populist policies, his 30 baht health scheme, has resulted in long hospital queues for pain-killers and antibiotics. The rampant, almost indiscriminant usage of antibiotics exacerbates the potential plague menace, and not just because doctors haven’t time to seriously investigate complaints or suggest behavior modifications: germs not only gain immunity to poisons, but both pain-killers and antibiotics weaken immune systems.

Burma has never known good governance, and drug trade and genocide in Shan State won’t stop without it. The government of China doesn’t care about genocide or cultural extinction(s); it’s become focused (like the West) on exploitation and profit. Many Chinese, though, recognize massive errors in their governance. Of Southeast Asian countries, the best-governed is semi-feudal Malaysia, where ethnic Malays get two votes while ethnic Chinese citizens only one. Modern, autocratic Singapore doesn’t mind if neighbors to the north receive drug flow; newly autocratic USA has lost moral legitimacy through inequitable “free trade” pacts, gross over-consumption, pollution, refusal to deal with global warming, and, of course, gross failure in regard to ‘terrorism’ and Iraq (illegal, inept invasion after mass-murder of innocents first through supplying Saddam Hussain then through ill-conceived sanctions). Mainland countries east of India and south of China can hardly pretend to honest, transparent governance, and are coming increasingly under the sway of Chinese… North America will fall further and faster if it doesn’t clean up its act by taking real interest in justice, human rights, environmental preservation, good governance and corporate restraint, instead of media manipulation, crowd-control weaponry, and ‘regime change’ - which should be the business only of the UN and local populations. Is there even an ‘international community’ to respond to genocide anymore? Why are there so few people like Guy Horton, documenting problems and making varieties of important information (such as the boom in “crowd control” weaponry) readily accessible, in organized fashion, through the news media or on the Net?

Nowadays druggies and some of the young set like to go to Laos to stay with poor people and try drugs, but anyone with even a shred of pretension to integrity will notice the negative effect doing that has on local communities visited. Unconstructive over-indulgence gets a stamp of approval from people of enviable position; greed and avarice are rewarded while dignity mislaid. Dope, while natural remains fairly innocent, but commercialized becomes a tool of exploitative greed, used against the already oppressed. Mess with it, and sooner or later, and more likely sooner, you will be, and feel, betrayed. One doesn’t really get to choose to join a mafia, or other secret organization; one must already be in place, before one even knows it… It’s not only other people who often aren’t what they seem, but sometimes also even you own self can suddenly seem quite different, changed or revealed… Remember, you can’t buy respect, or trust, or love.

Into the 70's, in rural Thailand, many households had a small ganja field; bai kratom (Mitragyna speciosa, probably an alkaloid), pretty poppies and opium were common, and older people still used betel… Then big money took over the world, promoting ‘heroin chic’ (sheek), expensive alcohol, corporate control… When Taksin started his first drug war, a billion methamphetamine pills were sold annually in Thailand; over 3 million people took them (perhaps only 300,000 were drug dependent). But the drugs war is also a race war. Border minorities were targeted for brutal police action; there was torture, and the number of dead vastly exceeded the body counts quoted. Thailand's poorest suffered, also people threatening to the powerful: over 400,000 people 'surrendered' themselves for treatment, some of whom surely had little or no involvement, but ended up on corporate-management style target lists police still can’t ignore. With marketing and market expansion dominant forces of control, stimulants have utility, and can still be purchased – expensively – in the country’s urban center; meanwhile arts and entertainment are losing out to golf and fine dining. Self-congratulations far more satisfying than facing truth, values that generated society, as well as society’s future, become seen as irrelevant. A task force of salaried scientists and engineers, in politicos dreams, will surely overcome all problems! Some believe development of a sophisticated form of slavery may be necessary for a world at peace. I don’t.

[In the Rai!]

[tayto]

Joel , the first time you posted your drivel I was respectfullly bored.

Now, I think you are using this board just to piss people off and judging by previous posters you are boring the cr** out of everybody here.

Keep your linguistic drivel to your books and give us a break.

[Limbo]

Thanks Joel!

It is a story we all have to read (if you like it or not), because living in this area we should know what happened (and still happens) across our borders, as it was (and still is) of the greatest importance for a better understanding of present day Chiang Rai. And even to a greater extend as one might expect or believe.

We are living in the Southern point of the 'second' Golden Triangle.

The first one was the sandbank in the Mekong River at Ban Sobrak where actually gold was found.

Ban Sobrak, a very little village twenty years ago, which is now re-created into an artificial tourist destination.

The second refers to the time that the area inbetween Chiang Rai, Kentung and Luang Prabang, the points of a geographical triangle, was infamous for the production of opiates.

The adjective 'gold' referred to the enormeous profits which then were made.

Nowadays our area is referred to as the Economic Quadrangle, of which Kunming (Yunnan) became the most northern point.

As 'Lannarebirth' wrote, we can expect an enormous boom, when free trade and Chinese tourism become facts. The new top-class hotels are not built for European package tours, that's for sure. Watch the expansion of Mae Sai and Tachilek, the activity in the harbour of Chiang Saen, the big investments in infrastructure in the whole area (the roads direction Yunnan, the bridges planned), the study programs Chinese language etc etc).

When I was told twenty years ago that this would happen, I just didn't believe it. It is incredible how fast things went.

Limbo

[Joel Barlow]

I wonder how I am imposing on certain crybabies who have posted above.

must suspect folk who feel need to contribute nothing but cash

[In the Rai!]

I wonder how I am imposing on certain crybabies who have posted above.

must suspect folk who feel need to contribute nothing but cash

Joel,

Please believe me when I tell you I am not trying get into an argument with you over this but after reading the majority of replies I feel you must get the gist of what peoples reactions are to your lengthy post.

I dont think we are cry babies. I just think that we all agree that if we wanted to read 25,000 words about the north than we would go out and buy a book or search it on the internet. If there was sometrhing in the book that we did not agree with than we would post "the question" for others to comment on, but posting 25,000 and not asking anyone for an opinion at the end is just plain boring.

Please learn to summarise or refrain from posting such lengthy posts.

I have one question for you Joel about contibuting nothing but cash.

Please explain?

Are you suggesting that all we are contributing to society is cash? Is that what you are trying to say?

cheers

In the Rai

[svenivan]

Hi Joel,

I really tried to read your second long post. I can understand what you write (most of the time) but please tell me in 100 words what you mean. There are a lot of facts but what is the purpose for it?

What do you want to tell us????

Please Joel, try not make it complicated, keep it simple!

Cheers!

[tayto]

I wonder how I am imposing on certain crybabies who have posted above.

must suspect folk who feel need to contribute nothing but cash

Any body who feels like contributing cash, there is a very worthy cause here and I guarantee your money will be spent wisely.

Account name; Tayto.sort no:3433667712 . Bank of Neverland:

[mumbojumbo]

Any body who feels like contributing cash, there is a very worthy cause here and I guarantee your money will be spent wisely.

Account name; Tayto.sort no:3433667712 . Bank of Neverland:

Micheal,

I knew you weren't hiding in Bahrain or London any more, but why Chiangrai. I knew the ranch

was big too, but you got your own bank there too?? Welcome to CR, and i hope people contribute to

your request. I know the money flow to you isn't what it used to be. How about a freak concert here someday???

MJ

[tayto]

Any body who feels like contributing cash, there is a very worthy cause here and I guarantee your money will be spent wisely.

Account name; Tayto.sort no:3433667712 . Bank of Neverland:

Micheal,

I knew you weren't hiding in Bahrain or London any more, but why Chiangrai. I knew the ranch

was big too, but you got your own bank there too?? Welcome to CR, and i hope people contribute to

your request. I know the money flow to you isn't what it used to be. How about a freak concert here someday???

MJ

I will give you one, if you let me sleep over.

[Mymechew]

I wonder how I am imposing on certain crybabies who have posted above.

must suspect folk who feel need to contribute nothing but cash

Joel,

If you transfer your dissertation to paper, put on a nice cover with a provocative title I will gladly pay cash for it . . . but only if you promise to never again post at such length.

Mymechew

[Joel Barlow]

Opium wasn’t invented by Farang, but that’s who turned it into money. Western shortcomings (bigotry, condescension, short-sighted self-indulgence, materialism etc) have contributed to a precarious situation here: hundreds of thousands of distressed, disease-susceptible tribal peoples are in the throes of complete change. Their guidance is almost exclusively from Chinese, for whom they are expendable (yes there are NGOs helping in MaeSot, but can they help the refugees build new lives?).

Chinese influence in the region will grow – and is greater than commonly realized. The non-interference doctrine of ASEAN countries has been a gift to Chinese cartels. Blind optimism and assertion of competence will not help – inflation in Myanmar is rampant, nuclear technology there not feasible, and instability bound to further overflow borders.

Burmese people, whether Burmans or others in that country, need greater say in their own livelihood. Teak forest is mostly gone, and much of traditional ways, but narcotics could be sold for medicinal use. Why not? Is it so important to protect vested interests? It’s like W Bush protecting fetuses while causing death beyond what you will see tallied.

Notice the amazing exchange-rate changes lately? Amidst growing instability, decreased export trade, foreign investment and tourist spending, the baht gets stronger and stronger. Why? If I get too blunt and direct here (as is my typical wont), the potential for endangering myself is high. When organized crime gets big, it doesn’t slow down from nowhere to go, but attempts to gain even more power.

Heard of the Black Plague? That’s what happened when Mongols spread peace and prosperity throughout most of the Eurasian continent. New roads, and refugees, could result in a parallel situation. There are alternatives for the oppressed and endangered north and west of here, but why is this thrown into Chinese hands? Taksin has asked for construction of an ‘industrial estate’ here in this province, to be staffed by newly immigrant Chinese!

In the USA, Asian protection mobs extorting from Asian grocers are endemic and cruel. Our police here find it easy to learn nearly everything, and are good, but with sufficient influence brought to bear, things could change. This place used to be run by ‘gangs’ (as it were), and it could happen again. And acknowledge it or not, resentment of Farang is high (a neighbor who used to have a Democrat Party logo on his house clearly showed his, saying something like: “It must be really nice to be able to come here and have a pretty young girlfriend…”).

Development advocates like to suggest sweat-shops are nothing different from the unappealing aspects of early English industrialization, and ignore how much Nike money goes to Tiger Woods, as opposed to, to Thai workers (many of whom recently lost their jobs by pointing out that extreme inequity, an inequity common in recent CEO salaries and perks, among other places). Resentful feelings can’t be just swept under the rug, or dealt with by the crowd-control techniques the Clintons invested so incredibly much in, and US marines are right now teaching in BKK.

The world needs its variety; people need their choices and self-respect. Development will continue, but there can also be new disasters to rival that of Pol Pot. I’m not trying to suggest the individuals of our little expat “community” here can achieve much towards improving the outlook, but am sure it’s better to be informed than ignorant.

[JimsKnight]

<SNIP>

The world needs its variety; people need their choices and self-respect. Development will continue, but there can also be new disasters to rival that of Pol Pot. I’m not trying to suggest the individuals of our little expat “community” here can achieve much towards improving the outlook, but am sure it’s better to be informed than ignorant.

Hey!

You're spewing out excessive tripe when people ask you questions.

Do you actually answer people on this thread or is this a 'Joels Thread Only, all posters bar myself shall be ignored?'

I've got a great idea, why don't I ask the moderators to give you your own section of the forum to post the reams of data flowing out from the lab.

[meadish_sweetball]

It must be really nice to be able to come here and have a pretty young girlfriend…

Have you considered that he was perhaps just making an observation, and not necessarily meant anything disapproving?

[psychedelix47]

Hey, looking at that dragon avatar, I wonder if ol Barlow has more than an academic relationship with that stuff the grow in the hills.

But yeah, some interesting observations, never noticed any of this when I was trekking around Chiang Rai, I think the hillpeople are really cool, all good vibes and that.

Pity there's all that politics going on.

[mumbojumbo]

Do you actually answer people on this thread or is this a 'Joels Thread Only, all posters bar myself shall be ignored?'

I've got a great idea, why don't I ask the moderators to give you your own section of the forum to post the reams of data flowing out from the lab.

Agree, give him his own thread to babble, most of us don't want to read or ignore his long posts, and if we are interested in the subject, we can go buy one of his best sellers.

[tayto]

Again Joel has stired the hornets nest.

I have to say I admire Joel and some of his writtings and indeed would agree a lot with most of his postings but come on, this pasting of text and long winded articles really has to stop.

I really think his books are the place for these articles or as a member suggested, on his own webpage.

Joel, heres another place you could post your articles

/link removed/

______________________________________________________________________

If you google to 'Chiang Rai' (or Chiangrai) you will find a lot of Joel's work out there in space. He has been on the first google-page for a couple of years, but now you might find him on the second page.

Good luck!

Limbo

Edited July 29, 2006 by Limbo

[Joel Barlow]

as if there were lots else to read on CR forum, or any of you had to read what's posted here...

[JRingo]

as if there were lots else to read on CR forum, or any of you had to read what's posted here...

That's right on both accounts.

However Joel, if you shortened you paragraphs or indented more often or doubled spaced

more often your posts would be easier to read.

Keep up the good work.

[mumbojumbo]

as if there were lots else to read on CR forum, or any of you had to read what's posted here...

And who is the cry-baby now??

[Mymechew]

as if there were lots else to read on CR forum, or any of you had to read what's posted here...

That's right on both accounts.

However Joel, if you shortened you paragraphs or indented more often or doubled spaced

more often your posts would be easier to read.

Keep up the good work.

Joel,

It seems to me that many of those who have responded did read your essays but have suggested a more appropriate forum or format for them. TV does have blogs and your own personal blog site seems the best place for your writings.

Mymechew

[z21rhd]

I wonder how I am imposing on certain crybabies who have posted above.

must suspect folk who feel need to contribute nothing but cash

This is the first time that I have visited the Chiang Rai forum. I must say that I broke down in tears.

Joel , is it possible that you are unaware of the meaning of plagiarism ? It appears that although you may not know the meaning, you have certainly mastered the craft.