IN A TURNAROUND, BURMESE JUNTA MOVES AGAINST OPIUM

LASHIO, Burma---In the remote valleys and rugged mountains here in
northeastern Burma, opium offers more than a narcotic high. For years,
it has provided a livelihood for hill tribes who inhabit the northern
expanse of the Golden Triangle, the lush, lawless area of Southeast
Asia that is the source of much of the world's heroin.

Opium finances daily needs, from rice and cooking oil to assault
rifles. The rifles are used to wage rebellion and to defend the mule
caravans transporting the sticky, pungent opium to be refined into
heroin for American and European drug habits.

Burrna produced an estimated 2,600 tons of opium last year, enough to
make more than 200 tons of heroin---at least 60 percent of the world
total. But the drug trade is changing along Burma's porous frontiers
with Thailand, China and Laos, and one of the most startling shifts
may be in the attitude of the military junta that seized power in this
country in 1988.

For years the junta tolerated opium trafficking as the price of its
cease-fires with insurgent ethnic groups. Now it says it wants to
eradicate all opium within five years. To show what it has
accomplished, it recently allowed three American reporters into an
opium-growing region usually closed to visitors.

Some diplomats in Rangoon, the capital, view the eradication claim
skeptically because land devoted to opium cultivation has doubled
under the junta's rule, and the country's mismanaged economy has grown
to rely on laundered drug profits.

The government says it has eradicated 41,000 acres (16,500 hectares)
of poppies a 10th of the land under opium cultivation in Burrna. "The
crop eradication areas are only small parts of the areas they do
control, " a Western diplomat said. "They are window dressing."

Colonel Gyaw Thien, the chief of Burrna's counternarcotics program,
disagreed. "It's quite unfair," he said. "We are making much more
effective interdictions and seizures than we have in the past."

Last year, police and army units reported seizing 1.5 tons of heroin,
compared with about half a ton in 1996, though their record seizures
amount to less than I percent of Burma's output. "This drug problem is
not only the problem of the United States, " Colonel Gyaw Thien said.
"It's our problem, too. We know that we cannot fight this alone."

The junta's new policy puts Washington in a quandary because the
United States cut off counter-narcotics aid to Burma after the coup in
1988. Restoring such aid could undercut other American economic
sanctions and lend legitimacy to a dictatorship that stands accused of
widespread abuse of human rights.

Hla Min, deputy director of the Office of Strategic Studies, a
planning branch of military intelligence, said: "We think we can get
rid of 60 percent of the heroin going into the U.S. in 12 months' time
if the U.S. cooperates with us."

A Western diplomat who watched the shift concluded: " What this
government wants to do is perpetuate itself in power. They know it's
got a bad image. They looked at drugs and found this is the one asset
they have. They'd like to use whatever they've done to improve their
image and try to get sanctions lifted. "

The State Department acknowledges in its latest drug control report
that it has no evidence that Burma' s government is trafficking in
drugs on an institutional level.

"However," the report said, "there are persistent and reliable reports
that officials, particularly army personnel posted in outlying areas,
are involved in the drug business."

The government denies this, citing the arrest of 11 army officers last
April for colluding with a heroin refining operation in northem Shan
state. The senior of ficer, a lieutenant colonel, was sent to prison
for 25 years. It also deported Li Yunchun, a fugitive trafficker
indicted in New York, to Thailand, which handed him over to the United
States.

But new traffickers, notably the Wa, a fierce hill people whose
ancestors hunted heads, have wrested control of the lucrative heroin
business from remnants of renegade Chinese Nationalist soldiers and
rebel militias. Nearly a million Wa straddle the border between China
and Burma.

Their insurgent army has diversified from heroin into
methamphetamines, powerful synthetic stimulants that have saturated
Thailand and since tumed up in Japan, Taiwan and Malaysia, Burmese and
Westem officials said. A Burmese counter-narcotics official said the
Wa now make more money from methamphetamines than from heroin and
refine both drugs themselves using chemicals smuggled in primarily
from China.

Because of aggressive interdiction by the Thai police, the old
trafficking routes through the Golden Triangle are shifting from
Thailand and into China, or less often Laos and even northeastern
India. Some heroin still moves by truck down from the Shan highlands
market town of Lashio, through lowland Mandalay to the port of Rangoon.

Eradicating opium could help the military government's strategy of
subduing ethnic insurgents who traffic in opium to finance their wars
of independence. Government troops cannot enter most Wa-controlled
territory without a battle.

With an army estimated at 15,000 to 20,000 men, the Wa have grown so
strong, acquiring surface-to-air missiles and modern communications
equipment, that government troops say they are outgunned.

"The Burmese would like nothing better than to do away with the drug
trade," another diplomat in Rangoon said, "because it would take guns
out of the hands of these armies."

The government's creation of a handful of opium-free zones has upset
local farmers. "What we're talking about is really changing their life
style," said Jorgen Kristensen, an official with the United Nations
Drug Control Program which has introduced alternative development
projects. "Poppy cultivation is ingrained in their culture."

At Narn Tit, a Wa town about a halfhour's walk from the Chinese
border, Zi Zi Fa said that his grandfather and father grew opium
poppies. He earns about $650 for his own annual crop of 12% pounds.

Since the government told him to grow soybeans instead, he said, he
earns a 10th of what opium paid, not enough to feed 10 family members.
"The family is barely surviving,'' he said.