Burma: A Forgotten Land
With a thaw in relations between the ruling junta and the opposition, Burma is slowly opening up to the world
Asia's AIDS Crisis
The Chinese-Burmese border is the center of Asia's newest epidemic (September 30, 2002)
Chinese Junk
Over the past decade, China has become a major conduit for drugs from the Golden Triangle (May 20, 2002)
Soldiers of Fortune — page 5
Whatever the reasons for the reduction, Bao's chances of meeting his 2005 deadline for the eradication of poppies as a cash crop look increasingly dicey. Opium will remain "the economic backbone of the villagers," predicts a bleak U.N. report on the Wa hills, so long as new economic ventures in the area benefit only UWSA leaders and Chinese investors. Meanwhile, Bao's bombastic declarations on opium reduction have drowned out a more alarming development: since the relocations, the UWSA's production of methamphetamine has skyrocketed. "Maybe the Wa have it in their minds to scale back opium production," notes a senior Western antinarcotics official. "But they're not making any pledges to get out of methamphetamines." Bangkok police recently seized a record consignment of 3 million yaba pills. That's just a fraction of what is now streaming into the country from the Wa hills. Indeed, experts monitoring Southeast Asia's drug trade say Bao's Long March is not about eradicating opium production. It's about expanding the sphere of Wa influence and gaining greater access to the Thai border, which will facilitate methamphetamine distribution.
From Mong Yawn, the southern UWSA headquarters, the yaba trade is spreading in all directions. To the southwest, the UWSA has set up several factories around the Burmese border town of Myawaddy to pump pills into central Thailand. To the east, where UWSA troops are now firmly encamped on the Mekong River, drug running has surged across the poorly policed waters into Laos—a perfect place for further Wa expansion, notes an antinarcotics expert in the capital Vientiane. And hundreds of miles north, at the hardscrabble Burmese frontier town of Tamu, the arrival of Wa businessmen has coincided with a rising tide of yaba into the adjoining Indian state of Manipur.
What's more, the UWSA's freedom of movement around Burma—a nation bordering on five others—has also enabled it to launch a menacing new trade: selling weapons to Asia's ethnic insurgents. According to intelligence sources, the Wa army in the past two years completed deals that sent rifles and other munitions to Naga rebels in northeast India.
"If we have any more opium here after 2005," Bao once declared, reaching for a classic Wa metaphor, "you can come and chop my head off." But these days, as the cash-rich UWSA continues to expand unchecked, Burma's neighbors have much more than an opium problem. They have a Wa problem.
Darkness falls on Gawng Lang. There is no electricity in this tiny village, but the sky is brilliant with stars. Suddenly, a bright light arcs across the Milky Way. "A plane," declares village elder Ai Sin. No, too fast for a plane—and too slow for a meteor. Perhaps it's one of the satellites that the U.S. government routinely deploys to monitor the poppy fields surrounding Gawng Lang and hundreds of Wa villages like it.
What satellites can't monitor is the misery of the poppy growers living under the UWSA's unquestioned authority. In a typical year, Sam Rung, a wounded veteran of Burma's now defunct Communist Party, produces about 1.6 kilograms of opium, which he then sells for about $12 to the UWSA. "We're not allowed to keep any for ourselves," says Sam Rung. Nor are farmers allowed to smoke it. Opium is too precious to be consumed at the source. "If they catch you they put you in a pit for one or two years," says Ai Sin. The pit is a traditional Wa punishment: a three-meter-deep, two-meter-wide square hole in the ground where addicts go cold turkey in their own waste.
The Wa army metes out similar punishment to soldiers found using yaba. According to the New York City-based Human Rights Watch, repeat offenders are shot. There is a ready supply of replacements. Every Wa family that has two or three sons must send at least one of them to a UWSA training camp; a family with four or five boys must send two. Some 2,000 troops are under 18, and as many as 800 are under 15, claims Human Rights Watch. The Wa are still good at dying. By one estimate, war has killed one in four Wa men in recent decades. "These deaths have been devastating for the villages," says Hideyuki Takano, a Japanese writer who spent six months in 1996 living with the Wa. "With so few young men around, the social fabric of traditional Wa life is unraveling."
