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AP-Smugglers claim Burma Road



Reply-To: "TIN KYI" <tinkyi@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>

Smugglers claim Burma Road
Posted on 9/22/99, 09:21 AM CST. Email this story to a friend.
Source: .
Posted by: ShweInc NEWs

WWII route to China now lifeline to corrupt Myanmar's government

By Patrick McDowell / Associated Press

LASHIO, Myanmar -- In the early years of World War II, the dusty outpost of
Lashio was a key junction on the Burma Road, the intravenous drip that fed
Allied supplies to the beleaguered government of China.

The mountainous route in northeastern Myanmar retains a whiff of danger and
mystery, but these days it's because the old road is one of the world's
biggest smuggling routes.

The cargo moving up and down treacherous switchbacks and over rickety
bridges in smoke-belching trucks is a lifeline for the bankrupt military
regime of Myanmar, as Burma is now known. But it also is fanning ethnic
tensions and feeding the world's drug habit.

"The border is completely wide open now," says Sterling Seagrave, who
endured Japanese bombing raids five decades ago as a boy living along the
road, when Burma was a British colony.

Myanmar is one of Asia's poorest nations, and commerce is badly needed. The
country has been hammered by the region's economic crisis, which has choked
off investment from its neighbors, and by Western sanctions supporting Nobel
Peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi's persecuted pro-democracy opposition.

But the traffic also includes heroin and amphetamines from Southeast Asia's
Golden Triangle region.

It goes to China's Yunnan province, where drug use has mushroomed in recent
years, and elsewhere for transshipment to the United States and Europe.

>From overpopulated China come illegal immigrants seeking cheap land and
opportunity in a relatively empty country. More innocuous traffic includes
gems, teak, farm produce and raw materials heading to China and electrical
goods, fuel and auto parts coming out.

This has never been an ordinary road.

Hacked out of the mountains by Nationalist Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek's
forces in the late 1930s, it connected besieged China with a rail network
and seaport in Rangoon after China's ports fell into Japanese hands.

The main junctions -- Rangoon, Mandalay, Lashio -- were taken by the
Japanese in their steamroller victories after Pearl Harbor. Reopening a land
route to China became America's objective for the rest of the war so Chiang
could pin down a large part of the Japanese army.

Today's trucks are mostly rugged Japanese Hinos that don't look much
different from models a half-century ago -- big-fendered, low-geared, goods
piled above the cab and held down by a tarp. A dozen or more passengers
might ride on top.

Trucks still miss turns, rolling into a ravine or teetering precariously on
a cliff edge, front wheels hanging in space.

Wartime Americans described the road as a trail of corruption, where
bribe-hungry officials would hold up convoys for weeks. A modern trucker,
Wang Lee, says only the goods have changed.

Heading to Mandalay from the frontier, Wang, a border Chinese, is stopped at
one of four customs checkpoints along the route. His Nissan diesel awaits
inspection while he sips a soda outside a dusty gas station where hill-tribe
girls sell freshly cut fruit.

Wang begins talking about how bribery and smuggling are the way of life on
the road. In confirmation, the owner of the station slips him a payment for
four drums of smuggled gasoline.

"This is a trafficking road," Wang says. "I've been doing this kind of work
for 15 years and I have only one truck. If I was engaged in other kinds of
activities -- narcotics, or people -- I'd have 10 or 20 trucks and be rich."

Pointing to mammoth customs docks across the road, Wang points out the big
boys. Their trucks and shiny four-wheel-drive utility vehicles get the
required five stamps -- narcotics, immigration, customs, police and
forestry -- within an hour.

The rest -- trucks, cars, buses -- have to pile their goods on a siding,
where they are slowly inspected. "Sometimes it takes a week when the
checkpoints try to squeeze us," Wang says.

Part of the money is kicked upstairs to regional commanders, who need wealth
and the patronage it can buy to improve their careers and get posted closer
to the capital.

Western diplomats say Myanmar's cash-strapped government has reached deals
with drug lords to invest part of their gains in roads and other
infrastructure. For the regime, it's a form of development. Critics call it
money laundering.