We reach Gawng Lang village at dusk. At first, the only signs of life are the smoke of cooking fires seeping through thatched roofs and the muffled clatter of food being prepared. Then we notice the children. Half-naked, their bellies bloated by malnutrition, they watch from beneath the stilt houses with dumbstruck curiosity. Soon the women emerge, dressed in handwoven black smocks and gripping slender, silver pipes between their teeth. They stare and giggle at us, waiting for their husbands, uncles and brothers to arrive. Wearing ragged military fatigues, the men, when they finally materialize, seem without exception to be among the oldest members of the hamlet. Only later do we discover where all the young men have gone.
Gawng Lang sits on a lonely hilltop in northeast Burma, sheltered by gently swaying bamboo. None of its 400 inhabitants has seen a white man before. But then, very few white men have ever seen a Wa, the most fascinating, seldom met and impoverished of Burma's myriad tribes. Until the 1970s, many Wa strayed from their hilltop redoubts only to chop off human heads, which they believed to be powerful totems against disease and bad harvests. Neighboring tribes have long loathed and feared them. Among the Shan, Burma's largest ethnic minority, a mother anxious to hush her restless child might still whisper, "Shhh! A Wa is coming!"
From the nearest Chinese border town, it takes five hours of hiking over hauntingly beautiful mountains to reach the village. Five hours, that is, for a city-softened journalist. Even elderly Wa can cover the distance in less than two. The Wa are so accustomed to climbing steep terrain that they complain of sore feet when walking on level ground. Gawng Lang's inhabitants don't receive many visitors, but after recovering from their initial surprise, they are both hospitable and curious. "Tell me," says Ai Sin, a wiry 42-year-old who serves us rice and vegetables by guttering lamplight. "I have heard that when it is day in the Wa hills, it is dark in America. Can this be true?"
The Wa no longer chop heads, yet their ferocious and demonic image remains intact. Dawn reveals why: the sloping fields surrounding Gawng Lang are planted with thousands of opium poppies, their fresh green shoots pushing up through the mist- dampened earth. We also learn in the morning why there are no young men around. They have all been conscripted into the 20,000- strong United Wa State Army (UWSA)-a formidable force of tribal soldiers dubbed by the U.S. State Department as the world's "most heavily armed narco-traffickers." Burma in 2001 was the largest producer of opium in the world (Afghanistan ranked second), and the UWSA dominates the country's opium and heroin business. It also controls some 80% of Burma's equally lucrative trade in methamphetamine pills, a cheap and highly addictive drug better known in Asia by its Thai name yaba, or crazy medicine. Together, these businesses earn the UWSA's Elite commanders and their associates up to $550 million a year, according to TIME's research. It's an incomprehensible sum for the people of Gawng Lang, who see little of the spoils and go about their medieval existence much as their ancestors did.
In Thailand, a tidal wave of yaba has ripped through schools, slums and nightclubs, leaving a quarter of a million addicts in its wake. With narcotics experts and Thai army officials expecting a billion pills to pour in next year, many Thais regard the UWSA as the gravest threat to their society and national security since the 1970s communist insurgencies. Sending an aggressive message to Rangoon and its drug-dealing Wa allies, the Thai army last spring staged a troop buildup along the kingdom's border on a scale not seen since World War II. Yet the scourge is anything but contained. The UWSA is now diversifying into gunrunning while also expanding operations geographically into Laos, the Chinese province of Yunnan and the turbulent states of northeast India. Shipments of yaba are turning up in Europe, Australia and America. And in an ominous extension of its military reach, the UWSA has broken out of its traditional territory by forcibly relocating tens of thousands of Wa villagers to strategic swatches of land along the Thai-Burmese border-a Stalinesque forced exodus little noticed by the outside world.
How did a once isolated hill tribe grow so powerful, so quickly, transforming itself into an international crime syndicate to rival Colombia's drug cartels? The man we hoped might answer this question is the UWSA's commander, Bao Youxiang. Little is known about "Chairman Bao," as he prefers to be called, and few Westerners have ever met him. But his reputation, fueled by rumor, is gaudy, befitting the lord of a narco-fiefdom. Bao is reputedly so rich that he would need two trucks to carry around all his money. He is rumored to have once had four of his own men pistol-whipped to death for conspiring against him. Also, he likes bowling.
To meet Bao, we plunged into the lawless hills of northeast Burma- to the heart of an empire built on guns, drugs and blood.Even in the old days, not every Wa chopped heads; 19th century Chinese merchants made the potentially lifesaving distinction between the nonhostile "tame Wa" and their bloodthirsty cousins, the "wild Wa." But all Wa cherished the de facto independence their hilltop seclusion granted them and were quick to trade on their unsavory image if threatened. A Wa chief once declared to approaching British troops, "We are a wild people, who eat rats and squirrels raw."
Undaunted, a British colonial administrator named George Scott launched the first expedition into wild Wa territory in 1893. Scott demolished many myths about the hill tribe. They were not, as outsiders had insisted, "habitual cannibals" with a predilection for roasted babies. Nor were they backward, he said. "They are an exceedingly well-behaved, industrious, and estimable race," wrote Scott, "were it not for the one foible of cutting strangers' heads off and neglecting ever to wash themselves."
Despite brutal military campaigns by Scott's men-one in retaliation for the decapitation of two British officers-the Wa were never brought fully under colonial control. But later, greater historical forces shattered Wa isolation forever and propelled their homeland into the international narcotics trade. The Wa had always grown poppies. Scott himself had marveled at the "enormous amount of opium" they produced even in the 1890s. But the retreat of China's nationalist Kuomintang (KMT) divisions into northeast Burma after the 1949 communist revolution kicked cultivation into high gear. The KMT persuaded farmers to grow more opium, transporting it on long mule caravans into northern Thailand. By the late 1960s, the Communist Party of Burma (CPB) had arrived. Bent on overthrowing the Rangoon government through its jungle bases along the Sino-Burmese border, the Beijing-backed CPB quickly formed pacts with Wa guerrilla bands. One was led by a pugnacious 21-year-old named Bao Youxiang.
Born to a chieftain in Kunma, a northern Wa village near Gawng Lang, Bao was the sixth of eight brothers and a natural-born fighter. He rose steadily through the CPB ranks, from battalion commander in Kunma to leader of a crack brigade operating near the Thai border. For Bao and thousands of fellow Wa tribesmen, the CPB provided modern weaponry, combat experience and-a first for a people historically made up of squabbling clans-a loose political unity. In return, the communists got a pool of tough tribal warriors to fight a bloody 20-year conflict against the Burmese government. The Wa proved fearless in battle and willing to accept appallingly high casualties. As one saying went, "The Wa are good at dying."
At rebelling, too. In 1989 a key brigade mutinied against the aging CPB leadership. On April 17 of that year-a date the Wa still celebrate as national day-Bao and other tribal commanders joined the rebellion. Burma's Communist Party split into several heavily armed factions, all of which signed cease-fire agreements with Rangoon. One of these factions, the United Wa State Army, would be dominated by Bao. The cease-fire was a turning point in Wa history. The embattled Burmese military, still reeling from the 1988 democracy uprising, had no desire to fight the heavily armed Wa militia. In return for keeping the peace, the UWSA was given full autonomy over what the regime termed "Special Region No. 2," which Bao christened "Wa state." The UWSA was also granted lucrative business concessions, including tacit permission to deal in the only valuable commodity it knew: narcotics.
By 1994 the wa state army was mass-producing yaba in addition to heroin. Unlike fields of poppies, the tiny pills are immune to bad weather and invisible to U.S. spy satellites. They are cheap to produce in makeshift chemical factories and easier to smuggle than heroin. Thailand proved a ready market: today, more Thais are addicted to yaba than to heroin. And so the UWSA prospered. To defend its enterprises, it acquired a formidable arsenal, largely provided by Chinese dealers in Yunnan. Today the UWSA's weaponry includes heavy machine guns and Chinese-built, shoulder-fired, surface-to-air missiles.
With Burma's domestic economy teetering on collapse, the military regime needed Wa drug money and bribes. So Wa entrepreneurs were welcomed in cities such as Rangoon and Mandalay, where they set up trading companies and bought real estate. Today the UWSA reportedly controls such companies as the Myanmar May Flower Group and, through it, a large private bank. Inevitably the Wa leaders grabbed a hefty piece of the action for themselves. Bao's family, for example, reportedly owns Yangon Airways, one of the country's two domestic airlines.
Some money from the tribe's business ventures trickled down, changing the landscape of the Wa hills. "In 1993 you could still meet guys carrying spears," recalls a Christian missionary who toured the region. Since then, a handful of larger Wa villages have morphed into towns, and with Chinese technical help a new road has been built to link them. Villagers who live along its winding route refer to it simply as "the road." There is no other one in the Wa hills with which to confuse it. And so, by logical necessity, all roads in the Wa hills lead to one place: Panghsang, population 15,000, the headquarters of the UWSA's empire and the lair of Chairman Bao.
"To get into any Wa village," an earlier visitor once wrote, "you must either fight or be invited." Getting an invitation to meet Asia's most powerful druglord was simpler than expected. A few calls to a Chinese mobile-phone number, a letter of intent delivered through a Wa emissary and then, suddenly, a message from Panghsang: Bao was willing to meet. After that came a great deal of waiting near the Burmese border for this rare audience.
There are worse places to kill time than the Ru Yi Commercial City development in Menglian, a Chinese town only an hour's drive from Panghsang. Locals say the lavish, Thai-designed complex is owned by Li Ziru, a Chinese-born former Red Guard who nowadays acts as Bao's right-hand man. The U.S. State Department claims Li is a leader in Burma's drug trade. He is clearly a very wealthy man. The Ru Yi complex boasts a four-star hotel, shops, a supermarket, karaoke bars and-in a country where gambling is still outlawed as one of the "Five Evils"-a busy casino. Evidently, Chinese officials are not squeamish about drug money fueling the breakneck development of Menglian and other towns in Yunnan. The Golden Phoenix Hotel in Simao is proudly described in a brochure as a joint venture between "the Wa Federation of Myanmar [Burma]" and Yunnan's Provincial Farming Bureau. And at the UWSA-owned Health and Happiness Hotel in Cangyuan, senior county officials slurp tea in the lobby while Wa prostitutes prowl the upper floors for clients.
The summons from Bao eventually comes. Getting to Panghsang involves a short drive to the border, an immigration check and a trip across the bridge spanning the turbid Namkha River. On the other side, flanked by forbidding mountain ridges, lies Panghsang. Ten years ago it was little more than a village with a rebel army base attached. Today it has hotels, shops, karaoke bars and a 24-hour casino. There is also a bowling alley where, say locals, a lane is permanently reserved for Bao.
In a conference room in one of the hotels, Bao makes his entrance orbited by two of his own cameramen, one of them packing a side arm, both recording the boss's meeting with the Western press. Bao, a squat man in his early 50s with a bulldog face, is also armed. He carries a small-caliber pistol clipped to the belt of his khaki pants, an ensemble jarringly set off by his footwear: a pair of battered, pink Chinese slippers. He listens to our questions with unnerving stillness, staring at us intently, then answers in rapid-fire Yunnanese patois, gesticulating wildly. "These drugs!" he cries, karate-chopping the air for emphasis, revealing the diamond-encrusted gold Rolex he wears on his wrist. "I detest them! You think drugs have been harmful to others? Let me tell you: they have been a much greater disaster for the Wa! Our people are stuck in such poverty they haven't even got clothes to put on their own backs."
Ask Bao who runs Burma's narcotics trade, and he grows intensely agitated. "It's all done by businessmen!" he fumes. "Businessmen operating outside the law are refining opium into heroin and manufacturing yaba." The Wa people-and, by extension, their leader-are simply "victims," he says. This is disingenuous, to say the least. Many of these unnamed businessmen are Bao's own field commanders. His brother, senior UWSA commander Bao Youhua, runs what an official with an international narcotics-monitoring agency calls "industrial-scale" cultivation of opium poppies in the Nam Lwi Valley southeast of Panghsang. Another notorious trafficker is the shadowy leader of the UWSA's southern command, Wei Xuegang. Half Wa and half Chinese, Wei was indicted in absentia on heroin-trafficking charges in 1993 by a New York federal court. The U.S. is offering a $2 million reward for information leading to his arrest. Wei is also named by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and the Thai army as the boss of the booming methamphetamine trade into Thailand, where a court has already sentenced him to death in absentia.
But Chairman Bao will not be drawn on this. He prefers to portray himself as a heroic enemy of the narcotics racket, a man dedicated to the banishment of opium from the Wa hills. "Our objective is to eliminate the cultivation of opium poppies by 2005, and I intend to achieve that," he declares. Only 40% of Wa farmers now cultivate opium, claims Bao, down from 60% in recent years. "We've also developed a range of substitute industries," he says, listing what he calls "decent, regular businesses"-rubber and tea plantations, gem and zinc mines, liquor distilleries and a brand of cigarettes called Golden Triangle. This is just a start, promises Bao. "If the international community is willing to support us," he offers, "we'll get this work done. But we need help." The international community has shown little inclination to trust the UWSA leader. But Bao cites what he believes is irrefutable proof of his good intent: the great Wa migration.
In 1999, Bao launched a grandiose relocation scheme that he says is intended to solve the intertwined problems of opium cultivation and the chronic rice shortage in the northern Wa hills. "People in the north can break their backs for a year to grow enough rice to last them just six months," Bao says. "But those who have moved south can work for one year and harvest enough rice to eat for two years." A sense of historic destiny is also at work. By moving south, the Wa are reclaiming land they have regarded as their own since the 12th century. The migration is Chairman Bao's Long March.
| Meet the men behind the nation's narco-empire Bao Youxiang The commander of the United Wa State Army is believed to play an important coordinating role in the narcotics trade in the northern Wa region. His No. 2, Li Ziru, has been involved in the heroin trade since the late 1980s Wei Xuegang An ethnic Chinese, Wei muscled his way to the forefront of Burma's drug trade both as a heroin trafficker-for which he has been indicted by a U.S. court-and as a mass-producer of methamphetamines. Close to top members of the Rangoon junta, particularly strongman Khin Nyunt, Wei is now said to spend much of his time in Mandalay and Rangoon Peng Jiasheng A former Communist Party of Burma (CPB) commander from the Kokang region north of the Wa hills, Peng seized control of the lucrative heroin trade in his homeland during the 1990s, but his share has slipped due to rivalry with the Yang clan Luo Xinghan The "godfather of Kokang," Luo has been a key figure since the '70s when he rose to power as a government militia commander running opium caravans south to the Thai border. He now oversees one of Burma's largest conglomerates Lin Mingxian An ethnic Chinese, the former CPB commander runs Special Region No. 4 in eastern Shan state, touted by Rangoon as "opium- free." Lin's share of the narcotics trade, while nowhere near as profitable as that of the Wa, involves heroin and methamphetamines. He is married to the daughter of Kokang's Peng Jiasheng Khun Sa A warlord who stepped back from direct involvement in heroin trafficking when he and most of his rebel Mong Tai Army surrendered to Rangoon in 1996. Now retired, he still has connections to the drug trade |