NARCOTICS TRADE AND THE RANGOON JUN

[shan@xxxxxxxxxxxx]

Subject: NARCOTICS TRADE AND THE RANGOON JUNTA'S CHALLENGE: 

11 February 1999 

Draft: 

SDU PRESS RELEASE: NARCOTICS TRADE AND THE RANGOON JUNTA'S CHALLENGE 

We welcome the Rangoon junta's invitation to the world, requesting the 
international community (although not very politely nor very sincerely) 
to dig out the dirt about the narcotics business in Burma. This 
invitation should be taken up. 

We tend to agree with U Win Aung that the Rangoon junta as a whole is not 
officially involved or directly engaged in the opium-heroin trade. There 
are so many ways powerholders and governments can profit from crimes they 
do not actually have to commit: there is no need to, actually. And we 
also agree that the war-on-drugs establishments of many nations should be 
more specific and more transparent about what they know and what they do 
not know, and what they have actually been doing with tax dollars these 
past decades. 

We regret that the war against drug has, for a very long time, been an 
opaque one -- a war where straw men have been set up, impoverished and 
oppressed ethnic groups, debt-ridden cultivators punished (frequently by 
military action), and addicts persecuted (for possession of narcotics). 
There has been no shortage of straw men: Lo Xinghan, Chang Xifu (Khun 
Sa), Noriegia, even a Thai Prime Minister designate, and the Rangoon 
junta. (PLEASE NOTE: We do not in any way imply that these figures 
fingered by the media as drug lords and traffickers are clean). 

The public whose tax dollars have been poured down the war on drugs 
tunnel has are not given any real information. Instead, the narcotics 
issue or problem has become a handy slogan in city and national politics, 
and the failure to eradicate the drug problem has instead become a pitch 
for more tax dollars. Nowhere is failure, repeated year after year, 
rewarded than in the war against drugs. 

To date, no big financiers behind, and profiting from, the multi-million 
dollars global narcotics trade and the money-laundering industry have 
been fingered, much less punished. We find it incredible that the drug 
phenomenon, transnational in scope and worth billions of dollars, has 
been run solely by street-pushers, addicts (who sell drugs to support 
their addiction), and a dozen sleazebag "chemists" working in makeshift, 
primitive labs. 


We join U Win Aung in calling upon the international agencies and 
multinational anti-drug establishments to give the public full 
information of what they know or do not know. And if they do not know 
much after all these years and all the billions already spent on the war 
against drug, let taxpayers know the reason why they are ignorant despite 
vast sums spent by them. 

We call upon national governments, the United Nations, international 
agencies, multinational bodies (such as the Interpol) to be serious about 
dealing with this problem in an open, transparent, accountable manner -- 
not as a "cop-and-robber" clandestine operation directed at petty 
criminal-pushers, addicts, impoverished and oppressed ethnic nations, 
debt-ridden peasant-cultivators of opium and coca leaves, the raw 
material of this very lucrative, globe girdling industry. 


SHAN DEMOCRATIC UNION 
11 February 1999