Burma's Drug Lords By Washington Po

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Burma's Drug Lords
Wednesday, March 18, 1998; Page A20
IN A LETTER published on this page yesterday, Ann Wrobleski takes
issue with a recent editorial on Burma. A former assistant secretary of state
for international narcotics control, Ms. Wrobleski in her private capacity
now represents a firm with close ties to Burma's rulers, according to a Post
report. She defends such work in part by arguing that Burma has improved
its counternarcotics efforts and that Burma's government is only marginally
involved in the drug trade, for both of which points she cites a State
Department report as evidence.
While the letter's citations from the 1998 report are accurate, they are
incomplete. The report does cite a marked improvement in Burma's efforts
to seize and control heroin and opium "in percentage terms." However, the
same sentence continues, "but even so, the total seized was less than one
per cent of Burma's estimated annual opium/heroin output." In fact,
according to the State Department report, Burma's opium and heroin
production doubled after the current dictators took power in a 1988 coup,
and it has remained stable ever since. Burma is now the major global
supplier of opium and heroin, accounting for more than half of world
supplies, and it produces enough "to satisfy the U.S. heroin market many
times over," the report states. "Overall, the Burmese drug control situation
remained bleak during 1997."
As to the regime's role in this, the report does not confine its remarks to
officials in outlying areas. "The government systematically encouraged
leading drug traffickers to invest in infrastructure and other domestic
projects," it says. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was even more
direct last summer. "Burma is also the only member of ASEAN [the
Association of Southeast Asian Nations] where the government protects
and profits from the drug trade," she said. "In fact, Burma's top traffickers
have become leading investors in its economy and leading lights in its new
political order."
Even setting moral issues aside, then, an important question is whether
"engagement" with such a regime and attempts to burnish its image
constitute an effective anti-drug strategy. It is true that sanctions and
diplomatic isolation are blunt diplomatic tools that work only sometimes.
Burma represents an unusual case, in part because it is run by a
dictatorship but -- unlike Indonesia, say, or China -- already has a
legitimate democratic leader. Aung San Suu Kyi, daughter of Burma's
postcolonial independence hero, heads a party that won in a landslide in a
1990 election; Burma's dictators have kept her under house arrest ever
since, refusing to honor the election results. Aung San Suu Kyi has the
support of many ethnically non-Burmese tribes, which have battled the
central government for decades but say they accept her vision of
democratic federalism. The current regime, by contrast, has bought peace
with many of these insurgencies only by allowing them to grow and sell
heroin unhindered.
Burma's ruling regime, corrupt by birth and dependent on drug money for
survival, cannot satisfy U.S. hopes for meaningful efforts against heroin.
The best counternarcotics strategy is to support those forces inside Burma
that truly believe in the rule of law.
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