Khun Sa, Golden Triangle Drug King, Dies at 73
BANGKOK, Nov. 2 — Khun Sa, the publicity-loving Golden Triangle drug lord who thrived in the region’s “kill or be killed” cauldron of ethnic rivalries and heroin-financed private armies, has died at 73 in Yangon, Myanmar, according to an officer in the militia he once led.
Kon Jern, a commander in the Shan State Army, a separatist group, said in a telephone interview that he learned of the death from one of Khun Sa’s relatives. The cause was not known, but he was thought to have suffered from high blood pressure, heart disease and diabetes.
News agencies, quoting anonymous sources in Yangon, said he died on Oct. 26 and was cremated four days later. The country has been closed to outside journalists since Myanmar’s ruling junta cracked down on recent antigovernment protests.
For decades, Khun Sa symbolized the seeming impunity of heroin traffickers in the Golden Triangle, the area encompassing the northern reaches of Myanmar (formerly Burma), Laos and Thailand.
But his surrender to the Burmese authorities in 1996 was followed by a marked drop in cultivation of opium poppies in the Golden Triangle and foreshadowed the region’s decline. Although this year’s opium harvest in Myanmar increased by about 30 percent from last year, the Golden Triangle produces only 5 percent of the world’s opium, down from 70 percent three decades ago. Afghanistan is now the world’s largest producer.
Khun Sa was a guerrilla leader in the separatist movement of the Shan, an ethnic group linguistically related to the Thais, who inhabit northeast Myanmar. His drug empire traded opium for guns and used the weapons to consolidate his control over large swaths of the rugged, remote and impoverished Shan region.
At the height of his power, in the 1980s, he controlled an estimated 70 percent of the country’s heroin business, which enabled him to finance an army of tens of thousands of soldiers and large-scale heroin laboratories.
Khun Sa was born on Feb. 17, 1934, according to Bertil Lintner, a leading expert on Myanmar who interviewed him several times. His father was Chinese and his mother Shan; they lived in the northern Shan state. He changed his name from Chang Chi-fu (also spelled Chufu or Shee-fu) to his nom de guerre, Khun Sa, in the 1970s.
His father died when he was young, and his mother became the mistress of a local tax collector, according to Mr. Lintner. He received no formal education but had military training as a soldier with Chinese Nationalist forces that had fled into Burma after the victory of Mao’s Communists in 1949.
He entered the opium business in 1963, when the Burmese government authorized him and others to form militias allied with the central government as a way of outsourcing the job of fighting rebel groups. Within a year he broke his ties with the Burmese Army and established an independent fief in the northernmost reaches of Burma, near the border with China.
His early career was characterized by failure. He challenged the dominance of the Nationalists in the Golden Triangle drug trade, but lost in battle. He was captured by the Burmese central government and imprisoned from 1969 to 1974.
Soon after his release he rejoined his supporters in the northeast and set up a base in Baan Hin Taek, along the mountainous border near the Thai city of Chiang Rai. His drug network soon came to dominate the Burmese heroin trade.
In the 1980s and 1990s many of the drugs that passed through his network were shipped to the United States. In 1990, the Drug Enforcement Administration calculated that 45 percent of all heroin that reached the United States came from the Golden Triangle.
Alfred McCoy, who chronicled the rise of the Golden Triangle in “The Politics of Heroin,” described Khun Sa as “the only Shan warlord who ran a truly professional smuggling organization capable of transporting large quantities of opium,” and said he was “the first of the Golden Triangle warlords to be worthy of his media crown as ‘kingpin.’”
Khun Sa enjoyed cultivating that image. In an interview in 1977 with The Bangkok World, a newspaper that has since closed, he called himself the “King of the Golden Triangle.”
But Mr. Lintner said Khun Sa was illiterate and a frontman for an organization dominated by ethnic Chinese from Yunnan Province that still operates. “He was basically a country bumpkin,” Mr. Lintner said. “He was a peasant and never the brains behind the organization.”
Little is known about his life in Yangon after his surrender to the Myanmar authorities. Kon Jern, the Shan commander, said Khun Sa was held under house arrest. Other reports have said he lived comfortably if not lavishly. He is survived by three daughters and five sons, according to Mr. Lintner; all were educated abroad and at least one has prospered in various businesses in Myanmar.
European Pressphoto Agency
Khun Sa reveled in publicity.
News agencies, quoting anonymous sources in Yangon, said he died on Oct. 26 and was cremated four days later. The country has been closed to outside journalists since Myanmar’s ruling junta cracked down on recent antigovernment protests.
For decades, Khun Sa symbolized the seeming impunity of heroin traffickers in the Golden Triangle, the area encompassing the northern reaches of Myanmar (formerly Burma), Laos and Thailand.
But his surrender to the Burmese authorities in 1996 was followed by a marked drop in cultivation of opium poppies in the Golden Triangle and foreshadowed the region’s decline. Although this year’s opium harvest in Myanmar increased by about 30 percent from last year, the Golden Triangle produces only 5 percent of the world’s opium, down from 70 percent three decades ago. Afghanistan is now the world’s largest producer.
Khun Sa was a guerrilla leader in the separatist movement of the Shan, an ethnic group linguistically related to the Thais, who inhabit northeast Myanmar. His drug empire traded opium for guns and used the weapons to consolidate his control over large swaths of the rugged, remote and impoverished Shan region.
At the height of his power, in the 1980s, he controlled an estimated 70 percent of the country’s heroin business, which enabled him to finance an army of tens of thousands of soldiers and large-scale heroin laboratories.
Khun Sa was born on Feb. 17, 1934, according to Bertil Lintner, a leading expert on Myanmar who interviewed him several times. His father was Chinese and his mother Shan; they lived in the northern Shan state. He changed his name from Chang Chi-fu (also spelled Chufu or Shee-fu) to his nom de guerre, Khun Sa, in the 1970s.
His father died when he was young, and his mother became the mistress of a local tax collector, according to Mr. Lintner. He received no formal education but had military training as a soldier with Chinese Nationalist forces that had fled into Burma after the victory of Mao’s Communists in 1949.
He entered the opium business in 1963, when the Burmese government authorized him and others to form militias allied with the central government as a way of outsourcing the job of fighting rebel groups. Within a year he broke his ties with the Burmese Army and established an independent fief in the northernmost reaches of Burma, near the border with China.
His early career was characterized by failure. He challenged the dominance of the Nationalists in the Golden Triangle drug trade, but lost in battle. He was captured by the Burmese central government and imprisoned from 1969 to 1974.
Soon after his release he rejoined his supporters in the northeast and set up a base in Baan Hin Taek, along the mountainous border near the Thai city of Chiang Rai. His drug network soon came to dominate the Burmese heroin trade.
In the 1980s and 1990s many of the drugs that passed through his network were shipped to the United States. In 1990, the Drug Enforcement Administration calculated that 45 percent of all heroin that reached the United States came from the Golden Triangle.
Alfred McCoy, who chronicled the rise of the Golden Triangle in “The Politics of Heroin,” described Khun Sa as “the only Shan warlord who ran a truly professional smuggling organization capable of transporting large quantities of opium,” and said he was “the first of the Golden Triangle warlords to be worthy of his media crown as ‘kingpin.’”
Khun Sa enjoyed cultivating that image. In an interview in 1977 with The Bangkok World, a newspaper that has since closed, he called himself the “King of the Golden Triangle.”
But Mr. Lintner said Khun Sa was illiterate and a frontman for an organization dominated by ethnic Chinese from Yunnan Province that still operates. “He was basically a country bumpkin,” Mr. Lintner said. “He was a peasant and never the brains behind the organization.”
Little is known about his life in Yangon after his surrender to the Myanmar authorities. Kon Jern, the Shan commander, said Khun Sa was held under house arrest. Other reports have said he lived comfortably if not lavishly. He is survived by three daughters and five sons, according to Mr. Lintner; all were educated abroad and at least one has prospered in various businesses in Myanmar.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Comments always welcome!