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 6
At first, the villagers shyly refuse to talk about their lives as serfs of the army. But later, in the gloomy interior of one house, traditional Wa rice wine begins to flow, and so does the anger. "They don't help us at all!" shouts a villager. "They gave us money to pay for a teacher, but that's it. Then some U.N. people came and handed out leaflets promising food and clothing. We saw the leaflets but nothing else. The Wa army took everything." Outside Panghsang and Mong Yawn, there are no hospitals. When asked what happens to villagers who fall gravely ill, Ai Sin replies flatly, "They die." Curable diseases killed five of his nine children in infancy.
Though Wa peasants know little else but poverty, disease and war, their de facto leader Bao is nevertheless revered. They call him uncle. "He's a very good man," says Ai Sin. "If he says he'll do something, he does it." Says another elder: "All the Wa love him." Unconvincing as they might sound to outsiders, these sentiments seem genuine. Bao may have given little else to his beleaguered people, but he has at least given them pride, plus the apparent respect of an erstwhile enemy, Burma. The otherwise spartan bamboo walls of many Wa huts bear a poster of Bao with Burma's much feared military intelligence chief, Lieut. General Khin Nyunt. They are shown walking side by side, like equals.
Khin Nyunt, who brokered the 1989 cease-fire that launched the UWSA, still visits Panghsang annually—a sign that cozy relations with Rangoon will continue. It is no mean feat for the Wa to have achieved this special relationship, which affords them extraordinary autonomy in this despotic nation.
Bao is lord of the Wa, but he is also a player in a larger, Asia-wide game. For Burma's generals, the 10,000 UWSA troops now scattered along the border with Thailand serve as a proxy army in their decades-long fight against Shan rebels. The Wa army is also a self-financing frontier security force—Rangoon's very own "600-pound gorilla on the border," as a diplomat memorably put it. In May, the UWSA fought alongside Burmese troops in clashes with the Thai army, which Burma accuses of aiding the Shan. Just last week, Burmese troops were preparing for a fresh dry-season offensive against the Shan in which Wa troops will again participate.
Burma has little incentive to check UWSA expansion, and Thailand seems unable to. Raids by Thai police this year seized an estimated $7.9 million worth of Thailand-based assets allegedly belonging to southern commander Wei Xuegang. The haul included land, gold, mansions and luxury cars. But the UWSA's activities poison relations between Rangoon and Bangkok. The Wa issue has also created a dangerous rift between senior Thai military officers, who urge stronger measures to fight the UWSA and its drugs, and senior Thai politicians, who prefer to improve ties with Rangoon by fostering legitimate business and trade.
China is the one power in Asia whose opinion counts both in Rangoon and Panghsang. It has been suggested by Western diplomats that China backed Bao's relocation scheme in the hope that narcotics smuggling into Yunnan and beyond would decrease. There is evidence the gambit has failed. In April, with help from the DEA, authorities in the mainland commercial city of Shenzhen seized 357 kilograms of heroin that had originated in Wa territory. No wonder a drug official for Yunnan has described Bao's commitment to fighting drugs as "only lip service."
Indeed, Bao has more friends than enemies in China, including the numerous officials who have aided his highly visible enterprises in Yunnan. His interview with TIME ends because he has a business meeting to attend. A feast is laid out on a nearby table, but the Chairman isn't eating. However, he will join his foreign guests in a glass of fiery Wa State Rice Wine, made in his own factory. "Ganbei!" cries Bao, and knocks it down in one. Then he shakes hands and marches from the room—purposeful, confident, a Wa tribesman with his head very firmly on his shoulders.
