Wa Warriors: Soldiers in the UWSA are the world's most heavilty armed narco-traffickers
We reach Gawng Lang village at dusk. At first, the only signs of life are the smoke of cooking fires seeping through thatched roofs and the muffled clatter of food being prepared. Then we notice the children. Half-naked, their bellies bloated by malnutrition, they watch from beneath the stilt houses with dumbstruck curiosity. Soon the women emerge, dressed in handwoven black smocks and gripping slender, silver pipes between their teeth. They stare and giggle at us, waiting for their husbands, uncles and brothers to arrive. Wearing ragged military fatigues, the men, when they finally materialize, seem without exception to be among the oldest members of the hamlet. Only later do we discover where all the young men have gone.
Gawng Lang sits on a lonely hilltop in northeast Burma, sheltered by gently swaying bamboo. None of its 400 inhabitants has seen a white man before. But then, very few white men have ever seen a Wa, the most fascinating, seldom met and impoverished of Burma's myriad tribes. Until the 1970s, many Wa strayed from their hilltop redoubts only to chop off human heads, which they believed to be powerful totems against disease and bad harvests. Neighboring tribes have long loathed and feared them. Among the Shan, Burma's largest ethnic minority, a mother anxious to hush her restless child might still whisper, "Shhh! A Wa is coming!"
From the nearest Chinese border town, it takes five hours of hiking over hauntingly beautiful mountains to reach the village. Five hours, that is, for a city-softened journalist. Even elderly Wa can cover the distance in less than two. The Wa are so accustomed to climbing steep terrain that they complain of sore feet when walking on level ground. Gawng Lang's inhabitants don't receive many visitors, but after recovering from their initial surprise, they are both hospitable and curious. "Tell me," says Ai Sin, a wiry 42-year-old who serves us rice and vegetables by guttering lamplight. "I have heard that when it is day in the Wa hills, it is dark in America. Can this be true?"
The Wa no longer chop heads, yet their ferocious and demonic image remains intact. Dawn reveals why: the sloping fields surrounding Gawng Lang are planted with thousands of opium poppies, their fresh green shoots pushing up through the mist-dampened earth. We also learn in the morning why there are no young men around. They have all been conscripted into the 20,000-strong United Wa State Army (UWSA)—a formidable force of tribal soldiers dubbed by the U.S. State Department as the world's "most heavily armed narco-traffickers." Burma in 2001 was the largest producer of opium in the world (Afghanistan ranked second), and the UWSA dominates the country's opium and heroin business. It also controls some 80% of Burma's equally lucrative trade in methamphetamine pills, a cheap and highly addictive drug better known in Asia by its Thai name yaba, or crazy medicine. Together, these businesses earn the UWSA's Elite commanders and their associates up to $550 million a year, according to TIME's research. It's an incomprehensible sum for the people of Gawng Lang, who see little of the spoils and go about their medieval existence much as their ancestors did.
In Thailand, a tidal wave of yaba has ripped through schools, slums and nightclubs, leaving a quarter of a million addicts in its wake. With narcotics experts and Thai army officials expecting a billion pills to pour in next year, many Thais regard the UWSA as the gravest threat to their society and national security since the 1970s communist insurgencies. Sending an aggressive message to Rangoon and its drug-dealing Wa allies, the Thai army last spring staged a troop buildup along the kingdom's border on a scale not seen since World War II. Yet the scourge is anything but contained. The UWSA is now diversifying into gunrunning while also expanding operations geographically into Laos, the Chinese province of Yunnan and the turbulent states of northeast India. Shipments of yaba are turning up in Europe, Australia and America. And in an ominous extension of its military reach, the UWSA has broken out of its traditional territory by forcibly relocating tens of thousands of Wa villagers to strategic swatches of land along the Thai-Burmese border—a Stalinesque forced exodus little noticed by the outside world.
How did a once isolated hill tribe grow so powerful, so quickly, transforming itself into an international crime syndicate to rival Colombia's drug cartels? The man we hoped might answer this question is the UWSA's commander, Bao Youxiang. Little is known about "Chairman Bao," as he prefers to be called, and few Westerners have ever met him. But his reputation, fueled by rumor, is gaudy, befitting the lord of a narco-fiefdom. Bao is reputedly so rich that he would need two trucks to carry around all his money. He is rumored to have once had four of his own men pistol-whipped to death for conspiring against him. Also, he likes bowling.
To meet Bao, we plunged into the lawless hills of northeast Burma—to the heart of an empire built on guns, drugs and blood.
