FEER: Burma/Thai Drug Tensions

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                                Drug Tide Strains Ties
 
Burmese amphetamines are flooding into Thailand,
raising tensions that could force Bangkok to seek new forms of leverage

                       By Shawn W. Crispin in San Ton Du, Santi Suk and
Chiang Mai and Bertil Lintner in Chiang Mai
                            Issue cover-dated September 9, 1999 pp. 24-7

                      Santi Suk, a small village near the Burmese border
in northern Thailand, has a drug problem. Thai military officials say it's
the "nerve centre" of the country's rapidly expanding and increasingly
damaging amphetamine trade. But Banyen Wachirabanpotkul, the 32-year-old
village head, denies it. "Do you see a drug problem here," she screams
from her front porch when confronted with the military's allegations.
"There is no problem here."

                      Bangkok, however, disagrees. Thai military sources
stationed 10 kilometres south of the village say Santi Suk is a clearing
house for vast quantities of amphetamines, known as yaa baa, or crazy
medicine, in Thai. They say the drugs are smuggled over the densely
forested Wa Wee mountain range from Burma and distributed throughout the
country from the village. Western narcotics officials based in the
northern city of Chiang Mai estimate that millions of yaa baa tablets
flood into Thailand every month, mostly from Wa-controlled areas of
Burma's Shan state. "There's no end in sight," says a Western narcotics
official in Chiang Mai. "Drugs are everywhere."

                      And they are taking a heavy toll on the country. A
recent report by the Thai Development Research Institute in Chiang Mai
stated that Thailand now has at least 257,000 yaa baa addicts, surpassing
the country's 214,000 heroin addicts. Another recent study, by the
Ministry of Public Health, found traces of amphetamines in the blood of
more than 35% of students at a middle school in Chiang Rai province. The
drugs are also driving a thick wedge between the Thai and Burmese
governments, threatening the rapprochement reached via Burma's accession
into the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in 1997 and Bangkok's
withdrawal of assistance to many of the rebel ethnic groups fighting
Rangoon's military government.

                      Although the official rhetoric remains upbeat, the
growing bilateral tension was palpable on August 24 when Thai Foreign
Minister Surin Pitsuwan met Win Aung, his Burmese counterpart, in Rangoon
to urge the junta to step up joint anti-narcotics efforts. Surin even went
so far as to suggest that the countries' anti-drug forces undergo joint
training exercises with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency.
                     
		      Bangkok-based diplomats say the Thais were
discouraged by Rangoon's response and its insistence that the amphetamines
don't come from Burma. Rather than a hoped-for pact on narcotics control,
Surin returned to Bangkok with an agreement on cultural cooperation.  
"When we talk about joining hands, the talk stops when we mention yaa
baa," says a Thai soldier based at San Ton Du, a recently closed border
crossing just south of Santi Suk.

                      For decades, Thailand was able to pressure the junta
through its unofficial ties to, and support of, the various ethnic
insurgents along their 2,100-kilometre border. But in the early 1990s,
Thai policy changed course and the government withheld assistance to
ethnic groups as Burma squashed the rebellions. Now, with Burma's entry
into Asean and the effect of the economic crisis on the Thai economy,
Bangkok has lost much of its political and economic leverage over Rangoon.
"For constructive engagement to work a country must have bargaining
authority," says a Western diplomat in Bangkok. "Thailand is fast finding
it doesn't have any."

                      This fading influence has translated into less
pressure on drug lords in eastern Burma, according to Thai military
sources. In Burma's Shan state, north of Santi Suk, it's the Wa people who
run the amphetamine trade. And their tentacles reach deep into Thailand.
Banyen, the village head, is the daughter of Ai Siow Seu, founder of the
United Wa State Army, which took control of parts of Shan state in the
mid-1990s after helping the Burmese army defeat drug lord Khun Sa.

                      Thai military sources say a growing number of
local-government and military officials have been corrupted by the drug
trade. "There's just too much money involved," says Col. Sutat Jarumanee,
chief of staff of the Thai 17th Infantry Regiment task force at San Ton Du
and one of several professional soldiers sent to the area in recent months
to fight the flood of amphetamines. "Unfortunately it's making many of my
honest men dishonest."

                      The worsening situation in the northern provinces
has pushed Bangkok to action. On August 6, Thai Prime Minister Chuan
Leekpai presided over the closing of the border crossing at San Ton Du.
The closure was ordered by the Thai National Security Council, which has
identified the drug trade as a threat to national security. Col. Sutat
says the border crossing was long used to ship amphetamines and
construction materials to and from Mong Yawn, a Wa-controlled area 30
kilometres inside Burma.

                      Burma denies that amphetamines are made on its
territory. Col. Thein Swe, a Burmese military intelligence officer, was
quoted in an official transcript of a news conference in Rangoon on August
6 as saying that Burma doesn't manufacture the "chemicals and machines"
necessary to produce amphetamines. He said the Wa tribesmen who run Mong
Yawn are in fact busy turning the area into an "opium-free zone."

                      Nothing could be further from the truth, say Thai
and Western anti-narcotics officials. They say Mong Yawn is the site of
the largest collection of heroin and amphetamine laboratories along the
Thai-Burma border. The lucrative drug trade, they say, has allowed the Wa
to carve out of the thick jungle a thriving town of 20,000-30,000 people,
complete with schools, hospitals, a new hydroelectric power station and
even karaoke bars. "The junta hasn't wiped them out because they are
receiving money from them," says Sutat, the head of the Thai drug task
force at San Ton Du.

                      Western anti-narcotics officials estimate the
Burmese amphetamine trade is worth hundreds of millions of dollars a year.
They say Pao Yuwa, a younger brother of Pao Yuchang, supreme commander of
the United Wa State Army, runs the Ho-Tao drug complex on the Burmese
border with China. An older brother, Ta Rang, is chief administrator of
the area around Mong Yawn. Western anti-drug officials estimate the annual
turnover of the Pao family's drug operation at about 2 billion renminbi
($240 million). Wei Xue-Gang, a China-born drug lord who was indicted by a
court in New York in 1993 for drug trafficking and is wanted by the Thai
police, is also active in Burma.

                      Wei, the founder of the Mong Yawn settlement, has
invested millions of dollars in mineral smelting, retail trading and
logging during the past year in what one Western drug-enforcement official
calls "the biggest money-laundering operation in Southeast Asia today."

                      Thai military officials believe Wei and his men are
moving some of their operations further south in the wake of the closure
of the San Ton Du border crossing.

                      These developments have left Thai authorities
desperately seeking help from Rangoon to stem the influx of amphetamines.
But since the junta has economic interests in the trade, such assistance,
so far, has been withheld. When Burma joined Asean in 1997, Thailand hoped
membership would encourage the junta to increase pressure on drug lords
and expand efforts to end drug trafficking. At the same time, many
analysts noted that the junta's complicity in the narcotics trade was the
greatest potential cause of friction within the group.

                      "We hoped that the Asean norms would force Myanmar
[Burma] to conform," says Bhansoon Ladavalya, a professor of political
science at Chiang Mai University and former member of Thailand's National
Security Council. "But already two years have passed by and we haven't
seen any progress in that direction." Bhansoon, who is studying the effect
of the drug trade on Thai politics and the economy, says other Asean
members aren't taking a harder line on the issue because of the group's
tradition of noninterference in members' internal affairs.

                      Western diplomats say that given the worsening drug
problem in Thailand, the government may soon be pressed to find new ways
to turn back the tide of amphetamines from Burma. The nearly 100,000 Karen
refugees still languishing at Mae Sot in western Thailand represent one
possible bargaining chip. If the junta remains unwilling or unable to
suppress the flow of drugs into Thailand, unofficially rearming Burmese
ethnic minorities opposed to the Wa, such as the Karen and Shan, may
become an increasingly attractive option.

                      Indeed, the Shan Herald Agency for News, which is
run by Shan exiles in Chiang Mai, has reported that remnants of Shan
forces defeated by the Wa in 1994 have recently received arms from their
"old Thai friends."

                      If such activity becomes more prevalent and the Thai
authorities choose to turn a blind eye, conflict could flare again on the
Thai-Burmese border.

END