Pubdate: Mon, 17 Jan 2000 Source: International Herald-Tribune Copyright: International Herald Tribune 2000 Contact: http://www.iht.com/ Page: 5 Author: Thomas Crampton, International Herald Tribune DRUG DEALS TO END, AN ARMY SAYS Burmese Group Is Relocating Villagers Who Grew Opium Poppies WAN HUNG, Burma - In a bid to improve their image and win international development assistance, leaders of one of the world's largest opium armies have unveiled plans to extricate themselves from all aspects of the drug trade within five years. The leaders of the United Wa State Army detailed their plan - including the forced relocation of 50,000 mountain villagers - to a group of foreign journalists ferried in by helicopter over the weekend to witness a carefully choreographed destruction of opium fields. "In the past, we depended on drugs for our livelihood," said Pauk Yu Ri, political commissar for the United Wa State Army. "Now we recognize that drugs are our enemy. " While international drug enforcement officials say the Burmese government has stepped up counternarcotics efforts, there has been no independent verification of the increased efforts by the Wa, and a recent U.S. State Department report said similar pledges by ethnic insurgents had yielded little result. In the weekend ceremony, colorfully dressed hill-tribe children, Wa fighters and troops from the Rangoon government fanned out across high-altitude poppy fields to slash plants growing on mountains ranges controlled by the Wa. Fierce fighters known for mounting the decapitated heads of their enemies on spikes, the Wa negotiated an uneasy cease-fire with the Rangoon government a decade ago. Burma's national flag now flies above their outposts, but the Wa administer their own territory, pay no national taxes and require that Rangoon officials and troops obtain explicit permission before entering their territory. The United States, which considers Burma to be the world's largest source of illicit opium, has described the Wa as one of the country's largest opium cultivators and identified three Wa army leaders as having a major role in the heroin and amphetamines trade. Thai officials said the Wa had manufactured 126 kilograms (280 pounds) of U.S.-bound heroin seized at Bangkok International Airport early last week. "You can believe we have changed, not from our promises but from the deeds you saw today and these plans for the future we are telling you now," said Khin Mating Myint, liaison officer from the Wa army. "Please tell people to bring us foreign assistance to help us stop growing opium." The tightly controlled events witnessed by journalists included the destruction of roughly 105 hectares (260 acres) of poppy fields. Military intelligence officers from the Rangoon government served as translators, and journalists were allowed to spend less than five minutes in a makeshift transfer camp for several thousand villagers who had been forcibly expelled from opium growing regions. At the camp, large families were living in low straw lean-tos erected in a dusty clearing that afforded little protection from the blazing tropical sun. "I brought my family here because our village head told us we must leave," said Aik Rom Di, an opium farmer who had arrived in the camp with six members of his family three days earlier. Villagers are arriving in the camp at the rate of 600 a day, with a total of 20,000 expected by March, Wa officials said. The two-year plan calls for the relocation of 50,000 people, or roughly 20 percent of the population in the territory controlled by the Wa. In addition to Wa, those being moved include members of the Latin, Akha and Lisu hill tribes, officials said. Each displaced villager will receive two hectares of land already planted with several hundred sapling fruit trees, Wa officials said. The Rangoon government's anti-narcotics chief described the forced mass migration as an unprecedented but effective way to fight the Wa's addiction to drug money. "If you want to end this problem, you must think of villagers as human beings," said Colonel Kyaw Thein, a member of the Rangoon government's Committee for Drug Abuse Control. "You cannot just destroy the opium and leave them living on the mountain. They will starve." "We are trying to permanently change our business to things like pig fanning," said Khin Maung Myint, the Wa army's liaison officer. "If these ventures do not succeed financially, we will definitely return to growing opium." Wa officials repeatedly requested increased foreign assistance to bolster their own self-financed crop-substitution projects. The linchpin of Wa financing of the anti-drug efforts: 20 holding companies set up by the army after the cease-fire with Rangoon. The largest, Hong Pang Co., is the leading investor in almost every project that was shown to journalists by Wa officials. Wa officials strongly denied U.S. allegations that investment money for many of the holding companies such as Hong Pang had been derived from drug profits. Lieutenant Colonel Hla Min, spokesman for the Rangoon government, took a more nuanced view: "Isn't it better if money generated by villagers comes back to benefit them and does not sit in banks in other countries?" - --- MAP posted-by: Keith Brilhart