by David Eimer
Loi Tai Leng lies along the twisted spine of the ridge, which dips and rises as it traverses the top of the mountain, over 1,550 metres high. The road through town is compacted earth overlaid with yellow dust, which coats everything and everybody. Bamboo poles flying the Shan flag stood every ten metres or so. All available space at the sides of the road was taken up by temporary stalls covered by blue awnings. They far outnumbered the permanent buildings built of wood and topped with metal roofs.
Tracks have been carved out of the green hillsides, running downhill from the ridge in all directions and leading to more substantial structures and homes, bounded by trees and sun-blanched shrubs. Loi Tai Leng is laid out like a snakes and ladders board, an unplanned sprawl of a mountaintop town. ‘Almost everything here was built in the last few years. There was no water or electricity until five years ago,’ explained Yawd Maung, when we met at the house that was to be my home for the next couple of days. ‘Water had to be hauled up from the river in jerrycans and buckets.’
A lieutenant colonel in the Restoration Council of Shan State, also known as the Shan State Army – South, Yawd Maung oversees the RCSS’s department of foreign affairs, a fancy title that essentially means dealing with foreign journalists and diplomats. From Mong Kung in central Shan State, he was forty-two, a former monk with bristling hair, a wide face and an expanding paunch. ‘I learned my English at the temple in Bangkok,’ he said. ‘Then I decided to be with the people. I’ve been in the RCSS for twenty years, eight years in the jungle.’
Spread between Tachileik in the east of Shan State and Loi Moong Merng, farther west of us near Mae Hong Son, the RCSS occupies five bases along the Shan–Thai border including Loi Tai Leng. A force of 8,000 soldiers, the RCSS maintain positions in the north of Shan, too, where they have joined the Tatmadaw in its fight against the TNLA, after signing a ceasefire agreement with the government in 2011.
For most of the year Loi Tai Leng is quiet, the town a mere adjunct to the camp where the RCSS’s recruits come for nine months’ training, far longer than the two months the TNLA’s soldiers receive. But on 7 February Loi Tai Leng plays host to the biggest commemoration of Shan National Day in this part of Shan State, drawing some of the hundreds of thousands of Shan people resident in Thailand for a three-day party.
‘This is a special year,’ said Yawd Maung. ‘We’re celebrating three anniversaries: twenty years of the RCSS, seventy years of Shan National Day and on the 8th it is the chairman’s sixtieth birthday.’ The chairman is Yawd Serk. He founded the Shan State Army – South in 1996 after splitting from another Shan army led by the late Khun Sa, the most infamous of all the Golden Triangle’s drug lords. Technically the RCSS is the political wing of the Shan State Army – South, but both its soldiers and rivals refer to the army simply as the RCSS.
Shan National Day was first celebrated in 1947 in honour of the Panglong agreement, which appeared to guarantee the Shan self-rule over their region. I had arrived the day before the main event. Yawd Maung asked if this was my first visit to a Shan State conflict zone. I told him I had spent time with the TNLA, a tactical mistake given that the RCSS and the TNLA are sworn enemies. ‘Be careful of them,’ he said, fixing me with a stare, his mood darkening instantly. ‘We know they will try and attack us tomorrow on our big day, but we are ready for them.’
He showed me to a room where I would be sleeping on the floor with as many people as could be crammed in. ‘We are a revolution. We don’t have the money to pay for the media’s comfort,’ said Yawd Maung. I decided it wasn’t the right time to ask about the allegations that the RCSS profits from the drugs that move through the areas it controls. There was a Buddha shrine at one end of the room. ‘I’d like to see you meditate,’ scoffed Yawd Maung. I thought that you can take the boy out of the monastery, but you can’t take the monk out of the man.
Out on the main street the atmosphere was friendlier and increasingly festive, the Shan diaspora arriving in ever greater numbers. They came in pickup trucks laden with whole families, on motorbikes and some on foot. Women paraded in brightly striped htamein and close-fitting blouses, and many men wore t-shirts advocating Shan independence. Food stalls had been set up, ice boxes full of beer to the side, and the RCSS Women’s Association stand was serving fine Shan coffee.
Soldiers were everywhere. Some were off-duty teenage trainees strutting around in their camouflage, forage caps and the green plimsolls worn by farmers and militia alike in Shan State. But others wore boots, helmets and flak jackets and clasped American-made M-16 rifles. With far more money than the TNLA and KIA, the RCSS doesn’t have to rely on weapons bought from the Wa region. The soldiers patrolled up and down the road in a meaningless show of force for the visitors. I knew that the closest Tatmadaw positions were a three-day march away.
By the early evening the main street was a press of people, despite the wind that blew chilly across the ridge. Gaggles of girls walked arm in arm, giggling at the soldiers and teenage boys ogling them. The clothes shops were busy, offering t-shirts and hoodies alongside traditional Shan dress. Elderly women were selling trinkets and mementos, their wares laid out on blankets by the road, illuminated by candles and torches gripped in the mouths of the vendors.
Clouds of smoke rose above the crowd, spiralling towards the stars, as skewers of pork, sweet potatoes, chicken feet and thick trails of intestines were grilled. Thai beer and whisky and local rice wine sold in recycled water bottles was available everywhere. Some of the stalls were makeshift karaoke bars, housing mobile music machines and microphones for customers to croon Shan ballads and pop songs. There were fairground stands, too: lucky dips and darts, air guns fired at small balloons, the prizes alcohol or soft drinks for children.
Later, I attended the dinner held on the parade ground, a big expanse of land at the town’s highest point. Flagpoles lined three sides of the square, their banners beating back and forth in the stiff wind. A roofed stage garlanded with flowers took up the remaining side. Tables were set up in front of it, each adorned with food and two bottles of whisky. Men in Shan costume appeared on stage beating giant drums, before the sound system took over, blaring out an incongruous medley of easy-listening classics, and we started to eat.
Almost immediately, though, everyone was standing up as a white pickup truck arrived at the side of the stage. A group of black-clad men jumped down from the back and stood around the vehicle as Yawd Serk emerged from the cab. We regained our seats, watching as the chairman went first to the top table reserved for dignitaries and greeted them. After that he made his way around all the tables, his bodyguards following, shaking hands with every guest.
My table was one of the last to be visited. Up close, Yawd Serk was a head shorter than me, and I am not tall, bulky in an overcoat buttoned to the neck, a maroon beret with the RCSS badge on his head. We shook hands and, stupidly, I said, ‘How do you do?’ Yawd Serk looked confused for a second, before replying, ‘Thank you’ and moving on. ‘He doesn’t speak English,’ Yawd Maung told me. ‘Try Thai or Shan next time.’
After dinner there was a performance of traditional Shan dancing from the RCSS’s dance troupe. As people rushed the front of the stage to film it on their phones, Yawd Maung sat down next to me. He was genial again, a couple of whiskies inside him, poking me in the ribs, one eye on the dancing girls. I learned that his grandfather had been killed when the Tatmadaw razed his home village, part of the Four Cuts campaign in central Shan State. It was the reason why he had left the monastery to join the RCSS.
His revelation made me better disposed to him. But the alcohol couldn’t heat up his cold eyes and soon he started quizzing me about the TNLA, asking for details of their defences and equipment. I offered up what he knew already. ‘AK47s, RPGs, heavy machine guns.’ Yawd Maung nodded grimly. ‘The TNLA say they are protecting the Palaung people, but the Palaung and the Shan have been brothers for hundreds of years,’ he said. ‘Some Palaung ask us for protection. Just because people wear a TNLA uniform that
doesn’t mean they are TNLA.’
It was an attempted smear, typing the TNLA as mere gangsters living off the people they were supposed to defend, and brazen, too, given that I knew that the RCSS imposes heavy taxes on the locals in the areas it controls. I asked why the RCSS couldn’t strike a deal with the TNLA. ‘We have offered to negotiate with them, but they say they will only talk if we withdraw from our positions in the north. That is an impossible demand. We have to protect our people – the Shan – and they want us to do that,’ insisted Yawd Maung.
Notwithstanding its home bases in the deep south of Shan, the RCSS recruits from across Shan State. Many of its soldiers come from the areas where the TNLA fights. But there is also the rival Shan State Army – North stationed in northern Shan, and I wondered why they couldn’t be left to guard the Shan there. Yawd Maung didn’t like the question. ‘I leave it to the chairman to talk for us,’ he said finally.
National day dawned early for everyone in the house, a consequence of sleeping on the floor. Nursing his hangover, Yawd Maung seemed to bear no grudge about our exchange of the previous night. I asked about the RCSS’s relationship with the UWSA, the Wa army, and he started reminiscing about the time in 2005 when the UWSA had besieged Loi Tai Leng for forty-five days, supported by Tatmadaw mortar teams. ‘We fought them off. But many people died. It was a long time ago. Forget it.’ I said, ‘Of course’ and wrote it down promptly, just in case I didn’t remember.
At 8.45 a.m. the soldiers marched from their barracks to the parade ground, the stamping of their feet sending puffs of dust up around their shins. They were preceded by a band of teenagers in white uniforms who played ‘YMCA’, the Village People song, repeatedly. Following behind, I found a crush of people ten deep around the square. Monks clad in both the orange robes of Thailand and the crimson ones of Burma had found a vantage point standing on the flatbeds of pickup trucks parked to the side.
From the edge of the stage, I could see the chairman in his beret and blue dress uniform sitting with other senior RCSS men around him. The special guests were behind them. They included prominent Shan figures, representatives from the Karen and Chin peoples, as well as western diplomats who had travelled up from their embassies in Bangkok. Having signed a ceasefire with Naypyidaw, the RCSS is now respectable to the outside world.
We watched a series of displays. Members of the RCSS’s elite commando unit, including two young women, paired off and demonstrated how to disarm someone with a knife or gun. They were followed by students clad in white with red headbands, who stood in long lines across the parade ground and showed off a series of martial arts moves. Then there was a dramatisation of the RCSS rescuing farmers from an unnamed band of masked men, complete with sound effects of shots and explosions.
Yawd Serk sat impassive throughout, his eyes behind thick-lensed glasses. I was reminded of the Bruce Lee film Enter the Dragon, in which the super-villain on his island fortress off Hong Kong is protected by a private army of fanatical bodyguards who flaunt their skills at his whim. The parade ground had become a theatre and what we were witnessing was a spectacle fetishising the RCSS, turning the conflict in Burma’s borderlands into a movie to be broadcast by the TV crews present, with the chairman as the undisputed star.
Yet there was no doubting the crowd’s enjoyment of the show. Nor was there any question about their desire for self-rule. People living in the conflict areas may complain of the violence that follows the ethnic armies, as well as the enforced taxes, but the ordinary Shan gathered in Loi Tai Leng all wanted autonomy. This was their national day, an occasion when the Shan forget their long and continuing history of fighting among themselves and instead imagine an ideal: their homeland and its resources under Shan control. The audience cheered the soldiers and appeared proud of them.
Finally, we reached the last act. Troops clad in combat uniforms brightened up with yellow neckerchiefs started marching onto the square in formation. They lined up until the entire parade ground was occupied, the flags of their units flying above them. An honour guard approached the chairman and he took their salute, before giving a surprisingly succinct speech calling on the government to honour the 1947 Panglong agreement.
While the other dignitaries followed Yawd Serk with far longer addresses, I pondered the fact that the chairman was merely an exaggerated and corrupted version of the sawbwas who had once sliced Shan State into their own personal kingdoms. And sitting behind Yawd Serk on the stage was the youngest son of Sao Shwe Thaike, the sky lord who became Burma’s first president. Stripping the sawbwas of their powers ended feudalism in Shan State, but not dominion by local chieftains. The men who control the ethnic armies oversee their regions with a power as absolute as the hold the sawbwas once exerted.
Conflict and opium have made Yawd Serk, elevating him to a position where he meets now with Aung San Suu Kyi and holds court with foreign ambassadors. He started his career by rising through the ranks of the Mong Tai Army, a merger of Shan militias led by Khun Sa, the one-time king of the Golden Triangle and the most notorious opium warlord of them all. In 1948, the year of independence, Burma produced just thirty tons of opium annually. By 1996, when Khun Sa surrendered to the junta, over 1,700 tons of opium was coming out of Shan State each year.
That astonishing rise in poppy production was largely down to the efforts of Khun Sa, as well as of Lo Hsing Han, a warlord from the Kokang region of Shan State. Both men, though, were simply providing the raw material to the ethnic Chinese who ran the heroin refineries in northern Thailand, backed by criminal gangs in Bangkok, Hong Kong and Taiwan. The Chinese have always been the financiers of the Golden Triangle, and migrants from Yunnan introduced local farmers to opium cultivation in the nineteenth century.
Most of Shan State’s poppy now heads to refineries in Yunnan. But from the 1950s to the 1990s Thailand was the primary destination and point of export to elsewhere. Like the Chinese, the Thais had been forcibly supplied opium by the British. The ships of the East India Company carrying the black tar from India to China would stop off in Bangkok along the way. Until 1959 it was legal to buy opium from state-licensed outlets in Thailand. Once the drug was outlawed, and American soldiers serving in Vietnam were introduced to heroin, a space was created that allowed Khun Sa to flourish.
Khun Sa’s real name was Zhang Qifu. He was born in 1934 in an area of northern Shan State that was part of the Mongyai kingdom ruled by the father of Mrs Fern in Hsipaw. After Khun Sa’s ethnic Chinese father died when he was a child, his Shan mother remarried a man who was a tax collector for the Sawbwa. The teenage Khun Sa joined one of the KMT units that had fled to Shan State from China, but soon split off and formed his own armed group.
In 1963 his force was recruited by the junta as a local militia. Like the border units sponsored by the government today, such as the Panhsay militia the TNLA fights, groups like Khun Sa’s were allowed to profit from opium in return for battling insurgents on the generals’ behalf. But Khun Sa’s men didn’t do much fighting. They concentrated on selling poppy. By the late 1960s he and Lo Hsing Han had established a grip on the Shan State drug trade that wouldn’t be seriously challenged for another twenty years. And when Lo Hsing Han was arrested in 1973, it was all Khun Sa’s.
Similar to the pirate Samuel White, who made Myeik his personal fiefdom in the late seventeenth century, Khun Sa was equal parts charm and ruthlessness. ‘He was very charismatic. He’d greet you as a friend with a joke,’ I was told in Loi Tai Leng by an elderly Frenchman who had interviewed him on a number of occasions. ‘He communicated in Yunnanese mainly. He used to say he was part of the Shan family because his mother was Shan, but Yunnanese was his first language, then Shan and a little Thai.’
Despite his Shan heritage, Khun Sa was essentially apolitical. Making money was always his principal objective. He adopted his Shan moniker – Khun Sa means ‘prosperous prince’ – only in the mid-1970s, when he renamed his force the Shan United Army and started claiming that he was fighting for self-ru
le in Shan State. ‘It was a marriage of convenience between the Shan nationalists and Khun Sa,’ said the Frenchman. ‘He needed an army to guard his drug convoys and the nationalists needed money for the struggle.’
Cloaking his criminality with the Shan flag didn’t prevent Khun Sa from being pursued by the law enforcement agencies of different countries, the United States in particular. As heroin-addicted soldiers returned from Vietnam and narcotics from Southeast Asia poured into American cities, the then president Richard Nixon declared a war on drugs in 1971. The DEA made Khun Sa its number one target. It was easier to go after the Shan drug lords than their ethnic Chinese backers.
Holed up first in an isolated pocket of northern Thailand and later back in Shan State at a base now used by the RCSS, Khun Sa responded by suggesting that the United States government take his opium off the market by buying it all directly. Washington declined the offer. By now his Shan United Army had mutated into the Mong Tai Army, a force of 20,000 soldiers at its peak, including the young Yawd Serk as one of its junior officers.
Although he was indicted by a New York court on heroin-trafficking charges in 1989, the Americans never did catch Khun Sa. It was competition from fellow Shan State drug dealers which forced him out of business. From 1989 a coalition of the armies of the Wa and Kokang people and Lin Mingxian’s militia in Mong La moved aggressively into the opium trade. With his army under attack and his power declining, Khun Sa decided it was time to make a deal with the junta, with whom he had retained contacts throughout his career.
Surrendering to the authorities in January 1996, Khun Sa moved to a compound near Yangon’s airport overseen by military intelligence. Accompanied by four teenage mistresses from Kengtung, he remained there until he died in 2007. Like the sawbwas of old, and dubbing himself the ‘prosperous prince’ was surely a nod to their status, he was a prolific father: he had around thirty children. At his death Khun Sa was believed to own a significant property portfolio in Yangon, Mandalay and the Shan capital Taunggyi, as well as a ruby mine and cash in bank accounts across Asia.
