More News Related to Burma (r)

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Asia Week
Week of June 20, 1997

Why School Is Out in Myanmar

The school year begins in June in Myanmar. But not this year. The 
Education Ministry postponed the nationwide opening of grammar and high 
schools until an unspecified date. There is no official explanation for 
the move, but the understanding in Yangon is that the State Law and 
Order Restoration Council (SLORC) wants to avoid any incidents that 
could complicate the country's July induction into the Association of 
Southeast Asian Nations. And it is the possibility of demonstrations - 
one of SLORC's greatest fears - which many Yangon residents feel is the 
reason for the shutdown. Parents in the capital have resigned themselves 
to not having schools open before August.

There are recent historical grounds for SLORC's concern. High-school and 
grammar school students were among those who filled the streets in 1988 
to protest against former dictator Ne Win's government, which SLORC 
replaced after a bloody crackdown. But the younger children are unlikely 
to start anything on their own. In the past, they have taken their 
activist cues from their older brothers and sisters. And undergraduates 
have not been in school since the government shut down colleges and 
universities last December, after dispersing a big student protest near 
Yangon's main campus. Then, the target of student discontent was not 
ASEAN, but the alleged mistreatment of some carousing colleagues at the 
hands of the police. But the militancy was enough to set off alarm 
bells. And with the appearance of pro- and anti- ASEAN elements within 
the government (some of the generals prefer closer ties with China), the 
authorities are taking no chances.

(From Letters and Comments Section)
I AM STUPEFIED AT your selections for the "Power 50." It's beyond 
reasonable comprehension to have Dr. Mahathir -- a proverbial "big fish 
in a small pond" -- in your second slot, and to leave out Aung San Suu 
Kyi, whose ongoing efforts have changed U.S. policies toward Myanmar. 
Rev. Bill Pantin
Kuala Lumpur

The Straits Times (Singapore)
DRUG SEIZURE: Myanmar authorities earlier this month seized 10,000 
amphetamine tablets and arrested three men in a raid in Tarchilek, a 
border town with Thailand, the official Myanmar radio reported. 

The report said police had acted on a tip-off. Myanmar, one of the major 
sources of the world's opium and heroin, is now producing amphetamines. 
-- AFP.

Burma's Drug Commitment Questioned 

By ROBERT HORN 
Associated Press Writer 
Monday, June 16, 1997 1:45 am EDT 


BANGKOK, Thailand (AP) -- Burma's military regime says 700 of its 
soldiers have been killed and 2,200 wounded battling opium warlords in 
Burmese jungles since 1988. 

But during that same period, Burma's production of opium -- the raw 
material for heroin -- has increased from less than 1,000 tons to 2,560 
tons a year, making it the world's largest opium producer. 

So is Burma really fighting drugs? 

Several Western governments are skeptical about the Rangoon regime's 
attempts to eliminate opium growing and say they fear drug money is 
becoming a serious component in Burma's economy. 

Col. Kyaw Thein, a key figure in Burma's anti-drug activities, rejects 
the questions, calling them politically motivated. He says it is his 
government's obligation to fight narcotics. 

``But this is a complicated matter. We need more time,'' he adds. 

Rangoon's most vocal critic has been the United States, which in April 
slapped Burma with economic sanctions for the military's increased 
repression of the democracy movement. 

The U.S. State Department accuses the military regime of lacking the 
``resources, the ability or the will to take serious action against 
ethnic drug trafficking groups.'' 

It also says the military is allowing some major traffickers to attend 
the country's constitutional convention as representatives of ethnic 
minorities. 

A recent State Department report said 15 percent of foreign investment 
in Burma goes through a company owned by relatives of Lo Hsing-han, a 
major drug trafficker. 

Nonetheless, the State Department says there is no evidence high-ranking 
Burmese officials are involved in the drug business. 

And some paint a more positive picture of the regime's efforts, noting 
the opium is grown in remote regions where various groups have fought 
Rangoon's control for decades. 

``The Burmese are serious about fighting the drug trade,'' says Gerald 
Moore, former director of the United Nations Drug Control Program in 
Rangoon. ``A lot of what you read about Burmese involvement in drug 
trafficking just isn't justified.''

India's Northeast Flooded By Heroin 

By KRISHNAN GURUSWAMY 
Associated Press Writer 
Monday, June 16, 1997 1:36 am EDT 


IMPHAL, India (AP) -- Worried that heroin from neighboring Burma was 
ruining the youth of India's remote northeast, separatist guerrillas 
began enforcing their own anti-drug policy: If you use narcotics, expect 
a bullet in the head. 

Ronen, an 18-year-old addict who wouldn't give his last name, vividly 
remembers when he got his first warning. It was a moonless night last 
August. A militant knocked on his door and told him to stop using 
heroin. 

Shaken, Ronen tried to switch to alcohol, but he gave up quickly and 
went back to mainlining heroin. For weeks, he stayed shut up at home, 
except for occasional nighttime meetings with a street dealer. 

Then on Christmas, he partied with friends all night. Two days later, 
three men with automatic rifles dragged him from his house. 

``They told me, `This is your last warning.' Then suddenly, one man shot 
me in the thigh,'' Ronen says. 

He lay in bed a month while the wound healed. Without drugs, his body 
shook violently, his head hurt. He was desperate for heroin. But he was 
also scared of the rebels. His parents took him to the Kripa 
De-addiction Center, one of two dozen such centers in Imphal, capital of 
Manipur state. 

In the last five years, half of those who underwent the five-month 
residential program have given up drugs, Hijam Dinesh, an official at 
Kripa, said. The rest either died, disappeared or relapsed into drug 
abuse. 

Police say they don't know how many addicts have been shot by the 
region's powerful rebel movements. 

Yet, the guerrillas' threats have not reduced addiction drastically. 

Manipur, with 2 million people, has 50,000 addicts, said R.C. 
Bhattacharji, narcotics commissioner at the Central Bureau of Narcotics. 

The dense forests and rugged hills of Manipur are popular routes for 
drug runners from the ``Golden Triangle'' -- the area at the 
intersection of Burma, Laos and Thailand -- that grows 60 percent of the 
world's opium poppies, the raw material for heroin and morphine. Most of 
the drugs are destined for the United States and Europe. 

Police admit they are incapable of stopping the trade, claiming they are 
hindered by government apathy, inadequate staff, poor pay and lack of 
money for informers. The Narcotics and Border Affairs Police has just 12 
officers for Manipur. In one year, they seized only 2.2 pounds of 
heroin. 

``We have five guns and one jeep. And we have to cover the entire 
state,'' said Officer A.S. Ramlung. ``What can I do?''

Heroin Traffickers Still Thriving 

By GRANT PECK 
Associated Press Writer 
Monday, June 16, 1997 1:36 am EDT 


BANGKOK, Thailand (AP) -- When Li Yun-chung, accused of arranging the 
biggest shipment of heroin ever seized in the United States, jumped bail 
in Thailand, he made a beeline for neighboring Burma. 

He fled to the ``Golden Triangle,'' the rugged area where the borders of 
Burma, Laos and Thailand meet that provides about 60 percent of the 
world's supply of heroin and opium. Not so long ago, that would have 
been the end of the story. 

But in May, three months after Li fled, Burmese authorities handed him 
back to Thailand. And on June 5, he was flown to New York to stand trial 
for allegedly masterminding huge shipments of heroin into the United 
States, including one batch of 1,069 pounds estimated to be worth more 
than $1 billion. That was the biggest load ever intercepted by U.S. 
authorities. 

Li is one of 15 ``big fish'' from the Golden Triangle who have been put 
out of action in the past three years by operations organized by the 
U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration and its Asian counterparts. 

They have had striking but little-noticed success in arresting -- for 
the first time -- the kingpins of the heroin trade and bringing them to 
justice, sometimes in American courts. 

Even China, which has very limited cooperation with U.S. anti-drug 
efforts but a rapidly growing drug problem of its own, quietly deported 
a Burmese national to U.S. custody in late April. 

Still, the potential rewards of the heroin business continue to outweigh 
the risks. When Burmese warlord Khun Sa, reputedly the Golden Triangle's 
biggest heroin trafficker, surrendered himself to Burmese authorities 
early last year, rivals moved in to take over his market share. 

Worldwide production of opium last year was estimated by U.S. officials 
at nearly 4,300 metric tons -- probably a record amount and enough to 
make 430 tons of heroin. Burma was the biggest opium producer, turning 
out an estimated 2,560 tons. 

The value of opium and heroin exports from Burma may be almost equal to 
that of all its legal exports -- about $1 billion in 1995 -- a report 
from the U.S. Embassy in Rangoon said last year. 

In Thailand, primarily a transit point for drug shipments, two separate 
studies by local scholars estimated domestic turnover in heroin and 
opium to be about $1 billion annually. 

Small wonder that heroin has attracted entrepreneurs in Burma, China, 
Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam, all of which have moved from centrally 
planned economies to relatively free markets in the past decade. 

Improvements in communications and transportation for expanded trade 
have made it easier for drug traffickers to operate, the annual report 
of the U.N.'s International Narcotics Control Board said. 

Burma poses the biggest problem for the drug fighters, according to the 
U.S. General Accounting Office, which audits the activities of federal 
agencies for Congress. 

The GAO praised anti-drug efforts in Thailand, where as many as 31 
people charged in U.S. courts with drug trafficking have been arrested 
in the past three years, with seven extradited to the United States so 
far. 

Even a former Thai member of parliament, who previously would have been 
untouchable, was extradited in January 1996. Thanong Siriprechapong, 
accused of smuggling 50 tons of marijuana to the United States, became 
the first Thai national to face such action. 

Important cooperation has come from authorities in Hong Kong, another 
key transit point for the heroin trade. Since 1991, Hong Kong has sent 
at least 64 fugitives to the United States, most of them wanted for 
drug-related offenses. 

One of them, a former major general in the Thai army, became the first 
high-ranking military officer from Southeast Asia to be successfully 
prosecuted in the United States on drug charges. 

Thanad Paktipatt, 58, was convicted of conspiring to ship 107 pounds of 
heroin from Thailand to the United States. He was sentenced in May in 
Eugene, Ore., to more than 30 years in prison. 

The heroin trail begins in northern and northeastern Burma, where ethnic 
minorities like the Wa, Kokang Chinese and Shan cultivate hillside 
fields of opium poppies. 

At harvest time, they painstakingly scrape off by hand the sap oozing 
from cuts they make in the flower bulbs. The sap is boiled into a gum, 
and what isn't smoked locally is sold for processing. In closely guarded 
jungle laboratories, chemists turn the opium into morphine and then 
heroin. 

The drug is then sent on its way to the addicts of the world, including 
an estimated 600,000 in the United States. 

Many more heroin and opium addicts are to be found in the region itself, 
enough to make governments that might otherwise turn a blind eye to 
trafficking take notice. 

``Even China, which once had all but eliminated heroin addiction, is 
experiencing a serious rise in teen-age addiction,'' a top DEA official, 
James Milford, told the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 
April. 

Ethnic Chinese gangs usually deal with big drug shipments, ranging from 
fifty to several hundred pounds, hidden in maritime shipping containers 
and air freight cargo. 

West African gangs, which have carved out a market niche in recent 
years, are known more for using ``mules'' -- individual air travelers -- 
to smuggle heroin in smaller quantities, concealed in their luggage, 
strapped to their bodies, or packed in condoms and swallowed. 

The DEA's ``Operation Global Seas,'' which ended last October, rolled up 
a Bangkok-based, Nigerian-led network that transported heroin from 
Thailand and Cambodia to Chicago and Boston. 

The breaking of Khun Sa's operations has disrupted heroin trafficking in 
Thailand, reducing the amount of Asian heroin transiting the country 
from 80 percent of the world market to 50 percent. New routes emerged 
through the southern provinces of China to Taiwan and Hong Kong or 
through Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam. 

The GAO cited the traffickers' ability to shift transportation routes to 
countries with inadequate law enforcement capabilities as one of several 
problems facing the anti-drug campaign in Asia.


"THERE WILL BE NO REAL DEMOCRACY IF WE CAN'T GURANTEE THE RIGHTS OF THE 
MINORITY ETHNIC PEOPLE.  ONLY UNDERSTANDING THEIR SUFFERING AND HELPING 
THEM TO EXERCISE THEIR RIGHTS WILL ASSIST PREVENTING FROM THE 
DISINTEGRATION AND THE SESESSION."  "WITHOUT UNDERSTANDING THEIR 
STRENGTH, WE CAN'T TOPPLE THE SLORC AND BURMA WILL NEVER BE IN PEACE."



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