Burma's Shan State, the global epicenter of heroin and methamphetamines, is once again in the eye of the storm. This time, dissident and exile voices have joined the new cycle of violence between a narco-guerrilla with one foot in China and the Burmese narco-state, in order to bring about the fall of the military junta, even at the risk of exaggerating the scale and the quality of the challenge.
The fact is that the army and a Sino-Burmese militia are once again fighting, as in 2009, 2015 and 2017, over the border city of Laukkai. It is not exactly the jungle, since it is home to around thirty large casinos and has also become a center for prostitution, trafficking of all kinds and online scams in several languages. Suffice it to say that 160 Thais have had to be repatriated due to the fighting, while hundreds of Chinese have rushed across the border. The UN estimates the number of displaced people at more than six thousand.
The military recognizes the loss of the border town of Chinshwehaw, where a quarter of the trade with China passes and where the Chinese high-speed train should arrive this decade.
Further west, the Kachín Independence Army guerrilla has seen its headquarters in Laiza bombed by aircraft, in retaliation for its harassment and alleged – unverified – capture of the city of Kawlin, in Sagaing. His pupils from the Arakan Army and, supposedly, some forces identified with the self-proclaimed Government of National Unity, in exile, would have contributed to this.
The head of the military junta, General Min Aung Hlaing, has declared that the armed challenge, to which he attributes the blowing up of bridges and power plants, “has been financed with drug money.” Yaba, methamphetamine that ravages Bangladesh, is produced in Shan and enters the neighboring country through the Arakan Army, according to the International Crisis Group.
Although the army encouraged, since 2009, the narco-guerrillas to become allies, such as the Border Security Forces, not all of them accepted. Even those who did so continued to pursue their old businesses. Others, like the aforementioned Kachín militia, not only did not dissolve, but multiplied.
To the rise of synthetic drugs in the last twenty years, it should be added that, after the return of the Taliban, Burma has once again supplanted Afghanistan as world number one in poppy cultivation and the production and export of opium and heroin. Not coincidentally, in Shan and Kachin states, Naypyidaw has faced the brunt of a coordinated offensive since October 27 (which has led to it being dubbed Operation 1027).
The outbreak of violence coincides this week with the first joint naval maneuvers of the navies of Russia and Burma, in the Andaman Sea. Two Russian destroyers with eight hundred sailors concluded exercises yesterday off the former British colony.
The Burmese military junta, once again an international pariah after the February 2021 coup, purchases most of its weapons from Russia and China and, to a lesser extent, from Singapore, India, Thailand and Israel.
Min Aung Hlaing was precisely the general who, in 2009, expelled the Chinese guerrilla from the Kokang region, promoting another of the same origin, but less rebellious. The former fled to China and promised that she would return to recover Laukkai. In 2017 they attacked three casinos, kidnapped 700 people and fled with the equivalent of tens of millions of euros. Two years earlier, the army's offensive against them – similar to the current one – was praised in Yangon and in the West as “patriotic.”
Maybe because they are Chinese, of the Mandarin language. In fact, it was the Kuomintang troops, who crossed defeated in 1949, who started the opium and heroin trade in Kokang. Twenty years later, Mao supported the militias of the Burma Communist Party, which prevailed. A split from this was what would later take the name of Army for the Democratic Alliance of Burma, until today, although any resemblance to democracy is purely coincidental.
In any case, the group is part of the so-called Brotherhood Alliance, along with the aforementioned Arakan Army (AA) and the Ta'ang National Liberation Army (TNLA). This takes the name of the Northern Alliance when it includes the Kachín guerrilla, of Baptist Christian confession, like many cadres of the “government in exile.”
Opposition figure Aung San Suu Kyi remains under house arrest since her party was removed from power.
