To quote the February 1996 UN Commission on Human Rights report: "Torture, summary and arbitrary executions, forced labor, abuse of women, politically motivated arrests and detention, forced displacement, important restrictions on the freedoms of expression and association and oppression of ethnic and religious minorities..."

The forced labor is massive, with huge mining complexes literally serviced by slaves under the whip - and paid, literally, in heroin. They are encouraged to share needles and, since they are in so much pain, they do. Burma is the leading source of AIDS transmission in Asia.

Many SLORC mining and roadbuilding operations use little children and women in advanced pregnancy as forced heavy labor. Those peasants who resist "volunteering" are charged with sedition, the punishment for which is the same as for handing out pro-democracy leaflets - five years or more at hard labor on a chain gang.

Burma's billion-dollar gas pipeline, for instance, is being built with slave labor. This is a joint U.S.-French-SLORC venture. The U.S. company is Unocal, the French is Total, and SLORC supplies the road gangs. Once the gas starts flowing, the pipeline will be worth about $400 million a year to the Rangoon generals.

Since 1990, SLORC has gotten about two-thirds of its overt financing from foreign oil companies, including Britain's Premier Oil and America's Texaco and ARCO. Even the 1993 U.S. State Department Human Rights report said that the SLORC "routinely uses slave labor." Nonetheless, the EU, Japan, Singapore and China are all competing for a piece of the Burmese action.

Thanks to the cease-fire agreements it now has with fifteen ethnic minorities, the Burma Army now controls every border checkpoint in the country. The SLORC-sanctioned leaders of those ethnic minorities, of course, are the most powerful heroin dealers in the world.

When Gen. Maung Aye headed the Burma Army's Eastern Command, which included Khun Sa's territory, the jungle warlord was allowed to operate unimpeded. Maung Aye is now Vice Chairman of the SLORC, the second most powerful man in Burma and successor apparent to SLORC Chairman Gen. Than Shwe. Than Shwe is the chosen successor of elderly dictator Ne Win, who gave up official power on the 1988 accession of SLORC. Both work closely with Gen. Khin Nyunt, head of Ne Win's CIA-trained secret police. Secretary Gelbard calls this is "the mid-levels of the Burmese Army."

In January of 1996, in an elaborate public ceremony, the SLORC formally welcomed Khun Sa and his associates into their exclusive Rangoon circle as "our own blood brethren." This marriage was negotiated in December of 1995 by Khun Sa's uncle in Rangoon and the SLORC's Defense Commander Gen. Maung Aye. Maung Aye's dowry for the blushing Khun Sa was the bus concession from Rangoon to his Shan state opium empire.

On August 21, 1996, The Bangkok Post reported that "Rangoon has officially allowed former Mong Tai Army soldiers [Khun Sa's army] and Shan People at Ho Mong [Khun Sa's former headquarters] to grow opium poppies to ease poverty in the area." The State Department, in its end-of-year 1996 Narcotics Control Strategy Report, deceitfully characterized this marriage as a victory in the Drug War, insisting that Khun Sa's "surrender…[was] ending an era in southeast Asia heroin trafficking history."

Secretary Gelbard and his military intelligence allies were active supporters of the July, 1997 enrollment of Myanmar into ASEAN, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, thus conferring diplomatic legitimacy on the SLORC. This is called "constructive engagement," as if little Burma had the geopolitical clout of China.

In January, 1992, DEA agents in Rangoon were contacted by U Saw Lu, a Wa prince from the mountainous poppy-growing Shan state, Chairman of the United Wa State Anti-Narcotics and Development Organization. Lu was trying to get his people out from under the heel of the Burma Army, which had enslaved them as opium sharecroppers. Lu documented the coercion of Wa farmers into growing opium by the imposition of arbitrary taxes, failure of which to pay resulted in land confiscation and imprisonment.

Lu presented detailed evidence of cooperation between the regional Burma Army intelligence chief, Major Than Aye, and Wei Hsueh-kang, a Wa commander with 7,000 troops protecting a very lucrative heroin and methamphetamine operation. Prince Lu was immediately arrested by the Burma Army and mercilessly tortured, to the point of death, for 56 days, by Major Than Aye himself. Lu’s torture, however, provoked Wa leaders to personally threaten Khin Nyunt with a general uprising, so he was allowed to live through it.

Half a year later, the unreconstructed Lu presented the sympathetic new Rangoon DEA chief, Richard Horn, his evidence and his political program, entitled "The Bondage of Opium - the Agony of the Wa People, a Proposal and Plea." The enthusiastic Horn, who was delighted to have found a grass-roots democratic ally, forwarded Lu's plans and evidence to the DEA, by way of the American Embassy in Rangoon.

Horn's reports were intercepted by Embassy Chargé d'Affaires Franklin Huddle, who insisted that Horn change the report's conclusions. Horn had insisted, as had Prince Lu, that political protection combined with subsidized crop substitution, rather than coercion, was the way to wean the Wa from opium. This, of course, threatened SLORC control of Wa territory. Huddle and his CIA operatives also bugged Horn's phone. Huddle quoted Horn's private phone conversations with his DEA superiors back in Washington verbatim in his State Department communications. The Rangoon CIA station chief, Arthur Brown, turned a copy of Lu's report over to his allies in Burmese military intelligence, who again threatened Lu's life. Horn was able to prevent Lu's murder, but at the cost of his job. In September 1993 he was forced out of the country by Huddle's State Department under pressure from the CIA.

Horn, who became a DEA group supervisor in New Orleans, filed a class action lawsuit, 9/12/96, in DC's Federal District Court, alleging that the CIA, the National Security Agency and the State Department illegally surveilled him and the numerous other DEA agents who joined him in the suit. Needless to say, Prince Lu’s plans for crop substitution, which would have included economic and political protection for the poor dirt farmers he represents, went out the window. Wa farmers grow opium or else.

This incident was part of a larger State Department/CIA-DEA turf war in which the State Department actually expelled three heads of the U.S. DEA from Burma, for working too closely with Burmese military intelligence. As of 1998, the State Department says it has engineered the suspension of economic aid to Burma, implemented an international arms embargo, blocked assistance from international financial institutions, downgraded our representation from Ambassador to Chargé, imposed visa restrictions on senior regime leaders and their families, and implemented a ban on new investment by Americans or overseas American firms. But the arms embargo, the lynch-pin of the effort, is completely vitiated by the "anti-narcotics" loophole - aid given to Burmese military intelligence by the CIA-DEA.