When I met Khun Sa in 1989 he insisted his notoriety was exaggerated. “I’m not the monster people make me out to be," he claimed.
After Khun Sa died Oct. 27 in the former Burmese capital of Rangoon, the media dredged up all the old headlines. He was called the “Prince of Darkness” by Washington, which put a USD 2 million bounty on his head. He was the “most powerful heroin warlord the world has ever seen,” wrote the South China Morning Post. He was King of the Golden Triangle, the rough and remote area on the Burma-Laos-Thai border which accounted for up to 60 percent of the heroin in America during the late 80’s and early 90’s. A U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration official was quoted as saying Khun Sa’s private army “relied on violence and murders and assassinations and bribery to keep its whole infrastructure in place.”
With such a larger-than-life persona, Khun Saw was the Osama Bin Laden of his era’s war against drugs.
He was ruthless and swaggering, just like they said. He was charismatic, too. Named Chang Chi-fu, he was born 73 years ago to an ethnic Chinese father and a Shan mother. He had spoken with me animatedly in Mandarin Chinese during interviews spread over a few days, one of them conducted as he rode a jittery white stallion on the parade ground of his rebel redoubt. Said to be illiterate, Khun Sa bought his talent. He employed ethnic Chinese accountants – he introduced me to one of them – and, reportedly, Hong Kong underworld "triad" chemists to ensure the purity of the deadly “China White” heroin churned out by clandestine refineries under his control. Those are the guys I was not introduced to.
Dressed in immaculate fatigues, Khun Sa played the role of a freedom fighter of the Shan, an ethnic minority group in the jungly hinterland of northeast Burma. He’d received military training at an early age, first from mainland Chinese Kuomintang soldiers who’d fled into the region after their defeat by Mao’s Red Army, then later as the leader of a militia bankrolled by the Burmese government to quell ethnic unrest along the country’s restive borders.
By the time we met, Khun Saw headed a 20,000-strong Shan separatist army fighting against Rangoon. He used drug money to buy weapons. To reach his headquarters I rode on horseback for half a day over the Thai-Burma border with a mule train delivering ammunition stuffed into gunny sacks. His guerilla base was surrounded by Russian surface-to-air missile emplacements. He said his annual income was USD 200 million, derived from the 40 percent tax paid by drug refineries on his turf.
Khun Sa claimed he tolerated no drug use among his officers, and that the rural Shan communities around him had to grow opium simply to survive. The heroin trade would continue, he said, as long as Western demand existed. “Unless you in the U.S. do something to curb demand, your children’s children will still be addicts,” he warned.
But Khun Sa had overplayed his hand. The year I interviewed him, the flamboyant self-proclaimed freedom fighter was indicted by a U.S. district court in New York. Washington requested his extradition and began squeezing the Burmese government to shut down Khun Sa’s heroin refining and distribution networks. Factional infighting set in among Shan insurgent groups.
By the early 90’s, Khun Sa’s grip on the Golden Triangle drug trade was challenged by younger, more anonymous – and, some say, even more bloodthirsty – drug kingpins of the ethnic Wa clan. The Wa had been notorious among British colonial officers in Burma for their habit of decapitating enemies and displaying their grisly trophies on stakes around their villages.
In January 1996 Khun Sa surrendered to Burma's generals and relocated to a villa on Rangoon’s Inya Lake. Some say he had to pay the junta the USD 2 million which they otherwise might have scored had they turned him in to the Americans. Some say he went legit, profiting from lucrative real estate and transport deals and the odd ruby mine. Others say he kept a hand in the drug trade. Yet others say he lived under a gilded house arrest, suffering from diabetes and heart disease until his death in relative obscurity late last month.
The outside world was changing, too. The global market share of Golden Triangle heroin dropped after Khun Sa’s surrender. Meanwhile the fall of the Taleban regime in Afghanistan – which had punished drug use severely – has given a new lease on life to opium production in the area known as the Golden Crescent. Today druglords in Afghanistan control 92 percent of the world’s market share of heroin.
Does the death of a has-been Burmese druglord matter? The war against Khun Sa's drug empire has some disturbing similarities with today's war against terror. Could Bin Laden eventually die with not a bang but a whimper, his infamy overshadowed by the fresher exploits of younger terror-meisters from Europe to Iraq?
It's not inconceivable that Bin Laden would wind up living in relative comfort -- okay, maybe not in an urban lakeside villa, but perhaps in a quiet walled compound -- somewhere in the wilds of Pakistan where Islamic fundamentalists have wrested local authority from the shakey Islamabad regime. Is he doing that already? Khun Sa predicted that, unless the root causes of drug abuse are addressed, our children's children will still be addicts. I fear that coming generations will be haunted by terrorists long after Bin Laden is gone.
