1 Mai 2004
The Times
The head of a region that was the source of half
the world's heroin is to halt the poppy growing,
he tells Oliver August in Pangsang
WHEN Bao Youxiang offered to meet US diplomats in
Rangoon for a chat, they declined, telling a foreign
intermediary that he would be arrested on the spot
if he entered the embassy.
The Burmese rebel leader, whose remote territory
was the source of about half the world's heroin
in 2001, has a price of $1 million (Pounds 560,000)
on his head, the diplomat pointed out.
Bao is the leader of the hardy Wa tribe, former
head hunters who openly grow poppies on vast hillsides
and legally trade opium in village markets from
where it is transported to Britain and other Western
countries.
At the embassy in Rangoon, Chairman Bao, as he likes
to be called, had intended to tell US diplomats
about a radical plan to shed his drug lord image.
He wants to ban all poppy cultivation by his 400,000
people by next summer, a step that would transform
the region. Short of sympathetic listeners, he invited
The Times to inspect preparations for the ban, followed
by an evening of ten-pin bowling in the King Pin's
mountain stronghold.
Pangsang is only reachable via three consecutive
domestic flights and a twelve-hour bus ride through
poppy-growing areas controlled by Chairman Bao's
30,000-strong personal army, labelled the world's
"most heavily armed narco- traffickers".
The Wa "capital" stretches along a river
valley, wedged between a sleepy Chinese border crossing
and a fortified checkpoint. Along the main street
there is a 20ft golden water buffalo statue, the
scene of recent celebrations on the Wa "National
Day". Chairman Bao has issued his own car licence
plates and school curriculum and his meetings with
foreigners are filmed by Wa state television.
"You can chop my head off if
there are still poppies here next year," he
said in fluent Mandarin, using one of his favourite
phrases. "I want to help my people by building
a modern economy." A 10 per cent tax on opium
has long been a major source of income.
Chairman Bao was seated in a banquet hall with dining
tables arranged for three dozen. He apologised for
the absence of most of his lieutenants, whom he
called "Central Committee members" as
if referring to China's Communist leadership.
The 57-year-old, who had only two
years of education in a Chinese primary school,
has expanded the region's road network sixfold in
recent years, thanks to good trade relations with
China along the 300-mile border. But Beijing has
put pressure on him to abandon drug trafficking
and to concentrate on commerce in line with World
Trade Organisation guidelines.
Public Security Bureau officials from China, fighting
a domestic heroin flood, have visited Pangsang to
arrest traffickers presented to them by Chairman
Bao's United Wa State Army.
The US Government has yet to endorse
his conversion from drug lord to nation builder,
but it is helping to fund a UN aid programme in
Wa territory. Jeremy Milsom, a UN official, said:
"We believe that Bao is genuine. He used to
be up to his neck in it, but now he wants out."
When his brother was found to be operating
drug factories close to a UN project station this
year, Chairman Bao, who shed his combat fatigues
in 1996 and now wears a diamond Rolex and a sapphire
ring, acted promptly. The labs were closed and the
brother's militia disbanded, although he has not
been arrested.
United Wa State Army soldiers appear
to support the crackdown. Ai Sam, an armed and uniformed
16-year-old, said: "The ban should help to
stop addiction in the army. We were told offenders
will go to prison for four years." Even senior
officers, long beneficiaries of the drugs trade,
at least publicly applaud the ban.
Zhao Wenxing, a regional commander,
said: "We don't want to be known as the Wild
Wa any more. We want to be friends with other countries
and you can't with opium."
Attending a family funeral, the commander
stood only a few feet away from his relatives' poppy
plot. Every spring, the hill tribe villagers score
the plump bulbs with razor-like tools and scoop
up the oozing opium, rolling it into fist-sized
balls.
Dressed in their Sunday best, they
take their harvest to market traders who use as
weights old silver rupee coins picturing George
V and Edward VII. A kilo (2.2lb) of opium sells
for about Pounds 130, an annual income for the villagers.
The production of heroin, as well
as synthetic drugs, boomed in the 1990s after Chairman
Bao negotiated a ceasefire with the Burmese Government,
ending decades of fighting. His motivation for imposing
a ban now is something of a mystery.
Possibly, the Rangoon regime is buying
him off to improve Burma's international image.
The Bao family has been able to take over a government
airline. Pressure from China, long opposed to drugs,
is another factor.
The Chinese Ambassador to Rangoon
has repeatedly visited Chairman Bao. The warlord,
some say, is also concerned with his legacy. He
keeps referring to "history" and "my
people".
Others point to his young second wife,
a progressive ethnic Chinese who persuaded him to
set up a women's union in the Wa state. When he
decided to marry her, he apparently had quite a
bit of persuading to do himself: his first wife
only reluctantly accepted the younger companion
into what is now their joint household, a plush
villa with a large satellite dish, guarded by teenagers
with hand grenades.
Most of his people live much more
modestly. Opium is the only source of income and
medicine in much of the Wa region, and when the
ban comes into effect in July, it will cause major
disruption. Kya Teh, 56, who has smoked to fight
chronic pains for the past ten years, moaned: "I
don't know what I'll do without it." The village
chief in Kaw Law Su, a huddle of four dozen huts
on a ridge line, said: "The situation will
be desperate after the ban. Every household here
grows opium."
The UN Office on Drugs and Crime estimates
that the loss of income will condemn many Wa to
starvation and has financed an Pounds 8 million
relief effort, including building irrigation canals
for new rice paddies. If the fallout from the ban
cannot be managed, the UN office says, opium production
is likely to resume on a grand scale.
That, of course, presupposes Bao is
genuine in the first place. As far as a visitor
can tell, he may be. The public recognition of opium
as an evil by the Wa is a huge step.
"Drugs are bad for you. Really,
bowling is much better entertainment," Chairman
Bao said as he gestured to an assistant to book
a few lanes at his favourite ten-pin alley across
the street.
(c) Times Newspapers Ltd, 2004
