[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index
][Thread Index
]
NEWS - A crossroads in the new Myan
Subject: NEWS - A crossroads in the new Myanmar
10 December, 1999
A crossroads in the new Myanmar
Burma Road has long been a supply line. Now, it serves as a route for
illegal immigrants and drug smuggling.
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
is 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," said
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 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
shipment 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 said. "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
do not look much different from models of a half
century ago - big-fendered, low-geared, goods piled
above the cab and held down by a tarpaulin. 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, said
only the goods had 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 is not 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 said. "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 said.
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 traffickers to
invest part of their gains in roads and other
infrastructure. For the regime, it is a form of
development. Critics call it drug-money laundering.
Asia World, a company run by the family of Lo
Hsing-han, the Golden Triangle's first big heroin
exporter, upgraded the Lashio road and is working on
several other such projects.
A government spokesman, speaking on condition of
anonymity, said that Lo - who was jailed between 1973
and 1980 - had 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 said.
The government spokesman noted that 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 said many immigrant men paid local
woman to marry them, gained residency, and moved
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."