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The story of the narco-state in the jungle of Burma, between the CIA, the Chinese and opium

2024-09-21 21:50:03Kosova&Bota SHKRUAR NGA REDAKSIA VOX
The story of the narco-state in the jungle of Burma, between the CIA, the
The story of the narco-state in the jungle of Burma, between the CIA, the Chinese and opium

Roberto Saviano - Corriere della Sera

In the Burmese town of Lashio, battered by vigorous subtropical monsoons and also by a regime whose exploits are well known in the news, is a small Christian church built on top of a hill. At its entrance, suspended from two wooden beams, hangs a grenade. Weathered, rusted, but still completely recognizable, since the founding of this house of God in 1971, it has served as a church bell, a bell for visitors and a drum for the village that grew up around it.

What image is that, that of a church that has an old grenade as a clapper? It's an image of faith, of course. Of a faith that is only partly religious, as we shall discover. Belief in the rebirth of a people, in its salvation, in its destiny. It is an image of violence, above all suspicion. A violence that many of the inhabitants of those parts of the globe that cross China, Burma and Thailand are accustomed to and that have often been protagonists in the distant (but not too distant) past. It is the image of an exception from the canon, from the rules of which cult objects are subject.

You can bet any priest would object if one of his followers proposed using a war relic as a bell. But the man who built that church is not a priest. He is not even a priest, if you look closely. And the people he built it for, of the Wa ethnic group like himself, also overturned rules and laws like dominoes.

Forced by history, sometimes. Hungry for power and money, other times. For local news, especially those made in the US, Wa State – located in two non-contiguous areas, a geopolitical compromise born of incessant unrest, migration and war – is nothing more than a drug-trafficking cartel.

Merciless head cutter. Corrupt hierarchs. Money launderers. Unparalleled wholesalers of opium and heroin, first and then methamphetamine. Poisoners of the world. Despicable. Sludge.

But the story is much more complex. The story is increasingly complex. The reasons why the Wa-ts have become in recent decades, and for a long time, the world's largest exporters of heroin are many.

But if the question were to be answered: thanks to the United States and the CIA, you would not be wrong. Of course, only part of the truth would be understood, one element of the painting would be preferred to its diverse whole.

But it would be a very large element. Since the Cold War, Americans have gone around arming people, proxy soldiers, who, in the interests of the wealthy client, are supposed to strike the communist enemy, but who in reality do whatever they want.

They escape supposed control. They embrace the causes they consider most worthy.

They rebel against an agency that regularly—with eerie regularity, almost as if it never learns from its mistakes—treats them as hillbilly idiots, quarrelsome simpletons, illiterate fools.

Well, ethics aside, the problem is that with the same frightening regularity, the agency fills the sack. The fool turns out to be much less stupid than the one who wanted to control him.

This is exactly what happened to the Wa, the Shan, the Exiles, to those who from one day to the next saw automatic rifles raining from the sky, literally: whole boxes hanging in the clouds, connected with American paratroopers landing in villages and makeshift camps or in a dense forest, on an impenetrable hill, in the middle of a valley.

Struck, many of them, by Maoist China, refractory to any hypothesis of religious worship, persecuted, chased to the top of the mountains, into the thickest jungle, these men and these women, these barefooted and exhausted children, testified a "barrage of rifles".

Planes flew across the sky delivering them weapons and ammunition. Take and use them all. It is enough for you to send the communists home, with the blessing of our American friend.

And it was with the CIA's blessing that many of these unfortunates, kicked like deflated balloons from one corner of Burma to another, actually got those rifles.

They have become warlords. Armed traffickers of that opium, which, according to centuries-old tradition, is a natural product of their mountainous, cold and alkaline lands, lands which, moreover, offer nothing else on which man can make a living.

From poppy farmers to vicious heroin cartels in the blink of an eye.

It is the dream that breaks, indeed: it is a double dream, to be understood not in the Schnitzlerian sense, but precisely as a double dream excursion of two countries sleeping on the pillow of utopia.

China and the United States wake up together, at the same moment, as two twins so different, yet so much the same. Removing from his eyes – but only for a moment – ​​the veil of Maya, the Maoist dragon finds himself clumsy as well as cruel: how could he have thought of a transfer of believers from the Church of our Lord to that country?

On the other side of the world: how could Americans think that throwing a load of rifles, some medicine, a fistful of money at a group of unhappy people was enough to sustain them for life?

Who guaranteed the Western strategists that these people, once they took up arms, would not turn it on their rude, inaccurate and big-hearted benefactors?

Well, if one image can be useful for us to summarize the central theme of this volume, then it will be that of a bomb with the construction marks and logo of a China sclerotized by communism.

But a bomb must be activated to explode.

And what is the hand that activates the device? What passport does the bomber have?

Just like those who armed the Taliban and Mujahideen in Afghanistan against Russia; just like those who poured arms and money into a number of Latin countries without much concern whether they were government forces, rebels, fascists, drug traffickers or whatever.

The script is now canon; only who collects the explosives changes from time to time, but the traces in the primer are unchanged.

As in this story, which nevertheless offers a new chromatic palette, unprecedented nuances, sensational mixtures that in our home, in our armchair, in our streets, project us echoes that are only faint, however distant it may seem the source.

Its focal point is in Banna, on the Chinese side of the Burmese border, in a Christian mission led by Pastor William Marcus Young, nicknamed "The Man-God" by the Wa and Lahu.

The latter is responsible, both for the conversion of their religion and for the creation of the alphabet, since the natives do not possess a written language.

Jeremiah, Moses, Peter: these are the names of the newborns within the mission, to be traced, according to the pastor, to an ethical life away from alcohol, opium and beheadings, to which some groups have been assigned in the highest peaks.

Among the newborns, in 1944, is Saul – named after the first king of Israel, the one who unites the scattered tribes – who will later become Saw Lu, an ardent Christian, builder of a church in which can be accessed by tapping with a grenade.

The events of this book, impressive in content and ambition, unfold in wet and treacherous forests that are populated by characters whose names, on certain occasions, jump to the local news and sometimes occasionally support DEA reports. -s American, for Wei Xuegang and Bao Youxiang, politicians, drug traffickers, or both?

Khun Sa, General Lee Wen-huan, Zhao Nyi Lai, but also tribal leaders such as the Master of Creation - who according to the militias possesses the gift of levitation - Prince Mahasang, together with his American counterpart - the DEA and those of the CIA , presidents, diplomatic officials – friend, foe, conspirator, supporter, traitor, as the case may be, and capable of switching from one role to another with a snap of the fingers.

They are forests where there is no shortage of surprises, because often dwarfs turn them into giants, tribes into armies, unfortunates into disasters.

It is a very dangerous forest, the one you will read about, populated by snakes and wild beasts, guarded by militia and armed smugglers, filled with shacks where opium is turned into heroin, laboratories where methamphetamine is cooked and plantations ancient, with surviving poppies still standing the test of time and the US war on drugs.

And it makes us smile how the author uses the term "tribe" to describe not the groups that lived within it and that today, in many cases, reside in the surrounding cities, but the agencies of Atlantic origin whose internal strife has caused unrest large, considerable inconvenience and, indisputably, the largest number of victims in that geographical area called the Golden Triangle, which, however, often tries to provide electricity as well.


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