Drug War: Covert Money, Power & Policy: Burma:8/8/88

Free Burma!@http://metalab.unc.edu/freeburma

New York Times:2/12/95: "Administration narcotics experts say heroin production in Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, has doubled since 1988 and now accounts for 60 to 70 percent of the American supply. Those experts are urging President Clinton to step-up anti-drug cooperation with the Burmese military junta. But human rights officials argue against cooperating with a government judged to be a serious abuser of human rights...."

"'There's been a fairly dramatic increase in heroin since the military came to power,' said Robert S. Gelbard, Assistant Secretary of State for International Narcotics Matters. 'There is a lot of concern about narcotics-related corruption, particularly in the mid-levels of the Burmese Army.'"

"Backing up Mr. Brown's call for increased cooperation are Thomas A. Constantine, director of the Drug Enforcement Administration; Timothy E. Wirth, the Under Secretary of State for Global Affairs, and Assistant Secretary of State Gelbard."

"The stepped-up cooperation under consideration would include sharing intelligence with Myanmar officials, training the country's police and providing equipment to them like police radios, drug-detection kits and trucks."

Brilliant. Supply the Burmese military, which we know is dealing the heroin, which just murdered thousands of its own people in an overt coup d'etat, with military intelligence telling them what we know, and with crowd-control equipment to help them murder more of their own people.

The incredibly courageous Daw Aung San Suu Kyi of Burma's National League for Democracy will be named Prime Minister if Burma's legally elected National Assembly is ever allowed to convene. She is the daughter of the legendary General Aung San, below, postwar leader of the Burman nationalists.



Burma was, in many ways, an artificial conflation of the British, combining ethnic groups that had not traditionally shared a government. General Aung San is, in effect, the George Washington of Burma, the political author of the federal constitution of 1947 that created post-colonial Burma. Just as he was set to assume the Prime Ministership, in July 1947, Aung San was assassinated, leaving Burma's strong territorial minorities facing a death squad central army, the probable author of the asassination, and a weak central government. The result was precisely the civil war that Aung San's new constitution had been designed to prevent.

All the armies were financed by the artificial Prohibition value of opium except the Kachins, who had their jade, ruby and sapphire mines. Unlike opium, which, if allowed to float in a legal market would be worth little more than extra fine produce, the value of sapphires isn't artificial. Below, Lahu hunters in the Shan hills, 1925.



Complicating the situation further were the 12,000 CIA-financed Kuomintang troops in the Shan states, the eastern mountains bordering Thailand and China. They were originally placed there to draw Chinese strength during the Korean War. Mao's reaction to the CIA-KMT alliance was to turn the Communist Party of Burma into the same kind of well-armed client army as the KMT. Thus Burma degenerated into civil war.

Ne Win, in control of the Burma Army in the early sixties, brought many of the Shan state opium armies under his umbrella by legalizing the opium trade for those who would fight under his KKY (Ka Kwe Ye), local self defense, banner. Khun Sa, who eventually rose to control most of these Shan state opium armies, began his career as a CIA student in the Kuomintang's Shan operation.

After the Burma Army drove the KMT into Thailand, Khun Sa heeded Ne Win's call to become a KKY leader. As such, Khun Sa was armed by Ne Win, and held the right to use all government controlled roads for opium transport. He also had the right to run morphine and heroin refineries. Thus heroin for export became the official mainstay of the Burma Army's war against the Karens, the Shans, the Kachins, the Wa, the Lahu, the Communists, the KMT and the other territorially or politically-based rebels. Below, a Lahu father and child, and a Kaw woman, the Shan states, 1925. Criminalize the traditional contents of the pipe, criminalize the culture.



Since the American-led global Prohibition of opium sap popularized heroin, making it valuable enough to trade for arms, many KKY leaders were enabled to coopt the local ethnic or political movement. The Burma Army settled into the role of central wholesaler, issuing franchises to all the major players in control of opium-growing territory, using its KKY militia as trucking convoys for its franchisees. Thus did all sides in the civil war settle into a relatively peaceful marriage of convenience, a marriage that had the militarized heroin trade as its glue.

That is, when China's Deng Xiaoping turned Burma into a trading partner, the Communist Party of Burma made peace with the Burma Army and went into business with it, as did the Kuomintang, Khun Sa's Shans and most, but not all, of the other guerrilla groups. Notably absent were the Karens, who did not choose to enroll as SLORC opium sharecroppers. Below, Karen farmer-soldiers are inspired.



By 1988, Mandalay, in northern Burma, with dozens of refineries converting the vast highland opium crop into white #4 heroin, had become the heroin capitol of Asia. This freed the Burma Army to stomp all over elected representatives in all parts of Burma, creating a spontaneous, country-wide uprising that began on 8/8/88, the uprising of the four 8's.

The automatic reaction of the Burma Army was massacre. At least 10,000 people died (see the superb film Beyond Rangoon). It was Singapore, which is so proud of its fascist anti-drug laws, whose state arms company rescued the Burma Army's heroin traders as they were running out of ammunition during the Rangoon Massacre.

The diplomatic pressure created by the 1988 massacre forced the May 1990 elections, which the Burma Army was confident it had fixed by prohibiting opposition electioneering. Despite the repression, the National League for Democracy, led by Tin Oo and Aung San Suu Kyi, won in a landslide - 82% of the popular vote, 392 of parliament's 485 seats.

This government has never been allowed to convene and Burma is now a dope-dealing death squad police state run by the Army's State Law and Order Council (SLORC), which has jailed or assassinated many NLD parliamentarians and thousands of Aung San Suu Kyi's supporters. The SLORC now calls itself the State Peace and Development Council, SPDC, but "Myanmar" is still Burma and the SPDC is still the SLORC.



Under the brutal repression, which has thrown many Burmese into shock, the fighting peacock Daw Aung San Suu Kyi has become as mystically revered as Joan of Arc. Unfortunately, she faces similar dangers. But the Clinton administration refused to break relations to force the seating of the duly elected government, despite the fact that this was strongly advocated not only by the NLD, but by many members of the U.S. Congress on both sides of the aisle. Instead, in the name of Nancy and Apple Pie, Clinton chose to engage these killers in a "dialogue."

To quote the February 1996 UN Commission on Human Rights report: "Torture, summary and arbitrary executions, forced labor, abuse of women, politically motivated arrests and detention, forced displacement, important restrictions on the freedoms of expression and association and oppression of ethnic and religious minorities..." Below, 14 year-old Mon girls kidnapped to work as slave porters for SLORC platoons. Right, Mon women and children working under guard as forced labor to build the Ye Tavoy Railroad, May, 1995.



The forced labor is massive, with huge mining complexes literally serviced by slaves under the whip - and paid, literally, in heroin. They are encouraged to share needles and, since they are in so much pain, they do. Burma is the leading source of AIDS transmission in Asia.

Many SLORC mining and roadbuilding operations use little children and women in advanced pregnancy as forced heavy labor. Those peasants who resist "volunteering" are charged with sedition, the punishment for which is the same as for handing out pro-democracy leaflets - five years or more at hard labor on a chain gang.

Burma's billion-dollar gas pipeline, for instance, is being built with slave labor. This is a joint U.S.-French-SLORC venture. The U.S. company is Unocal, the French is Total, and SLORC supplies the road gangs. Once the gas starts flowing, the pipeline will be worth about $400 million a year to the Rangoon generals.

Since 1990, SLORC has gotten about two-thirds of its overt financing from foreign oil companies, including Britain's Premier Oil and America's Texaco and ARCO. Even the 1993 U.S. State Department Human Rights report said that the SLORC "routinely uses slave labor." Nonetheless, the EU, Japan, Singapore and China are all competing for a piece of the Burmese action.

Thanks to the cease-fire agreements it now has with fifteen ethnic minorities, the Burma Army now controls every border checkpoint in the country. The SLORC-sanctioned leaders of those ethnic minorities, of course, are the most powerful heroin dealers in the world.

When Gen. Maung Aye headed the Burma Army's Eastern Command, which included Khun Sa's territory, the jungle warlord was allowed to operate unimpeded. Maung Aye is now Vice Chairman of the SLORC, the second most powerful man in Burma and successor apparent to SLORC Chairman Gen. Than Shwe. Than Shwe is the chosen successor of elderly dictator Ne Win, who gave up official power on the 1988 accession of SLORC. Both work closely with Gen. Khin Nyunt, head of Ne Win's CIA-trained secret police. Secretary Gelbard calls this is "the mid-levels of the Burmese Army."

In January of 1996, in an elaborate public ceremony, the SLORC formally welcomed Khun Sa and his associates into their exclusive Rangoon circle as "our own blood brethren." This marriage was negotiated in December of 1995 by Khun Sa's uncle in Rangoon and the SLORC's Defense Commander Gen. Maung Aye. Maung Aye's dowry for the blushing Khun Sa was the bus concession from Rangoon to his Shan state opium empire.

On August 21, 1996, The Bangkok Post reported that "Rangoon has officially allowed former Mong Tai Army soldiers [Khun Sa's army] and Shan People at Ho Mong [Khun Sa's former headquarters] to grow opium poppies to ease poverty in the area."  The State Department, in its end-of-year 1996 Narcotics Control Strategy Report, deceitfully characterized this marriage as a victory in the Drug War, insisting that Khun Sa's "surrender…[was] ending an era in southeast Asia heroin trafficking history."

Secretary Gelbard and his military intelligence allies were active supporters of the July, 1997 enrollment of Myanmar into ASEAN, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, thus conferring diplomatic legitimacy on the SLORC. This is called "constructive engagement," as if little Burma had the geopolitical clout of China.

In January, 1992, DEA agents in Rangoon were contacted by U Saw Lu, a Wa prince from the mountainous poppy-growing Shan state, Chairman of the United Wa State Anti-Narcotics and Development Organization. Lu was trying to get his people out from under the heel of the Burma Army, which had enslaved them as opium sharecroppers. Lu documented the coercion of Wa farmers into growing opium by the imposition of arbitrary taxes, failure of which to pay resulted in land confiscation and imprisonment.

Lu presented detailed evidence of cooperation between the regional Burma Army intelligence chief, Major Than Aye, and Wei Hsueh-kang, a Wa commander with 7,000 troops protecting a very lucrative heroin and methamphetamine operation. Prince Lu was immediately arrested by the Burma Army and mercilessly tortured, to the point of death, for 56 days, by Major Than Aye himself. Lu’s torture, however, provoked Wa leaders to personally threaten Khin Nyunt with a general uprising, so he was allowed to live through it.

Half a year later, the unreconstructed Lu presented the sympathetic new Rangoon DEA chief, Richard Horn, his evidence and his political program, entitled “The Bondage of Opium - the Agony of the Wa People, a Proposal and Plea.” The enthusiastic Horn, who was delighted to have found a grass-roots democratic ally, forwarded Lu’s plans and evidence to the DEA, by way of the American Embassy in Rangoon.

Horn’s reports were intercepted by Embassy Chargé d’Affaires Franklin Huddle, who insisted that Horn change the report’s conclusions. Horn had insisted, as had Prince Lu, that political protection combined with subsidized crop substitution, rather than coercion, was the way to wean the Wa from opium. This, of course, threatened SLORC control of Wa territory. Huddle and his CIA operatives also bugged Horn’s phone. Huddle quoted Horn’s private phone conversations with his DEA superiors back in Washington verbatim in his State Department communications. The Rangoon CIA station chief, Arthur Brown, turned a copy of Lu’s report over to his allies in Burmese military intelligence, who again threatened Lu’s life. Horn was able to prevent Lu’s murder, but at the cost of his job. In September 1993 he was forced out of the country by Huddle’s State Department under pressure from the CIA.

Horn, who became a DEA group supervisor in New Orleans, filed a class action lawsuit, 9/12/96, in DC’s Federal District Court, alleging that the CIA, the National Security Agency and the State Department illegally surveilled him and the numerous other DEA agents who joined him in the suit. Needless to say, Prince Lu’s plans for crop substitution, which would have included economic and political protection for the poor dirt farmers he represents, went out the window. Wa farmers grow opium or else.

This incident was part of a larger State Department/CIA-DEA turf war in which the State Department actually expelled three heads of the U.S. DEA from Burma, for working too closely with Burmese military intelligence. As of 1998, the State Department says it has engineered the suspension of economic aid to Burma, implemented an international arms embargo, blocked assistance from international financial institutions, downgraded our representation from Ambassador to Chargé, imposed visa restrictions on senior regime leaders and their families, and implemented a ban on new investment by Americans or overseas American firms. But the arms embargo, the lynch-pin of the effort, is completely vitiated by the "anti-narcotics" loophole - aid given to Burmese military intelligence by the CIA-DEA.

In November of 1996, the United Nations Drug Control Program reported that the Asian heroin trade was worth $63 billion in profits annually. Burma, said the UNDCP, supplies more than 50% of that. Karen land, then, assumes a value as artificially inflated as the opium it can produce. If SLORC can turn the Karens into opium sharecroppers, it will. Below, Karen soldiers wounded by SLORC phosphorus, Feb. 1995.


Free Burma!@http://metalab.unc.edu/freeburma