by David Eimer
Just as the Tibetans suffered under the generals, so did the Lisu and Rawang. Some Lisu reacted by choosing to live in India. Around six thousand walked across the mountains in the 1960s, on the advice of the Morse family, in an effort to find a better life. They and their descendants are still in Arunachal Pradesh, also home to large numbers of Tibetans, and the Lisu continue to move between India and Burma. Ngwalisa told me that one of his friends residing across the frontier was back visiting relatives in his home village and we set off to meet him.
Travelling south from Putao on the road to Myitkyina, we ran through mostly Rawang villages. In Putao the minorities live side by side, but out in the country the villages are not mixed and there is little intermarriage between the different ethnic groups. Some of the women wore htamein with horizontal red, white and blue stripes, the traditional Rawang colours. While I could sometimes recognise whether people were Lisu or Rawang from their faces – the Rawang have wider ones – it was much easier to identify them by their different patterned and coloured clothing.
Cows and goats grazed along the verges of the road, released from the backyards of houses for the day, while women walked home bent almost double under baskets loaded with firewood. Electricity has yet to arrive in the settlements outside Putao, the villagers still waiting for hydroelectric plants to start generating power. Away to our right were forested hills and towering beyond them in the far distance were the mountains, the highest peaks dusted with snow, and the frontier with India.
Turning off the main road onto a more primitive track, Mulashidi Village appeared at the bottom of a hill which was thickly wooded with bamboo and oaks. ‘The only reason they haven’t been chopped down is that the roads are so bad around here. It’s too hard to transport the timber,’ said Ngwalisa. The village is divided by a tributary of the Malihka, which we crossed via an uncertain bridge, its planks creaking under the weight of the motorbike. Beneath us the water was a translucent turquoise in the sun, and I could see every rock on the riverbed.
Ngwalisa’s friend Siliw was hacking away at a stack of bamboo outside the front of his family home with a group of men. They were building a temporary extension to the house for a wedding, the reason Siliw had returned from India. Out back, in a garden that was a riot of papaya and palm trees, the women were preparing a huge pile of vegetables for the party. Ngwalisa told me that it was rare to see so many men in the village at this time of year. ‘Once the rice is harvested, they go to Tanai to work in the gold or amber mines, or farther south to Hpakant for the jade. Women raise the children around here,’ he said.
Siliw offered us juicy grapefruit and green tea served in bamboo cups, while we searched for shade from the midday heat. He was thirty-eight, slender with the trace of a moustache, and had first ventured across the mountains to India for work in 2003. ‘People told me walking was the cheapest way to get to India. It’s a nine-day walk from Putao to where the Lisu villages are. You have to carry everything you need: rice, a plastic sheet to cover yourself at night. But we are used to hill-walking,’ said Siliw.
He told me there are four different routes into Arunachal Pradesh from Putao, and that there was little scrutiny of the frontier by the authorities on either side. ‘The Indian army checks the border once a year. The Burmese army are too lazy to check. But the smuggling goes on farther south near Tanai.’ Siliw studied at bible school in India, where he learned both English and Hindi, and then decided to stay in Arunachal Pradesh as a pastor and teacher.
‘I prefer it there. It feels more free than here,’ he said. ‘It’s a simple life, more simple even than here. The villages aren’t the same. It’s mostly bamboo houses, and it is higher and colder there. We’re a four-day walk from Miao, the nearest town. But everyone has land for rice and people grow enough to live on.’ After a protracted tussle with the Indian government the Lisu were granted citizenship in 1994. Some now join the Indian army as an alternative to farming.
Mulashidi is also known for being the site of the first church built by the Morse family, replaced now by a far more prominent structure. The large wooden house the missionaries lived in until they were forced out of Burma by the military still stands on the outskirts of the village, windows open to the elements and increasingly decrepit. Beyond Mulashidi we bounced along trails that weaved through grassland, as Ngwalisa cut across country to reach Machanbaw, our next destination. Away from the rivers, the yellow soil of the Triangle is far less fertile and the land here was untilled.
Machanbaw lay on the other side of the Malihka, east of Putao. The Kachin are the majority ethnic group here and the KIA keep soldiers in the surrounding area. Consequently the town is home to a large Tatmadaw base, whose soldiers eyed me suspiciously, as well as a couple of government-built pagodas, a rare sight in this Christian-dominated region. Machanbaw was barely awake in the afternoon sun, the modest market already shut for the day with just a sole food stand open to serve us a late lunch of noodles and fatty pork, followed by dried persimmons.
Returning to Putao, we went through a succession of Lisu villages. Sugarcane and banana and papaya trees encroached on the bamboo and wooden houses with thatched roofs – firewood stacked to the side and rice drying on plastic sheets out front – a natural bounty for their residents. Ngwalisa waved at some of them as we drove past. They were his people and he admitted he was less comfortable with the Rawang or Shan. ‘There is some tension between the Lisu and Rawang,’ he said. ‘It goes back to the old days, before the British came, when the Rawang had to pay tribute to the Lisu.’
In the late afternoon the Triangle grows cold, the sun’s rays diminished by an unwelcome wind that rushes through the valleys. It grew rawer by the minute as we drove through mile after mile of grassland stretching away to the hills in the distance. The mist was gathering above us, curls of condensation linking together, ready to render Putao wet and freezing overnight. Poking above the vapour, bathed in soft light, were the mountains, sculpted by the same icy air currents that had me hunkered low on the back of the bike.
While the different minorities distrust each other, they do unite to combat what all of them see as the most pressing problem in the region: the ever-increasing levels of drug abuse among the young. Ngwalisa had pointed out some of the local addicts soon after my arrival, teenagers and young men driving three to a motorbike past my guest house and the complex next door that is home to the Putao Baptist Association, on their way to meet their dealers around the market.
A meeting with the leaders of the All Religions and All Tribes Combined Group revealed the sheer scale of the heroin epidemic in the Triangle. It is one of a number of community anti-drug organisations formed in Kachin State in recent years. The biggest and best known is Pat Ja San – the Kachin for ‘Fighting against drugs’ – with 100,000 activists backed by the Baptist and Catholic churches. They run their own rehabilitation programmes, but act also as vigilantes: beating up dealers and burning poppy fields, as well as occasionally flogging recalcitrant users.
None of the men sitting opposite me seemed the type to be wielding whips. They were middle-aged or older, some balding, in woolly hats, fleeces, tracksuit tops and longyi, a mix of Lisu, Rawang, Shan and Kachin ethnicities. We met in a village south-west of Putao, green tea and an array of snacks on the table in front of us, our conversation punctuated by the sound of sunflower seeds being cracked between teeth.
U Aung Aung was their unofficial spokesperson, an intense Shan man with glasses. ‘We started in 2004, before Pat Ja San. Even then there were a lot of addicts. People were overdosing and dying and the police numbers were too small to do anything. We couldn’t look on and do nothing, so we persuaded the heads of the different peoples to be patrons of our organisation.’ He spoke in Burmese, the common language between the different minorities. ‘We started out just trying to raise awareness, to inform people about why doing drugs is so bad.’
Now the group has become much more proactive, while not being as aggressive as Pat Ja San, w
ho clash often with the militias who oversee drug production. ‘Since 2010 we have concentrated on getting the dealers arrested. We have informers in all the villages who tell us what is going on. Families here all live together, so people don’t do drugs at home. It’s too easy to spot. So they tend to go to one house in the village, or a place outside, to take drugs. When we identify the house and the dealer, we tell the police,’ U Aung Aung said.
‘Women are often the dealers. They’re less suspicious to the police, especially when they are stopped at the checkpoints on the road from Myitkyina. So now we have women to help us search them in the villages. Most of the dealers are Lisu. We tell the addicts the consequences of what they are doing, and that they need to stop or we’ll have them arrested. The dealers we get arrested straightaway. But it’s very hard to get the ones above local level. They won’t say where they get the drugs from. They just say they got them in Myitkyina.’
Some dealers are able to pay their way out of trouble. ‘We got one man arrested and his wife tried to bribe us first,’ recalled U Aung Aung, waving his hands in disbelief at her audacity. ‘But then she paid the judge and he was released quickly. He runs a restaurant near the airport now. And we’ve had cases of army officers and police supplying drugs to the local dealers. We can’t do much about that.’
Opium and heroin are the narcotics of choice, although U Aung Aung said yama, methamphetamine pills, is becoming more popular. In part that is because the minorities have always used opium as a medicine. ‘Young ethnic people think it is not a big deal to use opium or heroin, but they don’t realise that taking heroin is not the same as using opium to alleviate pain,’ said U Aung Aung.
‘One injection of heroin costs 5,000 kyat [£2.80] – the price is dropping because the supply of drugs is increasing. Addicts normally inject twice a day, so they need 10,000 kyat [£5.60]. That’s a lot of money for people around here,’ said U Aung Aung, speaking ever faster as he grew more passionate, the men to his side nodding their silent assent. ‘The addicts don’t even realise they are victims until they haven’t got any money left and start stealing from their families and neighbours. Then it gets worse and worse. Some even use guns to rob people at night on the roads.’
Easy access apart, why did they think drug use is so prevalent among young minority people? ‘Each individual will give a different reason. Some say because their friends are doing it. Some will say they use it to relieve pain. But there is a lack of job opportunities here, especially for the young people whose families can’t afford to send them to school, or who drop out,’ noted U Aung Aung.
Their organisation is entirely funded by local people, with donations solicited from villages and businesses. ‘We’ve asked the local government for help, we’ve written to our MP and to the Minister for Ethnic Affairs, but they never reply,’ U Aung Aung said. ‘We’ve never seen anyone get arrested because of the central government’s policies to eradicate drugs. But I don’t think the government is too worried about ethnic people dying from drugs. They know what’s going on.’
Ngwalisa told me that a Baptist church, the Assembly of God, ran its own rehabilitation centre outside Putao. After a few phone calls he found out where it was, isolated out in the grasslands on the way to Machanbaw. It was just visible from the main road, a bamboo longhouse on stilts with a thatched roof, set in a dip of the plain, the tall grass all around it swaying in the stiff breeze.
Two smaller huts stood behind the main building, washing slung on lines suspended from bamboo poles between them. Sitting under an awning at a long table that acted as the dining area was Tang Raw, the head of the centre, a 43-year-old Kachin man from Myitkyina and former heroin addict. He ticked me off for lighting a cigarette, asking me to put it out. Rehab centres in the West are full of people who smoke like chimneys. Tang Raw, though, regarded tobacco as the start of a slippery slope that leads ultimately to shooting smack.
Rehab facilities run by the churches in Kachin State are far more rigorous than the ones in Europe or the States. I had heard stories of people being locked in cells to detox, or even being chained up. A glance inside the longhouse, a line of sleeping mats on a raised wooden platform, made it clear that this was a basic operation. ‘We’ve been here two years,’ Tang Raw told me. ‘The students have been through a year’s rehab. They’re Kachin and Lisu, mostly from Myitkyina. Heroin addicts mainly, but some who took yama and a few alcoholics.’
Ranging in age from nineteen to fifty, all undergo the same initial process. ‘We don’t give them other drugs when they’re coming off heroin. For the first few days they go under the shower or in a water tank ten to fifty times a day. Anytime they crave drugs we put them in the cold water. When they are aching we massage them,’ said Tang Raw. ‘After we’ve taken care of the physical side we look to their spiritual care. We introduce them to the gospels and they study the Bible. Some are Buddhists when they come here but they convert.’
Tang Raw claims a 70 per cent success rate for his rustic rehab. ‘We don’t lock anyone up and some run away. We don’t bring them back by force but we encourage them to return. I think our way is better than the government rehab centres. I went to them a few times, but the moment I got out I bought drugs. The government method cures you physically but doesn’t remove the desire to take drugs.’
Joshu, the Lisu version of Joshua, is one of his success stories, a twenty-year-old from Tanai, thin in a replica Barcelona football shirt with bad teeth and a cheeky expression that hinted at his bad-boy past. ‘I took opium, heroin and yama. I started at fourteen because all my friends were doing it. I smoked heroin at first, then I started injecting when I was sixteen.’ Joshu recounted his drug-taking history in a matter-of-fact tone, as if he was reciting one of the biblical texts he had learned while in rehab.
‘My parents realised I was addicted when I was fifteen. They’re rice farmers, although my dad used to grow a bit of opium, too. My father beat me and said he’d throw me out if I carried on. But they didn’t. Finally, they sent me here. By that time I was stealing motorbikes and animals to get the money for drugs,’ said Joshu. ‘I was craving a lot at first. I wanted to run away. But I couldn’t face my parents again if I did that. So I stuck it out. But I still wanted heroin. It took a long time not to want drugs.’
Hard as the regime is the students seemed happy, joking with the volunteers who come for a few weeks at a time to care for them and teach the Bible. Tang Raw warmed up, too, revealing an empathy with his charges as he recalled his fifteen years as an addict. He showed me his forearms, badly scarred from injecting for so long. ‘My teeth are all damaged, too,’ he said. He has been clean for thirteen years now, and has a wife and four kids in Myitkyina.
Before then, he worked for years in the jade mines of Hpakant in the west of Kachin State. The hills around Hpakant contain the largest and highest quality jadeite deposits anywhere in the world, and it is just 120 miles from Hpakant to the border with China, where the lust for jade is unrivalled. That seemingly auspicious proximity of mines to marketplace has made the trade in green jade the most profitable industry in Burma, along with drugs, worth over £20 billion annually.
Hpakant’s mines are mostly owned by Chinese interests, cronies, families of former senior junta figures, the Tatmadaw and the warlords of Shan State. Around 80 per cent of the jade mined is thought to be sold illegally, smuggled into China through areas controlled by the military or the KIA. Hardly any of the revenue goes to Kachin State. Just as narcotics trafficking benefits only Chinese gangs, the ethnic armies and militias and the Tatmadaw, so the profits from Burma’s other major industry disappear into the pockets of the elite and Chinese companies. All the peoples of Kachin get in return is a nightmare.
Located in a conflict zone where the KIA battles the Tatmadaw, Hpakant is Burma’s heart of darkness. It is an environmental disaster, with entire hills blasted away in the hunt for green gold and rivers polluted with the waste, and is notorious as the heroin and HIV capital of the country.
So toxic is Hpakant that the government makes strenuous efforts to hide the area from foreign eyes. It is the most restricted place in all Burma, far harder for a westerner to reach than Shan State’s special regions. The closest I came was Indawgyi Lake, about forty miles south, beyond which lie army checkpoints, minefields and guerrilla war.
Only the Chinese get to travel the abysmal road from Myitkyina to Hpakant, which is near-impassable in the rainy season. Any other foreigners found there are instantly deported. But people from across Burma flock to Hpakant. They do so for the same reason that wagon trains crossed America to reach the gold rush towns of California in the mid-nineteenth century: the opportunity to make a swift fortune.
An army of freelance miners scrambles across the moon-like terrain of collapsed hills and giant craters. There are said to be more bulldozers in Hpakant than anywhere else in the world, digging out hillsides and shovelling away the debris. Swarming over the slag heaps are the so-called ‘hand-pickers’, sifting the rocks and earth for jade that has been overlooked by the industrial mining concerns.
‘Find one medium-sized lump of jade and you can return to your village, build a house and live comfortably for years,’ said Tang Raw. That is if you don’t die in the frequent landslides or get seduced by Hpakant’s most popular recreational activity, heroin. ‘People take it because it is such a hard life being a jade miner. A few companies pay their workers in heroin,’ noted Tang Raw. Hpakant is a place where methamphetamines provide the energy to dig all day and opiates soothe the pain in the evening.