Burma Road Now Smuggler's Route

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Saturday September 18 11:56 AM ET 

Burma Road Now Smuggler's Route
Full Coverage
Drug Trade
 
 
 
By PATRICK McDOWELL Associated Press Writer 

LASHIO, Myanmar (AP) - 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. ``It's become like the border between
Texas and Mexico. There's a tremendous amount of people coming across.
They're going to change Burma very quickly.''

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. Many are settling in Mandalay,
Myanmar's second-largest city, and alarmed citizens fear northeastern
Myanmar will become a Chinese colony.

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.

Seagrave, a Myanmar expert and author who writes about Asia's power
structures, is the son of a missionary doctor whose wartime border hospital
treated the Allied wounded and the road laborers.

``The joke was that the road was two lanes wide - one for each wheel,''
Seagrave says. ``You had to be careful. The drivers coming from China would
turn off their engines to save gas and ride their brakes to slow down.

``The brakes would give out, of course, and you'd drive by these curves
where they didn't make it and see the wrecks in the ravine. Sometimes, the
wheels were still spinning.''

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 asks a Westerner - a rarity in Lashio - if he is with Myanmar military
intelligence, the omnipresent branch of the regime that has ruled through
fear and bloodshed since 1962.

Convinced that isn't the case, 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.

Asia World, a company run by the family of Lo Hsing-han, the Golden
Triangle's first big heroin lord, upgraded the Lashio road and is working on
several other such projects.

A government spokesman, speaking on customary condition of anonymity, says
that Lo - who was jailed between 1973 and 1980 - has paid his debt to society.

``It is nothing unusual or illegal for Lo and his family to take part in the
development and investment sector,'' the spokesman says.

Not all road workers are employed by Asia World. Convict road gangs,
recognizable by dust-stained white sarongs, break rocks on some sections and
scramble for cheroots thrown from well-wishers in passing cars.

The government spokesman notes the penalty for drug smuggling can be
execution. But more heroin reaches the rest of the world from Myanmar every
year than from any other country.

The border trade is needed by the government to raise money. It is also a
concession to China, which is Myanmar's biggest supplier of military hardware.

But ordinary people openly express resentment at China for backing the
government and at the illegal Chinese immigrants they say are moving into
the country by tens of thousands.

In Mandalay, where ethnic Indians were the largest minority a few years ago,
Chinese letters on shops and restaurants line entire streets.

A police official, speaking on condition of anonymity, says many immigrant
men pay local woman to marry them, gain residency and move their whole
families to Myanmar.

The ethnic Chinese tend to have more business skills. Their relatively rapid
accumulation of wealth breeds resentment in an area where ethnic suspicions
are never far below the surface.

The original inhabitants of the region, the Shan and other ethnic
minorities, have been decimated by decades of unsuccessful rebellion,
poverty, immigration to Thailand and the latest scourge, AIDS.

A bitter joke heard up and down the road goes: ``The Burmese son has been
adopted by the Chinese father.''