All text and photos © copyright by Richard S. Ehrlich
Opium Warlord Asks U.S. Help
By Richard Ehrlich
BANGKOK, Thailand (IPS)
Opium warlord Khun Sa,
grappling with a new Burmese military offensive and international
heroin seizures, has asked U.S. President Bill Clinton to help turn
his northeast Burma drug zone into an independent nation in exchange
for an end to smuggling from his territory.
Khun Sa's Shan United Army have had sporadic clashes with the Burmese
military in the past. But lately, fighting has intensified and getting
bloodier in the last few months.
Since Dec. 13, more than 10,000 Burmese soldiers have been engaged in
savage battles with the forces of Khun Sa around his stronghold at Ban
Muang Jod. Thai police officer, monitoring the fighting from the Thai
border town of Mae Hong Son, estimated that at least 25 of the Khun Sa
men and scores of Burmese soldiers have been killed so far.
"How much longer the cause of the drug crusade will take is anybody's
guess, but one thing is clear: as long as hostilities continue, both
the people's sufferings and drug production -- strange but inseparable
bedfellows -- will go on," he warns in the letter. U.S. officials have
said 60 percent of the world's heroin supply is from Khun Sa's section
of Burma that is part of 'Golden Triangle', where Thailand, Burma and
Laos meet.
International drug authorities say total opium from the Golden
Triangle ranges from 1,200 to 2,200 tonnes a year. This season's crop
is said to be the largest. The 66-year-old Khun Sa controls thousands
of impoverished Shan peasants who grow opium poppy pods.
In his letter to Clinton, the drug lord says peasants who stopped
growing opium would need "assistance in their crop substitution
programmes. A period of five years would be adequate for this
purpose".
But U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) officials dismiss his request
for Shan independence as a poor attempt to justify his illegal
operations. International drug authorities say Khun Sa uses his Shan
United Army to protect opium caravans and to collect some eight
million dollars worth of 'taxes' annually on all drugs, timber, jade,
ivory and antiques that are smuggled through his territory into
northern Thailand and southern China. In 1989, a U.S. grand jury
indicted him on ten separate charges for allegedly smuggling more than
2,575 kilos of heroin into the United States.
Thai officials in Mae Hong Son, some 30 kms from the fighting, said
Rangoon's attack has caused hilltribe people to flee the area and
cross the mountainous border into Thailand. Khun Sa himself is thought
to be moving his followers to safer mountaintops.
A representative of the opium kingpin, however, has told reporters
that Burmese troops soon retreated after staging the attacks, which he
said were aimed only at impressing an unofficial delegation of four
U.S. congressmen visiting Rangoon.
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Richard S Ehrlich is a Bangkok-based journalist who has reported news from Asia since 1978. He is co-author of "Hello My Big Big Honey!", a non-fiction book of investigative journalism.
His web page is
http://www.oocities.org/asia_correspondent