“Good business,” Sam Mai said with his characteristically stiff smile. “The Chinese merchant charges owners to have it serve their mares. Many traders in Kokang prefer mules to horses. They’re sturdier in the hills.”
Having inspected this creature of local repute, we retreated to the house. Sam Mai and Xiao Yang slept on the earthen floor while I, as the honoured guest, was given a wooden bed complete with flea-ridden blankets. I was beginning to appreciate the thinking behind our liberal stock of liquor. The Wa soldiers stayed elsewhere in the village; I did not bother to find out where. I had come to realise they had no concept of duty, nor any real understanding of what they should be doing as my security escorts.
The next day’s march was considerably longer and more strenuous. We left at dawn and marched through tall grass, over hills stripped bare of trees. On the way, we met only some traders with mules and pack oxen carrying corn, pumpkins and basic consumer goods such as plastic flip-flops and torch batteries from China. We passed a few wretched villages of tightly-packed tumbledown rock-and-mud hovels. And to escort us through was the usual reception committee of ferocious mastiffs and inquisitive black pigs, snarling and grunting at our heels.
Only Tinggangho, a small settlement surrounded by rice terraces and bamboo groves, stood out as a pleasant spot, and we decided to halt there to have some tea and a rest. Having tethered our mules in the courtyard outside a house in the village we went in and sat down by the fire—the focal point of social activity in Kokang. Inside we found an old man puffing on a pipe of pungent homegrown tobacco. He had a long thin beard and his wrinkled face broke into a wide smile when he saw me. As I sat down on a low stool by the fire, he said something in Chinese to Sam Law.
“He says he’s seen people like you before. You must be British, he says. “It would have been pedantic to correct him, so I simply listened, fascinated: “Before the war,” he went on, evidently referring to the World War Two, “I was employed by the British Army as a muleteer. I carried supplies for them from Myitkyina to Fort Harrison.”
Fort Harrison was the frontier outpost opposite Sadon in eastern Kachin State—and the only route “before the war” was the mule track we had crossed with some apprehension after our brief encounter with the Burmese Army unit in Manwing.
We left the old man and his village in the early afternoon and descended into a wide savannah. Herds of goats were grazing on the outskirts of every village we passed but, to my great surprise, I was told the local people do not eat them, or drink their milk; they use their droppings as fertilizer in the poppy fields and make bags out of their hides. The meat, which is cheaper than pork or beef, is sold across the border in China.
As dusk was falling, we arrived at Lungtangchai. It was the biggest village I had seen in Kokang thus far and we entered it in single file along a narrow cobbled alleyway. Here was a piece of rural Yunnan of forty years before—but instead of Kuomintang warlords, the rulers were Burmese communists.
Through the open door of one of the grey-brown mud-brick houses, I glimpsed a faded print of Chairman Mao on the wall. The locals dressed in Chinese farmers’ garb: baggy cotton trousers, tattered blue or green shirts and communist-style caps. Many had toes sticking out of torn army plimsolls.
The poverty of the place was striking; as were the effects of inbreeding across many of the rough, unshaven faces that turned in my direction. And in their stares I read undisguised hostility as well as bovine curiosity.
Sam Mai asked for the way to the office of the local “peasants’ union”. In theory at least, these are supposed to be the basis of the CPB’s “people’s power” structure in its buffer state along the Chinese frontier. A crippled villager, gripping a bamboo staff, limped in front of us uphill towards a large mansion on a knoll overlooking Lunghtangchai. It was surrounded by a high mud wall and harked back to some mediaeval Chinese fortress. The cripple mumbled to us in the local Kokang dialect which only Sam Law could understand. The old man’s bony jaw was covered with white stubble and his thin trousers flapped around shrivelled skinny legs.
He opened the gate to the grand bastion of mud and showed us to a room where we could stay. We found water in a jar by an unlit fireplace. The other huge rooms were totally empty. There was nothing to suggest any administrative activity of any sort: no clerks, no office files, no desks. Indeed, in the whole ghost-like building, there appeared to be not a single stick of furniture. We camped on the cold stone floor in a room large enough to hold a mass meeting, should some latter day Cultural Revolution erupt to take Kokang by surprise.
“This is an enormous building. How old is it?” I asked Sam Mai as I looked around the empty hall and up at the solid wooden beams of the ceiling. It had obviously been built long before the forests disappeared from the area.
“Before liberation, this was the central administrative building of the village tract. There was also a primary school here.”
“And after liberation?”
“No school.”
The irony of his reply entirely escaped Sam Mai. If even the local school had been closed down, what had the villagers gained from their “liberation”?
In earlier, perhaps better, days, Lungtangchai had been a major centre for the Kuomintang forces that had retreated across the border following the communist victory in China. In the 1950s, more than 1,000 Nationalist Chinese troops had been stationed here and the village had served as a base for cross-border raids into China. The Kuomintang units in Kokang and elsewhere along the Sino-Burmese frontier had been in daily radio contact with other bases along the Thai border much further to the south and thus, indirectly, with Taiwan.
But as the hope for a reconquest of the communist-ruled mainland began to fade, the Kuomintang units in Shan State turned their attention to the lucrative local opium trade. Mule convoys were organised to transport the drug down to Thailand and, on the return trip, they carried arms and ammunition to enable the warlords in the north to maintain their private fiefdoms. Needless to say, the whole area remained far beyond the writ of the central government in Rangoon.
When talking with CPB commanders, I often had the feeling the Chinese support for the party’s thrust into Mong Ko on New Year’s Day 1968 had not been motivated solely by a desire to export “proletarian revolution” to Burma. The Chinese authorities doubtless wanted to wipe out these Kuomintang bases along the border. And the best way to do so, short of an invasion, was to use the CPB.
From Lungtangchai, we began descending into lower country. Passing us in the opposite direction were country traders driving convoys of heavily loaded mules and oxen, the bells on the animals tinkling as the caravans lumbered past.
The poppy fields gradually gave place to terraced rice paddies and the villages became increasingly prosperous. There is a common misconception in the West that opium farmers grow poppies because it is lucrative. That may be case where other crops are viable as well, and it is no coincidence that in northern Thailand where foreign-sponsored schemes have provided substitute cash crops and a marketing infrastructure, some wilier farmers have reverted to discreet cultivation of the poppy too.
But in the heart of the Golden Triangle the reality is starkly different. Because of the climate and the high altitude, few families in Kokang can grow paddy. The area traditionally has had a yearly cycle of cultivating opium poppies during the dry season and corn when the rains come in May or June. Between these two crops, most farmers in the Kokang hills face several hungry months when the opium has been harvested but not yet sold and the corn is still too young to eat.
In the Golden Triangle itself, the only ones really to profit from poppy cultivation are the merchants, and government officials and military personnel in both Thailand and Burma who reap bribes from the trade. But the biggest profits of all fall to international narcotics syndicates operating with total impunity in comfortable, air-conditioned offices in Bangkok, Hong Kong and Singapore—a world away from the grinding poverty and squalor that is the lot of the
Kokang farmer. Yet no drug enforcement agency has ever dared to pinpoint these real culprits, let alone move against them.
It is far more convenient to blame the drug menace on illiterate farmers or rag-tag guerrillas who have no chance of presenting their version of the story. Indeed, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that both local and Western narcotics suppression officials either are too afraid to expose the truth for reasons of politics or intelligence that are seen to take a higher priority than narcotics suppression; or, worse still, they themselves are corrupt.
The lower country we were approaching was the only part of Kokang where paddy cultivation was possible, and from where the impoverished hill-farmers were obliged to purchase rice with the pitiful income they derived from the opium poppy. Trekking parallel to the border as we were, it was impossible not to reflect on the Chinese alternative to this wretched state of affairs.
Across the border, rubber and tea had effectively replaced opium as cash crops. Practically and psychologically, switching from making incisions on opium pods and collecting the sap to carrying out an essentially similar operation on rubber trees was not difficult. This in fact appeared to be the most viable solution for Kokang once Burma’s civil war has been resolved.
The afternoon brought us to a substantial market village called Nang Kaw. Groups of people from surrounding villages were returning home from the market, almost all the men drunk while their womenfolk bent under the weight of cane baskets strapped to their backs and loaded with big pumpkins and white carrots.
Noticing a couple of children approaching, I took out my camera to take a picture. One of the boys, a ragged, barefoot little urchin of seven or eight years, halted, petrified. He covered his face with his hands and burst into tearful howls of fear. I lowered the camera and smiled in an effort to establish my benign intent. I might as well not have bothered: he promptly turned and fled screaming towards his father who was following behind. Hugely amused, Sam Law laughed uproariously.
“He thought your camera was a gun and that you were going to shoot him.”
I smiled. Yet it was sobering to reflection that in the closing decades of the twentieth century there were still places where people had not seen a camera; but at the age of seven or eight were already well aware of the lethal power of a gun.
Beyond Nang Kaw we reached a settlement which constituted more of a small town than a village. It was called Tashwehtang and we entered it along a roughly cobbled street lined with rows of two-storey terraced merchant houses built of stone with imposing wooden doors and verandas. There were also several typically Chinese arched stone bridges. But unlike the delicate constructions beloved of the classical painters of the Middle Kingdom, these were roughly hewn and slippery with cow dung.
On small hillocks around the town stood stone mansions in walled compounds. Hordes of barefoot children with grimy faces, all in green caps with the inevitable red stars, flocked behind us as we strolled down the street towards the CPB office. This turned out to be marginally better furnished and equipped than the one in Lungtangchai. Cobwebs festooned every corner of the building, but there were at least stacks of yellowed paper in wooden cupboards to attest to some administrative activity having once been undertaken.
Both the office and the town as a whole, however, were clearly in an advanced stage of neglect and decay. Here was a very different world from the glossy, future-storming confidence portrayed in the film screened at Mong Ko. There was no escaping the fact that the cut-back in Chinese aid had had severe effects: the party had seen better days.
That night I tuned into the BBC World Service and updated my diary. Electric wires and bulbs hung from the ceiling of the township office, mute witnesses to a more vigorous past. Now either the generator had broken down, or there was no petrol. I worked by candlelight at a crude wooden table.
Tashwehtang, I learnt, had once been the hill capital of Kokang in the days when it was ruled by its own local chieftain. British colonial sway had never really extended east of the Salween. It amounted, at most, to indirect rule through the British advised sawbwa, or prince, of Hsenwi west of the river to whom the lesser sawbwa of Kokang on the eastern bank paid tribute.
Independent Burma’s rulers were even less successful than the British in bringing Kokang under central control since the entire area had been taken over by the Kuomintang in the early 1950s. Speaking the same Chinese dialect as the retreating Kuomintang forces from Yunnan and, at least insofar as the local elite was concerned, sharing similar politics, many Kokang chiefs were happy to throw in their lot with the Nationalists.
But Tashwehtang was best remembered for its most famous native child, the legendary Warlord of Kokang, Olive Yang. While still in her early twenties, this decidedly masculine woman, known locally as “Miss Hairy Legs”, came to command a private army of nearly one thousand men.
Like many other scions of aristocratic Shan families, the young Olive attended the prestigious Guardian Angel’s Convent School in Lashio. Old classmates I had met still remembered how their parents warned them not to play with this singularly tough little girl: “Stay away from Olive!” they had said. “She’s got a revolver in her schoolbag.”
Her formal education behind her, Olive no longer troubled to hide her gun. She was officially proclaimed sawbwa of Kokang and was to be seen in the cobbled streets of Tashwehtang in a grey uniform, with a Belgian army pistol on each hip. Her mansion, which I had made a point of visiting earlier in the day, was an impressive stone building with tiled roofs surrounded by a high wall.
With the backing of the Kuomintang, Olive’s influence increased and she became the first warlord—or, more exactly, warlady—to dispatch convoys of trucks laden with opium to the Thai border. Security was ensured by heavily armed Kokang troops—popularly referred to as “Olive’s Boys”—who took up positions along the entire route from the Salween crossing at Kunlong to Hsenwi on the Burma Road.
The money she earned from these ventures was used to arm and equip her army—and to buy lavish gifts for her lover, the famous Burmese film actress Wa Wa Win Shwe. The remarkable Olive Yang was eventually arrested in the mid-1960s, and humiliated by her prison wardens in Insein Jail outside Rangoon. She was later released and turned to running a Chinese restaurant in the Burmese capital.
But in Kokang, the warlord tradition lived on. Olive’s elder brother, Jimmy, a well-known banker and a former member of the upper house of the Burmese parliament, continued to cooperate with the Kuomintang in politics as well as business. In the late 1960s, Jimmy was ousted by one of his local commanders, Lo Hsing-han, a gangster from Ta Tsu Chin village on Kokang’s border with China, who only a few years earlier had earned his keep walking behind Olive carrying her cigarettes.
It was this same Lo who rose to international fame in 1972, when senior US narcotics adviser Nelson Gross dubbed him “kingpin of the heroin traffic in Southeast Asia”. This reputation was altogether undeserved. By an unorthodox agreement with the military authorities in Rangoon, his local home guard force, known in Burmese as Ka Kwe Ye, had been given the right to use all government-controlled roads in Shan State for drug trafficking in return for fighting the CPB which by then had taken over most of Kokang.
Lo’s home guards were based in the garrison town of Lashio on the Burma Road and fought together with the Burmese Army at the bitter battle for Kunlong Bridge in November 1971-January 1972. It was Lo’s knowledge of the local terrain—plus newly supplied 105mm howitzers from the US—that enabled the government forces to halt the CPB’s attempt to seize Kunlong and push decisively into the area west of the Salween. Grateful Burmese Army commanders later sent their troops to provide security for Lo’s opium convoys down to Thailand. One of them was Col. Aye Ko, subsequently to rise to Vice Chief of Staff of the Burmese Army and Deputy Minister of Defence.
Hsi-Hsinwan, 16th November 1986. The attack took place in a spectacular landscape.
The CPB’s troops moved into combat in old Chinese army trucks.
The battle was planned meticulously by the CPB—but, in the end, they lost. Bertil marched south, crossed the Salween River and entered the Malipa Valley in Kokang
Early morning in the Kokang hills.
Old man in Tashwehtang village.
Panghsang was the headquarters of the Burmese communists, but the local population was still Buddhist. Plenty of opium poppies were also grown in the area.
Bertil and Thakin Ba Thein Tin, the chairman of the CPB.
The market in Panghsang.
In 1973, however, the kaleidoscopic tangle of Burmese narco-politics shifted once more. In anger over the failure of the Burmese Army to protect him from the exactions of rebels of the Shan State Army, who had begun imposing taxes on his caravans, Lo turned against Rangoon. Indeed, briefly he joined forces with the SSA, before retreating to Mae Hong Son in northwestern Thailand, where he was betrayed by a rival warlord. He was arrested, deported to Burma and sentenced to death.
The US narcotics suppression authorities hailed the arrest as a “big victory in the war against drugs” and lavished praise on both Thai and Burmese authorities for bringing him to justice—in blithe disregard of the fact that the very same man had served as a Burmese militia commander working in close cooperation with the Army; and at the same time maintained cordial links with military circles in northern Thailand. Significantly, at his trial in Rangoon Lo was charged with “insurrection against the state”; his opium trading activities were scarcely mentioned.
Land of Jade Page 36