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BURMA: Junta’s Drug ‘Exports’ to China Test Economic Ties

Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK, Dec 31 2010 (IPS) - As military-ruled Burma prepares to unveil its new political cast, an enduring link between the junta and the country’s notorious drug lords is poised to come under the spotlight.

Among the candidates who won in the South-east Asian nation’s first election in 20 years on Nov. 7 are six well- known drug barons. They represented the Union Solidarity and Development Party, the junta’s political front, which triumphed comfortably in the poll.

The bespectacled Kyaw Myint is among this gang of six who emerged victorious in a poll clouded with questions of fraud for the estimated 1,163 seats in the national parliament and regional assemblies that were up for grabs.

The elected national and regional legislators are to begin their new role in Burma by the first week in February. The opening of the new parliament 90 days after the November poll is the sixth step in the junta’s seven-step political roadmap to create a “discipline-flourishing democracy” in Burma, or Myanmar as it is also known.

Prior to slipping into his role as a legislator, the 51- year-old Kyaw Myint was better known as a junta-backed militia chief “notorious among local people as (a) drug dealer in the Shan State North’s Namkham township,” reveals the Shan Herald Agency for News (SHAN), a media organisation run by journalists from Burma’s Shan ethnic minority.

“Many ferry crossings on the Mao-Ruli river that serves as a boundary between China and Burma are guarded by Kyaw Htwe aka (also known as) Li Yonping, younger brother of Kyaw Myint,” adds SHAN.

Yet this political identity for Kyaw Myint, with the junta’s blessings, will test the growing economic bonds between Burma and its giant north-eastern neighbour China. According to official figures released by Burmese officials, China has pumped in over eight billion U.S. dollars in foreign direct investment this year to tap Burma’s resource- rich environment.

The investments by Chinese state-run companies in the oil and gas, hydropower and mining sectors mark a dramatic increase from what Chinese investments were five years ago – some 194 million dollars.

“Myanmar and China have grown closer over the past four years and Beijing is on the verge of displacing Thailand as the country that tops investment in Myanmar,” says a South- east Asian diplomat who spoke on condition of anonymity.

But one Burmese “export” to China has Beijing concerned, the diplomat added. “Beijing is worried at the increase in drugs flowing from Burma to its south-western Yunnan province.”

U.N. officials confirm this. “Yes they (Beijing) are concerned not only with ATS (amphetamine-type stimulus) but also with heroin,” says Gary Lewis, East Asia and Pacific regional representative of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).

The spike in the number of methamphetamine pills seized in China in 2009 underscores such worries. “In 2009, China reported total seizures of more than 40 million pills. This represented as almost six-fold increase from 6.25 million pills seized in 2008,” UNODC says in a December 2010 report on the ATS trade in Burma, whose north-eastern part comes within the narcotics producing Golden Triangle region.

“The Chinese government has been reporting a sharp increase of drug trafficking into China from the Golden Triangle region by means of constantly changing drug trafficking routes and methods,” states the 45-page report, ‘Myanmar – Situation Assessment on Amphetamine-Type Stimulants’. “Reports have pointed to transnational drug syndicates attempting to sell stored drugs, with a resulting sharp increase of drug smuggled into China.”

“The seizure of 3.2 tonnes of heroine and approximately the same quantity of methamphetamine in Yunnan province accounted for half of the total quantity of illicit drugs seized in China in 2009,” the report adds. “Three of the self-administered regions in Myanmar are located on the border with Yunnan province. Methamphetamine pills seized in Yunnan province are – at the very least – trafficked through these Special Regions.”

Burma’s rise as a major production centre of methamphetamine pills, with the drug factories located in the north-eastern Shan State, adds to its previous notoriety as a supplier of opium and heroin.

Burma’s emergence as an ATS producer followed a decision by the junta to launch a 15-year drug elimination programme in 1999. The Drug Elimination Plan (DEP) targeted the poppy fields in the north and eastern regions of the country, which accounted for 163,000 hectares under opium cultivation in the mid-1990s.

Before the DEP, Burma was known as the world’s largest producer of illicit opium, “accounting for approximately 700 metric tonnes annually between 1981 and 1987,” according to UNODC. “(That dropped) to 21,600 hectares in 2006, the lowest ever recorded.”

However, this 83 percent decline in poppy cultivation under the DEP has not seen a change in the cross-border trade of ATS, which follows the routes once frequented by drug caravans that moved heroin from Burma into China.

“The border is very porous and there are no markers to say where the Burmese border ends and the Chinese border begins,” says an official from Thailand’s Central Narcotics Control Agency. “It is easy to move drugs from Burma’s Shan State into China’s Yunnan province in remote areas where there are no checkpoints.”

“The caravans move at night. They take the drugs in backpacks,” the official tells IPS on condition of anonymity. “The Chinese government is faced with a problem because the domestic market is large.”