Editor's note: This is an excerpt from Dan Russell's Drug War: Covert Money, Power and Policy (New York: Kalyx, 2000). This comprehensive, 675 page tome sports 400 photos, a 16 page bibliography, and over 1300 footnotes. Reprinted by kind permission of the author.

Drug War: Burma: 8/8/88

New York Times (2/12/95): "Administration narcotics experts say heroin production in Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, has doubled since 1988 and now accounts for 60 to 70 percent of the American supply. Those experts are urging President Clinton to step-up anti-drug cooperation with the Burmese military junta. But human rights officials argue against cooperating with a government judged to be a serious abuser of human rights...."

"'There's been a fairly dramatic increase in heroin since the military came to power,' said Robert S. Gelbard, Assistant Secretary of State for International Narcotics Matters. 'There is a lot of concern about narcotics-related corruption, particularly in the mid-levels of the Burmese Army.'"

"Backing up Mr. Brown's call for increased cooperation are Thomas A. Constantine, director of the Drug Enforcement Administration; Timothy E. Wirth, the Under Secretary of State for Global Affairs, and Assistant Secretary of State Gelbard."

"The stepped-up cooperation under consideration would include sharing intelligence with Myanmar officials, training the country's police and providing equipment to them like police radios, drug-detection kits and trucks."

Brilliant. Supply the Burmese military, which we know is dealing the heroin, which just murdered thousands of its own people in an overt coup d'etat, with military intelligence telling them what we know, and with crowd-control equipment to help them murder more of their own people.

The incredibly courageous Daw Aung San Suu Kyi of Burma's National League for Democracy will be named Prime Minister if Burma's legally elected National Assembly is ever allowed to convene. She is the daughter of the legendary General Aung San, below, postwar leader of the Burman nationalists.

Burma was, in many ways, an artificial conflation of the British, combining ethnic groups that had not traditionally shared a government. General Aung San is, in effect, the George Washington of Burma, the political author of the federal constitution of 1947 that created post-colonial Burma. Just as he was set to assume the Prime Ministership, in July 1947, Aung San was assassinated, leaving Burma's strong territorial minorities facing a death squad central army, the probable author of the asassination, and a weak central government. The result was precisely the civil war that Aung San's new constitution had been designed to prevent.

All the armies were financed by the artificial Prohibition value of opium except the Kachins, who had their jade, ruby and sapphire mines. Unlike opium, which, if allowed to float in a legal market would be worth little more than extra fine produce, the value of sapphires isn't artificial. Below, Lahu hunters in the Shan hills, 1925.

Complicating the situation further were the 12,000 CIA-financed Kuomintang troops in the Shan states, the eastern mountains bordering Thailand and China. They were originally placed there to draw Chinese strength during the Korean War. Mao's reaction to the CIA-KMT alliance was to turn the Communist Party of Burma into the same kind of well-armed client army as the KMT. Thus Burma degenerated into civil war.

Ne Win, in control of the Burma Army in the early sixties, brought many of the Shan state opium armies under his umbrella by legalizing the opium trade for those who would fight under his KKY (Ka Kwe Ye), local self defense, banner. Khun Sa, who eventually rose to control most of these Shan state opium armies, began his career as a CIA student in the Kuomintang's Shan operation.

After the Burma Army drove the KMT into Thailand, Khun Sa heeded Ne Win's call to become a KKY leader. As such, Khun Sa was armed by Ne Win, and held the right to use all government controlled roads for opium transport. He also had the right to run morphine and heroin refineries. Thus heroin for export became the official mainstay of the Burma Army's war against the Karens, the Shans, the Kachins, the Wa, the Lahu, the Communists, the KMT and the other territorially or politically-based rebels. Below, a Lahu father and child, and a Kaw woman, the Shan states, 1925. Criminalize the traditional contents of the pipe, criminalize the culture.

Since the American-led global Prohibition of opium sap popularized heroin, making it valuable enough to trade for arms, many KKY leaders were enabled to coopt the local ethnic or political movement. The Burma Army settled into the role of central wholesaler, issuing franchises to all the major players in control of opium-growing territory, using its KKY militia as trucking convoys for its franchisees. Thus did all sides in the civil war settle into a relatively peaceful marriage of convenience, a marriage that had the militarized heroin trade as its glue.

That is, when China's Deng Xiaoping turned Burma into a trading partner, the Communist Party of Burma made peace with the Burma Army and went into business with it, as did the Kuomintang, Khun Sa's Shans and most, but not all, of the other guerrilla groups. Notably absent were the Karens, who did not choose to enroll as SLORC opium sharecroppers.

By 1988, Mandalay, in northern Burma, with dozens of refineries converting the vast highland opium crop into white #4 heroin, had become the heroin capitol of Asia. This freed the Burma Army to stomp all over elected representatives in all parts of Burma, creating a spontaneous, country-wide uprising that began on 8/8/88, the uprising of the four 8's.

The automatic reaction of the Burma Army was massacre. At least 10,000 people died (see the superb film Beyond Rangoon). It was Singapore, which is so proud of its fascist anti-drug laws, whose state arms company rescued the Burma Army's heroin traders as they were running out of ammunition during the Rangoon Massacre.

The diplomatic pressure created by the 1988 massacre forced the May 1990 elections, which the Burma Army was confident it had fixed by prohibiting opposition electioneering. Despite the repression, the National League for Democracy, led by Tin Oo and Aung San Suu Kyi, won in a landslide - 82% of the popular vote, 392 of parliament's 485 seats.