Save The Akha: The Thai-Burma Border Drugwar: Drugwar.com

Save The Akha: The Thai-Burma Border Drug War

Opium sap is the premier traditional medicinal in this part of the world. It is effective medicine, and was, in fact, the most widely physician-prescribed medicine in the United States in 1918. Dr. Marie Nyswander, the popularizer of the politically acceptable “methadone maintenance”: “There is a pattern of self-limitation or restraint in opium smoking in countries where it is socially acceptable. It is common for natives in these countries to indulge in opium smoking one night a week much as Americans may indulge in alcoholic beverages at a Saturday night party.... families who accept opium smoking as part of their culture are mindful of its dangers much as we are mindful of the dangers of overindulgence in alcohol.” The Akha have no problem with opium sap - they have a problem with the military forces competing for Akha land - for control, that is, of the raw opium crop and the heroin trade that they run.

The Akha hill tribe have been living in the heart of the golden triangle on either side of borders for over one hundred years. They have seen the British insist on opium production, drug lords, and now the insistence that it stop by the Americans. However the Akha can also remember loading more than bananas on the planes of Air America for which they built runways near their villages.

The criminalization of drugs makes the economics of supply and demand drive a lucrative drug trade in the region. Heroin goes to the west and other destinations. It all moves through the Akha back yard. Raising opium for heroin production is hard work. As well, much opium is raised for medicine and smoking, certainly not all for heroin. Whatever the case, even refining heroin requires laborers. The Akha find themselves in these jobs for lack of better ones. Not because they like to work hard for small coins.

Meanwhile, the need for drugs from their neighborhood bring with it arrests and imprisonment in a major hypocrisy imposed by the west. This tears up the lives of the Akha families which live vastly below the poverty line.

However, it is blantantly obvious, that while the US and Thailand may be spending billions on a drug war they are spending nothing on food security, land rights or poverty reduction in the Akha villages. It can also be said, that the Akha made billions in profits for the western traffickers in heroin, now used and abandoned, they are not needed.

Admiral Fargo

Since summer 2000 when Admiral Fargo promised the Thai Government logistic support in the drug war, we have seen an immediate escalation of hostilities along the border with Burma as well as a significant increase in the quantity and cost of military equipment, vehicles and personell in border areas. All areas that the Akha live in.

The emphasis in this drug war is on enforcement with ZERO attention paid to the conditions of the villagers in these same border areas. Name the village? The equipment however is in the millions of dollars. While we couldn't even get AM General to talk to us about a suitable military style Humvee for medical service to the Akha, the military ones with guns mounted are running everywhere.

Since we got the results of the Admiral's promises, with none of the benefits (like what the war tools manufacturers got) to the poor, we thought it might be real cool just to let everyone know who this Admiral Fargo is who promises war to a place he's never been to. Cause we got the war.

These brave young Karen rebels, calling themselves God's Army, were ruthlessly executed - as a Thai political statement. Resisting being reduced to opium sharecroppers by the nazi Burma regime, but trapped between the cooperating Burma and Thai armies, these ten staged a political protest, January 25, 2000. Thailand's military, the previous week, bombed 200 innocent Karen refugees from SLORC brutality cowering just inside the Thai border. The Thai military was forcibly preventing wounded Karen rebels from crossing from Burma into neutral Thailand.

This prompted the young Karens to storm a hospital in the Thai border town of Ratchaburi, taking 500 patients and staff hostage. Thus capturing the attention of the media, one of the rebels told a Thai Channel Seven news cameraman allowed into the hospital, "We would like to ask the Thai authorities to tell the army to stop shelling us." A nurse interviewed on a mobile telephone by the ITV television network said: "I do not think they intend to hurt anyone. They seem very hungry. The men went to the canteen and asked for a pot of boiled rice." The Thai Interior Minister, Mr Sanan Kachornprasart, added that the hostage-takers were demanding Thai doctors treat their wounded. Having made their statement, the rebels then peacefully surrendered. No one had been hurt. The surrenderees were immediately beaten with rifle butts and then repeatedly shot in the face at point blank range with small caliber revolvers.

At the very moment this was all going down I was full on squaring off with forestry and third army Col. Sawat in Chiangrai over the forced eviction of Huuh Mah Akha which I stopped in that confrontation at the Chiangrai Office. Believe me I was noting what was going on down there.

The Burma army is slowly turning all of the Karens into opium sharecroppers, as it has the Wa - all in the name of the anti-drug effort, of course. The current Thai competition with the Burma army is nothing near all-out war, simply negotiating for control of that multi-billion dollar trade. As we have seen, these traditional border competitors readily cooperate to knock out any threat to their massive drugs-for-arms trade. Legalization of opium sap, of course, and medicalization of heroin, would be the ultimate threat, since it would collapse the value of these commodities, making them useless as a source of military funding. That's why the Burma Army, the premier heroin trading institution in the world, is "anti-drug." That's also why it's armed and financed by the same American defense contractors that finance the Thais - in the name of the anti-drug effort, of course.

Don't be fooled by border issues for a minute here in Thailand. Peace Peace they say. Well, read between the lines. Today's Bangkok post said that a 20,000 man five country joint military project will run from 15 May till 29 May of this year, Cobra Gold 2001 with some 5,000 plus US troops, Singapore, Malaysia and some others.

Where? (now note the vague words) "In the rugged border terrain of Chiangrai Province." This is exactly where villages like Huai Sah Leh, Huuh Mah Akha (army tried to evict last year as you recall, which I blocked) Loh Mah Cheh, Huuh Yoh, Hua Mae Kom, Pah Nmm, Bpah Mah Hahn, Meh Maw and a score of other Akha villages are. This is not vacant land. The Akha farm here. There is a major effort to totaly destroy these people.

There will be live fire excercises. Now just the %@#! where are the Akha suppose to be farming while all this is going on? They already lost two months in the fields because the big PUSSY Thai army couldn't knock a few stupid instigating shans in the head, had to shell the shit out of some Burmese troops and then had to militarize the entire Akha border from BEHIND AKHA village positions.

So just what will these people eat?

We need ANYONE who can put us in contact with a US Senator or Rep who would be opposed to all this so this can be made public and stopped! NOW! We need ANYONE who can tell us where exactly the ops are going to be held. There is not an inch of land up here on the border that the Akha don't farm, have in fallow or traverse on a regular basis.

This is why America is always sticking its head in where it doesn't belong, the UGLY american, stirring up crap in someone's back yard and the pawns and peasants get totally stepped on. No one has told these villagers that this is coming. Nothing tells that this is a drug interdiction effort. So how will they interdict, talk to trees, ask them if they are doing more than growing leaves? Or will it mean village harassment and traffic on the road harrassment about pills, opium and such? Makes me want to go right out and buy a bunch of US flags so I can teach the Akha how to bloody burn them.

Extremely pissed off, Had enough of this fucking drug war, Matthew, Chiangrai, Thailand
Friday, April 06, 2001 2:15 PM

Village Crators

Joint U.S. Military Advisory Group Thailand (JUSMAG) Joint Task Force-Full Accounting (JTF-FA) Dear Sirs:

I read in today's Bangkok Post (April 6) that there is a planned Cobra Gold 2001 Excercise with five plus countries and quite a large contingent of troops scheduled for the dates between May 15 and May 29 of this year in Chiangrai Province "rugged mountain border areas".

The article stated live fire excercises.

Well, there are only one kind of mountains of a rugged nature that also have a border in Chiangrai province and these mountains are full of Akha villages or other hilltribe. Furthermore, past articles noted that this was going to be a "drug interdiction" excercise. Naturally this will include police, army and local people as the "clients".

These people have already been battered sufficiently by Thai Army policy of forced relocation going on better than ten years now, in violation of their rights and international norms, forestry taking their rice food land with the guns of the army backing them up and now this foolish border incident that kept many of the villages out of their farming fields for two months while the Thai army hid behind their villages lobbing mortars over the top. Very brave.

So what now are they to expect, more lost time while thousands of soldiers glory boy it through their mountain fields and villages? These people are receiving no poverty relief aid, and this operation is going to cost in the millions of dollars, with these unsponsored hill tribe people being the "clients" of this thoughtful action.

No village chiefs have been informed of these coming events. Possibly this is why villagers have no interest in cooperating regarding a "DRUG WAR" because mostly it is a war against them.

Can you please specify by longitude and latitude or town name the exact regions in which these excercises are planned? In Chiangrai Province there are more than 135 Akha villages, most of them in the "rugged mountain border areas".

Matthew McDaniel Maesai, Chiangrai, Thailand

Cluster Bomb

I have done more research today, in addition to the imbeciles from Cobra Gold 2001 (11,000 troups, 5,000 which are US, not 20,000, that was last year) and have discovered that they have assasinated at least one of my Akha friends and tried to on others.

They are currently hunting to assasinate a few more if they can find them. This is the Thais, the Americans are surely involved, doing phone call mobile tracking etc I would guess. You did know that the CIA tracked Dudayev's phone calls so the Russians could rocket him? Well, I am cooking up Admiral Fargo's Cobra Gold party. We are mobilizing.

Now you can reach your hand out and call your man, the Senator you hardly know and give him a lesson on geography, and tell him that there is this mad dog American over here who has wife and kids who are Akha in these "border regions" and there is going to be one hell of a stink. Furthermore, Bush or no, assasinations are illegal. Morally illegal.

I work here ten years in Maesai Thailand to help the Akha hilltribe. The region is full of drug runners of every sort, be it Thai, hilltribe or foreigners. In the last number of years numerous Akha leaders who were suspected of being involved with the drug trade related to Khun Sa have been assasinated. I know these men, I know their villages, their families, and the plight of their people in general. They know the names of too many politicians or even westerners involved in the drug trade and can tell too many stories.

The one sided assasination of these people, and the fact that they are killing them quietly rather than bringing them in, suggests that they can tell many of the names of the Thai politicians and military officers who are in the meth and heroin trade, and surely a few Americans too.

Hook and tongs, Matthew

Pine Bluff

Plain of Jars

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