“Have you ever heard anyone speak of U Ba Khin?” he asked. “He is a Burmese who founded a school of meditation that now has pupils all over the world. Follow his method. It is the best for people like you who want to go on living in the world—not to retire to a monastery, but to learn all the same.” He told me he had been meditating for three years, but had only recently become aware of his powers. It had happened by chance: in a town in northern Burma the municipal safe had disappeared, and one day, by concentrating, he had managed to see who had taken it and where it was hidden. Since that time he had heard voices and seen into people’s future. He no longer found it easy to work in the town’s economic planning office, where he was employed.
He escorted me to the door, and as I took my leave he said that we would meet again. I could not imagine how. In less than a year I had been to Kengtung twice, and I had the feeling that for me this was a farewell, not only to the old Shan capital but to a kind of Asia which I loved, and of which Kengtung had become a symbol.
The convoy was to leave at dawn. I waited until everyone else had gone to bed and the discotheque on the lake had closed, and took a walk alone around the city. It was deserted, but alive with shadows and ancient sounds. I walked as far as the city gate that had remained sadly standing, with a piece of old wall, in the middle of the widened road; I heard again the divine tinkling of the bells of the pagoda on the hilltop, and among the silhouettes of the trees against the white monastery walls I saw the shadow of a man, cast by the moonlight. He walked slowly, his head bent, like someone absorbed in useless thoughts about the meaning of life as he follows a funeral procession. It was myself.
The rest of the trip was monotonous. The next evening we were back in Thailand. In Chiang Rai, in one of the new deluxe hotels for “adventure tourists,” they had organized a banquet to celebrate the success of the “Friendship Rally,” distributing medals and diplomas—the sort of situation I always avoid like the plague. I went straight to the bus station and on toward Bangkok.
I was lucky. If I had not arrived that night in Chiang Mai I would have missed a magnificent opportunity: an invitation to spend New Year’s Eve with the Devil.
26/NEW YEAR’S EVE WITH THE DEVIL
All the message said was that I should go the next day to a certain inn in Maehongson, a town in northwest Thailand, and wait there for someone to contact me. That meant leaving immediately for another nine-hour bus ride through the mountains, but I didn’t think twice. The message was the response to a request I had made through some intermediaries in Bangkok. Together with my Swedish colleague Bertil Lindner, a walking encyclopedia on Burmese affairs, I had asked to meet one of the most wanted men in the world: Khun Sa, the “Prince of Darkness.” For decades Khun Sa has been the warlord of the Golden Triangle, the last great drug baron since General Noriega ended up in an American prison and Pablo Escobar in a Colombian grave. Here was another story I could write without having to take a plane.
The generals of the Rangoon dictatorship, trying to appease international opinion after murdering thousands of students and arresting Aung San Suu Kyi, had just announced a military offensive against Khun Sa. He for his part had declared the secession from the Burmese Union of the territories he controlled, and named himself president of an independent state called the “Land of the Shan.”
I used the long bus ride to get some sleep. In Maehongson I found the designated inn, took a room, and met up with Bertil, who had come directly from Bangkok. Of Swedish origin, he had come to Asia straight from university, and, rather like me, had found himself at home there. If ever there were a reincarnation of his compatriot Sven Hedin, the great explorer of a century ago, it might well have been Bertil. In 1985 Bertil walked for months through the mountains of northern Burma, married the telegraph operator of one of the guerrilla groups, and wrote the first of a series of books about the region.
Next morning, as we were having breakfast, a very Chinese-looking man of about thirty sat down at our table. He had the look of a prewar Shanghai gangster: leather jacket, hair slicked back, thin mustache. He said everything was organized. We should expect to hike for eight to ten hours. Were we ready? We should follow him.
We drove for about twenty miles in Bertil’s jeep on an asphalt road. The small compass I always carry indicated that we were going north. We came to a sort of farm surrounded by a high wooden fence, where we were handed over to some more strange characters, all apparently Chinese, who without saying a word showed us where to hide the car and offered us tea. Soon a young Shan appeared with three mules, and we set off. One mule carried our bags and water supplies, the other two were free in case we needed to ride. For the first few hours the going was easy. We passed a beautiful limestone mountain, then up and down a series of hills, crossing streams with water up to our knees. In the early afternoon we climbed a steep incline. The forest grew more and more dense, the trees taller. We followed a mule track, which made walking particularly difficult. The animals, sometimes in caravans of up to a hundred, all tended to put their hooves in the same places, producing a continuous series of holes. Along the way we encountered a banded krait, a yellow-and-black striped snake, very poisonous but not aggressive, and some huge, brilliantly colored millipedes.
At sunset we stood on the highest ridge, with a glorious, thrilling view to the west. The sun went down in a shower of fiery gold behind a succession of mountain ranges in shades of green, blue, violet and black. The nearest ones, covered with forest, had a soft and fuzzy look, while those further away had hard, precise outlines.
How deceptive beauty can be. The panorama was breathtaking in its vastness, its peace, its vitality. And yet there, under those trees majestic as cathedrals, under those bamboo thickets exuberant as fireworks, lay the origins of a trail of sorrow that knows no borders, that crosses every sea and penetrates every country to invade our homes and kill our children. What I saw before me was the heart of the Golden Triangle (what a deceptive name!), the source of much of the heroin produced in the world today. The man I was going to meet with so much effort was the ruler of that empire of death.
Night fell very quickly. The darkness echoed with birdcalls, screams of monkeys, and the mysterious rustlings and scrapings of other animals that I could not see.
The last three hours, all downhill, were especially hard. I got cramps in my calves, a bad headache, and then—a sharp pain in the chest. Is that not how a heart attack begins? I thought of the abbot in Ulan Bator, who had seen problems with my heart in the ashes of incense; I thought of that clueless astrologer in Kuala Lumpur, who also foresaw a serious illness before I was fifty-eight. No use telling myself how many other things those fortune-tellers had got wrong. My hand instinctively went to the mole on my forehead—which according to the sorceress in Singapore was a sign that I would die in a foreign land. What could be more foreign than this forest! I would have to “dictate my last wishes” to Bertil. When that expression popped into my head I had to laugh. And then I was really frightened, by the thought that one might take the words of a fortune-teller so seriously as to bring about what he foresaw, and make the prophecy come true. So instead of giving myself a heart attack, I took a good deep breath and went on walking.
The sky was crowded with stars, but at ground level the darkness was absolute. It was the night of the December new moon, when the Shan celebrate their New Year. Their 2088 was about to begin: they count from the year they were converted to Buddhism and built their first pagoda on the shores of the Dead Lake in Yunnan. The festivities last a week, and it was for these that we had been invited by Khun Sa. In two more weeks our 1993 would end. And my year without planes? Not quite. The Hong Kong fortune-teller was Chinese, and for him the year ends not on December 31 but with the first new moon of spring. In 1994 it would rise on February 8. If I really wanted to heed his prophecy, I must hold out until then.
After nine hours’ walking we came to a valley. I heard the rushing of a stream, and found myself walking through it before I saw it. On the
opposite shore was a large, isolated wooden house. As we entered, by the dim light of an oil lamp I saw the shapes of a few people standing to one side. I heard a woman give some orders in Chinese, and a young man brought us hot tea.
“Where do you come from?” I asked him.
“From Yunnan.”
“To do what?”
“To work,” he replied. I did not feel I could ask him anything else. The woman spoke to someone over a walkie-talkie, and soon a small pickup truck came to collect us. We drove for half an hour along a dirt road, and at last, in the middle of a plain, surrounded by mountains even blacker than the sky, a town rose before us. In a large clearing was a fairground with crowds of people strolling, eating and playing various games at the stalls. Dozens of very young soldiers, in clean uniforms and carrying rifles, discreetly stood guard in the dark. We had arrived at Ho Mong—“the Capital of Evil,” as the newspapers call it. It was in Burmese territory, but only about six miles from the Thai border.
The sole warning we had been given before leaving was absolutely not to let ourselves be seen by the Thai army, which claims to control this border rigorously. They do not want in any way to give the impression—especially to foreign observers—of collaborating with the “rebels” or having relations with the drug traders. Bangkok maintains cordial diplomatic and trade relations with the dictatorial regime of Rangoon, and officially denies having anything to do with Khun Sa and his Land of the Shan.
It was cold, and the “foreign minister” of the Land of the Shan, who came to welcome us and take us to the “government guest house,” had a woollen skullcap on his head and an anorak over his pajamas.
We spent five days in Ho Mong, and our stay was full of discoveries and surprises. The first came as soon as we got up the next morning, when we found that there are at least two direct roads from Thailand to Ho Mong, and that all of Khun Sa’s other guests had arrived in comfort by car. Among them were Thai army officers in civilian clothes. Surprising, as since 1990 Khun Sa has been under investigation in the United States as a drug dealer, and both there and in Thailand there is a price of $20,000 on his head. We photographed one another smiling broadly. The other guests were Shan people who had come from territories controlled by the Rangoon government—I met two from Kengtung—or who live abroad. One was the daughter of the old saw-baw of Yawnghwe, the King of the Thousand Banana Trees, who had emigrated to America.
The General, as they all called him, did not keep us waiting. At breakfast time a pickup stopped in front of the guest house, six soldiers jumped out, armed to the teeth, and from the front passenger seat, elegant in a greenish-brown uniform with the flag of the Land of the Shan as the only decoration on his sleeve, Khun Sa slowly emerged.
The first impression was sympathetic. He was very Chinese in appearance and bearing, with a smooth, shining face, small lively eyes, teeth brown from nicotine; he was poised and at ease. Instinctively, from professional habit, I searched for some detail I would remember, something in his face, a gesture that betrayed who he was. I saw none. His face was no more inscrutable than those of other Asians, his eyes no more mysterious, indifferent, murderous, impassive, determined or cruel. If I had met Khun Sa in the market without his escort and his uniform, I would have taken him for just another citizen out shopping. But isn’t that what is said about great spies?
Shaking Bertil’s hand he said: “I have heard much about you. Your words and my actions are arrows pointed at the heart of the dictators of Rangoon.” Bertil lit his pipe, embarrassed. For a journalist nothing is worse than being taken for an ally. By anyone, let alone Khun Sa.
He had come to invite us personally to the great New Year’s Eve supper at his home. Theatrically, before he slowly climbed into his truck and left, Khun Sa gave his “ministers” orders to show us everything, to explain everything to us, to let us go anywhere we liked.
Ho Mong is a town built entirely of houses with wooden walls and roofs of corrugated iron. There are about twenty thousand inhabitants. The large square in the center serves as a playing field, parade ground and market. All New Year festivities took place there. They had set up two theaters, a discotheque, some ranges for target shooting, and a catwalk for a beauty contest, the consolation prize in which went to a local transvestite.
Along the main street are barbers, tailors, jewelers, photographers and a couple of video rental shops. Jurassic Park was in great demand. All the goods come from Thailand. The currency used is the Thai baht, and even cars drive on the left-hand side of the road as in Thailand, not on the right as in the rest of Burma. Ho Mong has a Buddhist temple with four hundred monks, three hotels “for commercial travelers,” and a brothel with about fifteen girls.
On the houses of the well-to-do are satellite disks to pick up all the international programs. At the entrance to a modest shop, selling everything from torches to nails to blankets, is a sign: “Telephone.” Thanks to a special link with Thailand, from Ho Mong, the drug capital of the world, you can dial every corner of the earth, directly. In a telephone booth I overheard a Chinese girl telling someone in Taiwan to buy an air ticket from Bangkok to Hong Kong. Is that not the route the couriers follow? Is it not the Chinese gangsters who control the distribution of drugs all over the world? I did not dare ask these questions aloud.
The only brick building in the whole valley is the residence of Khun Sa: a white house, set apart on a height and surrounded by a vast garden, two tennis courts and a beautiful greenhouse full of orchids. From a distance it looked like a displaced Californian villa. Only from close up could you see it was also a bunker, protected by machine-gun emplacements, antiaircraft batteries, and a whole barracks full of highly trusted guards.
For the New Year’s Eve feast, Khun Sa opened his home to a few hundred officers of his army and officials of his administration. Along with mountains of food, the guests were offered karaoke. There too, in the middle of the Burmese jungle! The great attraction was a wonderful machine, very modern, with powerful speakers and a mega-television on which flashed the images and words of famous Chinese songs. As a polite guest, I ended up with a microphone in my hand to sing, tone-deaf as I am, a duet with the Drug King.
Nothing could have been more entertaining for that audience, and my reward for making everyone laugh was a guided tour of the house. The residence of Khun Sa, with a fireplace in the living room, pink carpeting in the bedrooms, imitation leather chairs with plastic sheets over them, and big bookshelves without one book but full of videocassettes, was the fulfillment of the dreams of a nouveau riche, the status symbol of a bandit with a yearning for respectability. On the walls were souvenir photographs of foreigners: an English lord with his wife, the son of a New York police chief, a former American colonel of the Special Forces.
“Why are they here?”
“Friends,” was the reply.
“And drugs, General? Shall we talk about that?” I ventured.
“Another day, the interview another day. Today we celebrate,” said Khun Sa with a laugh.
The next morning Bertil and I were taken to the offices of the “government”—a large wooden barracks overlooking the square, with hard earth floors—to meet the various “ministers.” The minister of information, formerly a veterinarian, had the task of presenting to us the official position of the Land of the Shan. It was this: We Shan are a minority oppressed by the Burmese. After several attempts at guerrilla war conducted in the past by different groups, Khun Sa has united everyone under his leadership and is now fighting a war of liberation. Opium is our weapon in this war. We could easily grow other crops, mangoes for example, instead of opium poppies. It would take less work and nobody could accuse us of trafficking in drugs, which as we know well casts an ugly shadow over our struggle. The problem is that to grow mangoes you need peace, you need roads to take them to market. Whereas with opium we don’t need anything. We sell it on the spot, because the buyers come even from very far away to get it. Thus growing opium is our only way of surviving
. If we ordered our people to stop growing poppies overnight it would mean condemning them to hunger. The only way of stopping the production of drugs is to have peace and develop an alternative economy. Help us. We would like nothing better.
This argument was far from absurd. The “foreign minister,” no longer in his pajamas and skullcap but dressed in a jacket and tie for the occasion, showed us some documents: several times since 1980 Khun Sa had made the West, and in particular the United States, an offer to sell or destroy his whole crop of opium. In return he had asked for economic aid of $300 million over a period of six years. There had been some contacts, but in the end nothing had been done. At the beginning of October Khun Sa had written directly to President Clinton reformulating his old offer, but, said the “ministers,” two months had already passed, and no reply had come from Washington.
“Why doesn’t the West, instead of trying to eliminate us, help us to develop?” said the “minister of finance.” “Repression serves only to raise the price, and that makes the drug traffic more attractive.”
The figures bore him out. In 1948, when Burma became independent, the Golden Triangle produced thirty tons of opium. In 1988, despite billions of dollars spent on international police operations and several attempts to destroy the opium at its source—for example, by spraying defoliants on the poppy fields—production had risen to three thousand tons. At the end of 1993 Khun Sa’s men expected a harvest of over four thousand tons. As it takes ten kilograms of opium to make one kilogram of refined heroin, there must be four hundred tons of pure “Chinese White” from the Land of the Shan going about the world. Never has humanity had such a quantity of drugs at its disposal, and never have the political and financial interests behind this traffic been so vast.
Khun Sa’s power, according to his “ministers,” lies in the fact that the Shan people support him, and that he has an army of forty thousand men who are absolutely loyal to him. This army is efficient, with iron discipline. If a deserter is captured, his head is cut off. If he is not caught within three months his parents’ heads are cut off and exhibited to his comrades as a warning. A soldier caught smoking opium or injecting heroin is sent to a reeducation center. The “cure” is ten days in a hole in the ground ten feet deep, followed by months of forced labor. A second offense means execution.
A Fortune-Teller Told Me Page 41