Beyond Fair Trade

by Mark Pendergrast

  The Kuomintang (KMT) forces of Chiang Kai-shek’s losing Chinese Nationalist Party regrouped in Burma. Partially funded and armed by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the KMT invaded southern China in 1951. After the invasion failed miserably, the KMT forces set up camp in northern Burma in the Shan States. To support themselves, they turned to opium, levying an annual tax on every poppy farmer and becoming an opium militia.

  The Thai military rulers, who took power in a 1947 coup, lined their own pockets and personal fiefdoms through opium sales and graft. “General Phao, head of the CIA-equipped and -trained national police force, took personal control of the opium trade and, in exchange for CIA support, furthered KMT political aims, protecting their supply lines and opium business interests and establishing the Burma to Bangkok opium corridor,” observed Martin Booth in Opium. “By 1955, Phao’s police force was the largest, best organized trafficking syndicate in Thailand.” Although Phao was ousted in 1957, the corruption and flow of opium continued, even after opium use and cultivation in Thailand were officially outlawed in 1958.

  In 1961, the Burmese government drove the KMT into Thailand and Laos. In Thailand, the KMT soldiers were called civilian refugees, and they were soon escorting caravans of hundreds of opium-laden mules, guarded by armed troops, through the mountains, including villages such as Doi Chang. General Li Wen-huan ran the KMT smuggling operation from his private mansion near the city of Chiang Mai, in the district just to the south of Chiang Rai.

  For the next thirty years, many in the Thai military and Border Patrol Police worked with the KMT and other opium dealers to keep the border with Burma relatively safe, while extracting profitable kickbacks. In his book The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, Alfred McCoy documented the confusing, kaleidoscopic, shifting alliances and politics of poppy production in Southeast Asia. “Thailand,” wrote McCoy, “defended its frontiers with warlord allies who transformed the borderlands into zones of controlled chaos.” Even while the US government officially launched a war on drugs, the CIA quietly supported the opium trade as part of its anti-Communist efforts. “The Cold War was also fought with covert operations that encouraged alliances with warlords and criminal syndicates at the flash points of global confrontation,” wrote McCoy. “As the CIA mobilized tribal armies in these rugged highlands, their warlords used the agency’s arms and protection to become major drug lords… The opium trade relieved the agency from the prohibitive cost of welfare for tribes… Control over this critical cash crop allowed the CIA’s chosen warlord to command tribes, clans, and villages in bloody wars that ground on for years.”

  In 1965, a US Agency for International Development (USAID) document stated, “Thailand is currently of enormous strategic importance in terms of U.S. national interests [because] Thailand is located in the midst of the all-out struggle between the Free World and Communist Forces of Southeast Asia.” That same year, the CIA helped to fund the new Tribal Research Center in Chiang Mai, intended to study the “hill tribe problem,” as it was regarded by the American and Thai governments. At the opening ceremony of the new center, the General Secretary of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) said, “I need not remind you…that it is among minority people that Communist propaganda and agitators find a fertile field for their subversive activities.”

  Although the Tribal Research Center was ostensibly founded to help the hill tribes, and did indeed do some important research, the attitude toward the hill tribes was generally negative and patronizing. In a 1967 report, UN-funded German social anthropologist Hans Manndorff wrote about the “problems” that hill tribes allegedly caused—forest destruction, opium growing, border insecurity—and, although ostensibly sympathetic to the hill tribes, he assumed that they had to be forced into Thai society: “Of course, it is no longer possible for the government to leave these ethnic minorities entirely alone today. It is the inevitable logic of events in our times that administration and modernization are extended even into those remote parts of the country which were traditionally self-sufficient.” He suggested “the government should consider ways and means of creating loyalty to the Thai nation, so as to facilitate the integration of [the hill tribes] into the social, economic, and political life of the country.” Manndorff recommended setting up experimental demonstration areas to promote cash crops to replace opium, as well as centers for health, education, and welfare.

  Thus, while opium was illegal, and the hill tribes were blamed for producing it, the CIA and some corrupt Thai officials continued to wink at the charade of anti-drug enforcement. In a staged media event in March 1972, General Li Wen-huan appeared on US television to denounce the opium trade. As the cameras rolled, one hundred mules loaded with 26 tons of opium deposited their load on a huge bonfire, for which the Thai military, with covert funding from the CIA, paid US$1.85 million. Li vowed that this was the end of the opium trade, but most of the material burned was just poppy straw, and General Li continued to profit from opium for years to come.

  By now it was not just opium but also its refined product, heroin, which was being smuggled. Heroin was a relative youngster compared to opium. In 1874, a pharmacist in London, Britain, was looking for a non-addictive alternative to opium and morphine. He experimented by boiling morphine with acetic anhydride, creating what came to be known as heroin. By 1898 heroin was being mass-manufactured in Germany by Bayer Laboratories, which touted it as a powerful, safe painkiller and gave it the trade name of Heroin, from the German word heroisch, meaning heroic. Within a few years, it became clear that heroin was indeed addictive, but by then its use and manufacture had spread widely.

  Although pure heroin wasn’t simple to manufacture, it was more concentrated and easier to smuggle than opium, and it didn’t have the characteristic odor that gave away the presence of opium. It was also easier to smoke, snort, or inject, and quicker to take effect. And it could be cut with chalk or other white powders to maximize profits.

  Heroin use gradually increased in the first half of the twentieth century but its use exploded during the 1960s in the United States, where the number of addicts rose from 50,000 to 500,000 from 1960 to 1970. During the Vietnam War (1965–1975), heroin was the drug of choice for many miserable, frightened, disillusioned American soldiers. The swelling number of US addicts led to President Nixon’s announcement of a “war on drugs” in June 1971, the beginning of a hopeless, counterproductive effort that only made drugs more unsafe and expensive, lining the pockets of criminals, dealers, warlords, and authorities who looked the other way.

  In 1974, a rival appeared to contest General Li and his KMT opium squad. He was Khun Sa, an old nemesis, whom Li had defeated in a 1967 opium war. Half-Chinese and half-Shan, Khun Sa had been imprisoned by the Burmese military in 1969. Upon his release in 1974, he quickly rebuilt his opium empire, based in the remote hilltop village of Ban Hin Taek in Thailand’s Golden Triangle region, near the Burmese border. There he built a major heroin refinery. In the crop year of 1976–1977, his army of 3,500 combatants accompanied twelve caravans, each with over one hundred mules, carrying 70 tons of raw opium.

  In 1977, the Thai military, trying to protect itself against the perceived threat from Burmese Communist Party troops (who also made money from opium) across the border, tried to forge an alliance between Khun Sa and General Li, hosting a meeting between the two. They proposed a cozy marketing agreement with Khun Sa and Li in return for arming both to fight the Communists. But the two warlords refused to work with one another. Around the same time, the American government was giving military aid to the repressive Burmese government, which claimed that it was fighting against opium cultivation among the rebellious hill tribes of Burma.

  On January 21, 1982, under Thailand’s Prime Minister Prem Tinsulanonda (uncorrupted by opium money), the Thai military turned on Khun Sa, attacking his stronghold in Ban Hin Taek with 1,500 troops, jet fighters, and helicopter gunships. A survey of the captured village revealed luxurious villas, a hospital, a brothel, and
seven heroin refineries. Khun Sa quickly rebuilt a major heroin outpost just across the border in Burma at Homong, declaring it the capital of his “Free Shan State,” where he remained for the next fourteen years. From there, he launched an attack on March 11, 1984, against General Li’s mansion in Chiang Mai, detonating a truck loaded with 7,000 sticks of dynamite that destroyed the building and left a huge crater in its place. General Li survived, since he was in Bangkok at the time, but his opium empire crumbled as the Thai government finally cracked down on the KMT forces with whom they had cooperated for so many years. Khun Sa remained the undisputed, self-described “King of the Golden Triangle” until 1996.

  CHAPTER 2

  Culture Clashes

  ACCORDING TO AN Akha proverb, “One does not have the ability to throw away our customs, any more than a buffalo has the ability to have its footprints one place and its body someplace else.” Unfortunately, the modern Akha of northern Thailand, including those in the village of Doi Chang, have found it increasingly difficult to maintain their traditional way of life. Especially since the 1960s, their culture has faced threats from other tribes, the police, the army, Communists, anti-Communists, fundamentalist missionaries, so-called environmentalists, warlords, and drug dealers, as well as the encroachment of “civilization” in the form of cheap mass-produced clothing, television, and a cash economy where becoming a prostitute was a way to survive in the city.

  The first Akha tribe moved into Thailand in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, followed by a few others in subsequent years, but the major migration took place after Burmese dictator Ne Win staged a 1962 military coup. The Loimi Akha, named for a mountain in the Shan State of Kengtung in Burma, began to migrate out of Burma into Thailand in the late 1960s to avoid violent conflict. “Groups such as the Akha [were] caught in the cross-fire between forces of the central Burmese government and the forces of various independence, communist, and opium armies,” wrote one observer. Or, as anthropologist Leo Alting von Geusau put it, the Akha sought to escape “increased incidence of violence, robbery, murder, and the destruction of property in the mountain areas of east Kent Tung state [in Burma.] Like many other highlanders, [they] came over the border after being robbed of surplus silver and cattle, some even in a state of near starvation.”

  In 1980, the first three Akha families settled in the village of Locha in northern Thailand, southwest of the town of Chiang Rai, though the village was more commonly known by its Thai name, Doi Chang, which meant “Elephant Mountain,” since the mountain on which the village sat could be taken to resemble an elephant’s head and trunk. Brothers Akur and Luko and their cousin Asar, together with their families, were the pioneers, escaping villages to the north on Doi Tung mountain, where the violence between drug warlords and the government was becoming a daily threat, and where the soil was depleted, the forests disappearing. They had all been born in Burma, where the chaotic violence and forced labor had driven them across the border. Now, in typical Akha fashion, a few families tested out the new village, sending back reports the following year to encourage others to relocate as well.

  Doi Chang, up a remote mountainside about 30 miles southwest of the city of Chiang Rai, was a Lisu village. Since the Akha traditionally established their own separate communities, this was an unusual relocation. But there were advantages. There was still some unoccupied forest here and no warlords. The small valley, tucked just below the mountaintop, offered springs and streams with fresh water. Because it took many hours to walk up or down the mountain, the location was sufficiently isolated from lowland Thai interference. The entrepreneurial Lisu were glad to sell nearly level land for housing, and there was enough surrounding sloping land to clear for fields so that there was initially no charge for claiming them.

  Over the next few years, as news of the fertile soil and relative isolation and peace spread, more Loimi Akha arrived, through word of mouth and family ties. Three of these newcomers were men named Aha, Piko, and Agui, plus a spirit priest and shaman. And in January 1982, as the bombs were exploding in Khun Sa’s compound at nearby Ban Hin Taek, a wealthier Akha named Aso fled the Doi Tung area, heading for Doi Chang with his family and relatives, including his two younger brothers and their families; his father, who was in his sixties; and his uncle, who brought along his two sons and their families. In Hue San, his previous village on Doi Tung, Aso had bought goods such as battery-operated transistor radios for resale and had accumulated one hundred cows. He sold them and bought land in Doi Chang, adding to the nucleus of the new Akha village, now home to some one hundred Loimi Akha, downhill from about 700 Lisu. The first Lisu had moved there in 1921, replacing Hmong villagers who had sought fresh land. The Lisu were the predominant tribe and generally looked down on the Akha as inferior, despite the two tribes having much in common.

  The Lisu

  LIKE THE AKHA, the Lisu had traditionally practiced rotational swidden agriculture, growing mountain rice as their primary food crop and opium poppies as an important supplemental cash crop. They, too, believed in ancestral and forest spirits. The sun, moon, trees, hills, guns, and crossbows all had their own Lisu spirits. A guardian spirit shrine was located above every Lisu village to ward off evil spirits and disease, serving a similar function to the Akha village gate, and the Lisu, too, kept ancestral altars in their homes. While the Akha had their werewolves, the Lisu believed in weretigers that could possess people.

  Both tribes had village priests and shamans, though in his trance, the Lisu shaman was ridden by the spirits like a horse, whereas the Akha shaman rode atop a spirit horse. A Lisu shaman could make a spectacular show of chasing illness from a house by spraying hot lard from his mouth over a torch, producing fireballs worthy of the Wizard of Oz. Both tribes told stories of a great flood, and the Lisu, too, believed in one superior God they called Wu Sa. They also practiced various rituals and animal sacrifices to ensure good outcomes and harvests, reading the lines in a pig’s liver to determine which spirit might have been wronged.

  Although there were many similarities between the Akha and the Lisu, however, they were different in other crucial ways. Unlike the Akha, the Lisu were intensely individualistic and competitive. “A Lisu always wants to be first,” wrote Paul and Elaine Lewis in their 1984 chapter on the tribe. A Lisu household appeared to be continually trying to “keep up with the Joneses,” so to speak. While the Akha held fiercely to their traditions, the Lisu’s cultural basket was quite loosely woven and easily modified to take advantage of new circumstances.

  In 1982, the same year that many of the Akha arrived in Doi Chang, a Dutch anthropologist named Otome Klein Hutheesing moved to the Lisu village of Doi Lan, 4 miles down the mountain from Doi Chang, to conduct field work. She lived there for four years. A third of the Lisu wives she interviewed had grown up in Doi Chang.

  At first, the Lisu completely baffled her. “For many, many months, their world of living appeared to me like a huge surrealistic painting,” wrote Hutheesing in her book about her experience, bearing the rather arcane academic title of Emerging Sexual Inequality Among the Lisu of Northern Thailand: The Waning of Dog and Elephant Repute. “I groped for objects in their dimly-lit habitat, I stumbled across roughly-hewn doorsteps, fell through shakily-constructed platforms, bumped into unexpected protrusions of a never-finished wall.” Eventually, however, she became a seemingly accepted member of the village. “I became one of them as I shared the meals, the quarrels, as I sowed rice and maize, scraped the poppypods, sang and danced with them.”

  The subtitle of her book refers to traditional Lisu expectations. Men were like dogs—brave, adventurous, and sometimes rather irresponsible. Women were supposed to be like elephants—not in terms of size, but shy, reserved, and well-behaved, as female elephants were perceived to be. While men and women had different roles, Hutheesing argued that they seemed to be equally valued. It was only as their traditional life unraveled that the relationship between the sexes became unbalanced.

  Given wh
at she observed, however, most readers would conclude that Lisu men always had the upper hand. While women could visit nearby villages, it was only men who ventured down the mountain into town to sell maize or opium and buy bullets. Men were stronger and had nine souls versus seven for women. Men hunted and cut down trees, while women cooked and pounded rice. During sexual intercourse, men made “hae-hae” sounds when they climaxed, but women were expected to remain quiet. Lisu men had formal given names but were often called by descriptive nicknames such as Bad Leg, Big Head, Wide Eyes, Big Shit Body, Ear Not Good, Kinky Hair, or Opium Smoker. Women, too, had nicknames, such as Little Bird or Big Mouth Lady.

  The women complained to Hutheesing about the men’s gambling, gallivanting, and opium smoking. “Her husband drinks every day, every day he is drunk,” one Lisu woman told the anthropologist about a woman married to a man named Bad Leg. “He is not ashamed. Why is this? Because of what woman is… Woman is like elephant. Man is like dog. She has to be shy. A man does not. If he divorces, he can get another wife. A woman waits. A man is never shy when he makes a child in the forest (without marrying her). He is a dog.”

  Hutheesing summarized the limitations imposed on village females: “To have to adhere to the dictates of elephantlike timidity restricts the world of movement of a Lisu female and restrains the expressions of her psyche. She, for example, seldom trades or sells a pig in a nearby village. She is not supposed to laugh too loud, she should not be short-tempered, not drink tea nor alcohol. Her only pleasurable outlet is the chewing of betel [nuts].”

  The concepts of “repute” and “shame” were deeply embedded in Lisu culture. The Lisu talked about feeling shame in many circumstances, such as providing inadequate food to guests or a woman waking up later than her husband. “Children are soon told that they ought to know about shame,” Hutheesing observed. “If a father cannot pay money for the acquisition of a bride for his son, there is shame.” This feeling of shame, so foreign to the Akha, could have mortal consequences for the Lisu. Hutheesing told the story of a Lisu wife who told her husband, “Give the rifle to the son. You are too old to go to the forest and shoot.” When her husband accused her of wanting her son for a mate instead of him, the woman felt such deep shame that she swallowed poison and died. Unlike the traditional Akha, the Lisu sometimes resorted to suicide (or murder) when matters of honor were involved.