The Great Opium War

By Marguerite Johnson

"Like a shootout in a cowboy movie, only it wasn 't a movie

The clatter of mess-hall cleanup had just given way to the nocturnal sounds of the jungle when Sergeant Manit Kammung and 800 other Thai Border Patrol Police suddenly received orders for a maneuver in the north. Armed with assault rifles, grenades, recoilless rifles and rocket launchers, the men clambered aboard trucks and rode all night through the newly harvested rice fields of central Thailand. Finally the trucks began to growl up the narrow roads that climb to the Golden Triangle, the opium-rich territory where the borders of Thailand, Burma and Laos converge.

At daybreak the convoy reached the border town of Ban Hin Taek, the fortified mountain stronghold of Khun Sa, the most powerful opium warlord in Asia. Their objective: capture the town and crush the 2,000 mercenaries of Khun Sa's Shan United Army, who ran the opium refineries and ruthlessly held sway over the entire region. The Thai soldiers promptly took up battle lines on one side of the town's main street. Ten yards away stood the surprised drug traffickers, many of them routed from bed and still in their underwear--but heavily armed with automatic weapons.

"You are under arrest for smuggling, possession of weapons and insurgency," shouted Colonel Thong-Aun Charoen-sam. "Lay down your guns and surrender."

The bedraggled Line of Shans, some of whom had been passing a bamboo bong filled with marijuana when the Thai soldiers arrived, looked startled for a moment, then raised their weapons and opened fire. "It was like a shootout in a cowboy movie, only it wasn't a movie," recalled Sergeant Manit. "I've been in many battles with Communist insurgents, but they were nothing compared with this."

The house-to-house battle for the town late last month lasted three days. Only with the support of OV-10C aircraft, which strafed the dense surrounding jungle, were the government forces able to defeat the opium mercenaries, who fled across the border into Burma. At least 51 mercenaries and 16 Thais were killed in the fighting. When the Thai soldiers picked their way through the rubble afterward, they were amazed to find that Ban Hin Taek in no way resembled a jungle village. It was a modern town with tennis courts, a soccer field and shops stocked with electric guitars and leather furniture. Officers and chemists in Khun Sa's narcotics army lived in spacious villas with manicured lawns. The warlord himself kept a hilltop aerie outfitted with a television in every room, an elaborate stereo system and a swimming pool. There were even photograph albums of family vacations in Hong Kong. The soldiers also discovered huge caches of weapons, ammunition and communications equipment.

Khun Sa, who at 50 is regarded as the undisputed "king of the Golden Triangle," proved as elusive as ever. Born in Burma to Chinese parents, he turned to soldiering at an early age and adroitly manipulated a princely marriage for his mother and connections with the Burmese government to set himself up in the drug trade. Since 1964, he has successfully challenged the opium operations of several now aging Nationalist Chinese generals, who with their armies sought sanctuary in the triangle in 1950 and developed the lucrative drug trade.

"Khun Sa has increased his power through intimidation, execution and murder," says an official of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, which has more than 20 agents in Thailand. "He pays his men well and has won surprising loyalty from them." In 1978 he even tried to make a deal with the U.S. to sell it 500 tons of raw opium over a five-year period for $30 million. DEA officials convinced the Carter Administration that such preemptive buying would be futile, since Khun Sa could still flood the market with opium. Officials now estimate that about 600 tons of opium is harvested each year in the area, most of it in the vast poppy fields of northern Burma. Of this, at least 125 tons is lashed to mountain ponies and carried to the Thai-Burmese border, where it is refined into 90% pure heroin. The 12% tons of heroin thus produced provides about twice the world's demand.

As long as Khun Sa did not threaten Thailand's national security, Bangkok refrained from direct attacks on him. But last year he made a deal with Burma's Communist Party to provide its cadres with rice in return for opium. The Communists soon became a major supplier. Khun Sa's army in turn acted as a conduit that enabled Communists to establish a toehold near the Thai border.

Khun Sa's tactics, meanwhile, became ever more brutal. One Thai government informant was buried alive, another drawn and quartered on the main street of Ban Hin Taek. In 1980 the American wife of DEA Agent Michael Powers was gunned down on a street in the northern city of Chiang Mai. Bangkok offered a $25,000 reward for the warlord's head. When a group of Thai paramilitary troops set off to capture Khun Sa and cop the reward, they were ambushed by Shan mercenaries. The open clash on Thai soil enraged Bangkok, already under mounting pressure from both the U.S. and Australia to crack down on the heroin trade. Says a Western diplomat in Bangkok: "The Thais finally concluded it was not in their interest to allow Khun Sa to function in Thailand. The domestic and international costs became too high."

The destruction of Ban Hin Taek may disrupt the heroin flow for a while. Thai officials claim they have swept Khun Sa's mercenaries out of Thailand and captured ten tons of guns and ammunition worth $2 million. But narcotics officials admit that the opium war is far from over. Says one Bangkok agent: "The syndicate will start up again. The problem is not supply but demand. People will continue to want heroin and be willing to pay big money for it." --By Marguerite Johnson. Reported by David DeVoss/Bangkok

With reporting by David DeVoss

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