DRUG DEALS TO END, AN ARMY SAYS

Burmese Group Is Relocating Villagers Who Grew Opium Poppies

WAN HUNG, Burma - In a bid to improve their image and win international
development assistance, leaders of one of the world's largest opium armies
have unveiled plans to extricate themselves from all aspects of the drug
trade within five years.

The leaders of the United Wa State Army detailed their plan - including the
forced relocation of 50,000 mountain villagers - to a group of foreign
journalists ferried in by helicopter over the weekend to witness a
carefully choreographed destruction of opium fields.

"In the past, we depended on drugs for our livelihood," said Pauk Yu Ri,
political commissar for the United Wa State Army. "Now we recognize that
drugs are our enemy. "

While international drug enforcement officials say the Burmese government
has stepped up counternarcotics efforts, there has been no independent
verification of the increased efforts by the Wa, and a recent U.S. State
Department report said similar pledges by ethnic insurgents had yielded
little result.

In the weekend ceremony, colorfully dressed hill-tribe children, Wa
fighters and troops from the Rangoon government fanned out across
high-altitude poppy fields to slash plants growing on mountains ranges
controlled by the Wa.

Fierce fighters known for mounting the decapitated heads of their enemies
on spikes, the Wa negotiated an uneasy cease-fire with the Rangoon
government a decade ago.

Burma's national flag now flies above their outposts, but the Wa administer
their own territory, pay no national taxes and require that Rangoon
officials and troops obtain explicit permission before entering their
territory.

The United States, which considers Burma to be the world's largest source
of illicit opium, has described the Wa as one of the country's largest
opium cultivators and identified three Wa army leaders as having a major
role in the heroin and amphetamines trade.

Thai officials said the Wa had manufactured 126 kilograms (280 pounds) of
U.S.-bound heroin seized at Bangkok International Airport early last week.

"You can believe we have changed, not from our promises but from the deeds
you saw today and these plans for the future we are telling you now," said
Khin Mating Myint, liaison officer from the Wa army. "Please tell people to
bring us foreign assistance to help us stop growing opium."

The tightly controlled events witnessed by journalists included the
destruction of roughly 105 hectares (260 acres) of poppy fields.

Military intelligence officers from the Rangoon government served as
translators, and journalists were allowed to spend less than five minutes
in a makeshift transfer camp for several thousand villagers who had been
forcibly expelled from opium growing regions.

At the camp, large families were living in low straw lean-tos erected in a
dusty clearing that afforded little protection from the blazing tropical sun.

"I brought my family here because our village head told us we must leave,"
said Aik Rom Di, an opium farmer who had arrived in the camp with six
members of his family three days earlier.

Villagers are arriving in the camp at the rate of 600 a day, with a total
of 20,000 expected by March, Wa officials said. The two-year plan calls for
the relocation of 50,000 people, or roughly 20 percent of the population in
the territory controlled by the Wa. In addition to Wa, those being moved
include members of the Latin, Akha and Lisu hill tribes, officials said.

Each displaced villager will receive two hectares of land already planted
with several hundred sapling fruit trees, Wa officials said.

The Rangoon government's anti-narcotics chief described the forced mass
migration as an unprecedented but effective way to fight the Wa's addiction
to drug money.

"If you want to end this problem, you must think of villagers as human
beings," said Colonel Kyaw Thein, a member of the Rangoon government's
Committee for Drug Abuse Control. "You cannot just destroy the opium and
leave them living on the mountain. They will starve."

"We are trying to permanently change our business to things like pig
fanning," said Khin Maung Myint, the Wa army's liaison officer. "If these
ventures do not succeed financially, we will definitely return to growing
opium."

Wa officials repeatedly requested increased foreign assistance to bolster
their own self-financed crop-substitution projects. The linchpin of Wa
financing of the anti-drug efforts: 20 holding companies set up by the army
after the cease-fire with Rangoon. The largest, Hong Pang Co., is the
leading investor in almost every project that was shown to journalists by
Wa officials.

Wa officials strongly denied U.S. allegations that investment money for
many of the holding companies such as Hong Pang had been derived from drug
profits.

Lieutenant Colonel Hla Min, spokesman for the Rangoon government, took a
more nuanced view: "Isn't it better if money generated by villagers comes
back to benefit them and does not sit in banks in other countries?"