SHADY DEALS WITH GENERALS OFTEN END ETHNIC WARS IN MYANMAR

KEKKU, Myanmar -- Freedom's just another word for cutting a deal with the
generals.

That is what the business manager of the Pao National Organization
explained over a lunch of spicy chicken and avocado salad here in the rebel
outback of a country that is a perennial contender for the title of world's
most repressive state.

By agreeing to a cease-fire with the generals who run what used to be
called Burma, the Pao, an ethnic minority of about 400,000 people in a
country of 50 million, have won themselves civil rights and economic
opportunities all but unimaginable to most Burmese.

A look at the semi-good life in Pao land explains why, in the last decade,
at least 15 armed ethnic minorities in Myanmar have been willing to end
decades of bloodshed and do business with the generals.

"It is not a perfect arrangement," said the Pao business manager, smoking a
cigarette through a bamboo water pipe after lunch. "But it is better than war."

The Pao are prospering primarily as hoteliers, garlic farmers and jade
miners. But other ethnic minorities -- the Wa and the Shan, in particular
- -- have used cease-fires to expand their interests in the heroin and
amphetamine trades, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.
They have also been encouraged by the government to launder drug profits
through the legitimate Burmese economy.

For the generals, ceding "contingent sovereignty" to groups like the Pao,
Shan and Wa has been a win-win deal.

The agreements have, for the most part, ended a series of expensive
insurgent wars that had become a way of life in the mountainous fringes of
this country.

Probably more important, cease-fires have freed the generals to focus state
resources on saving their own skins. Since killing hundreds of
pro-democracy marchers in 1988 and ignoring an election they lost in 1990,
the generals have used an ever-expanding web of repression as the key to
their continued rule .