Workers shovel sand into a horse cart along the Mekong river in Kandal province, Cambodia, north of Phnom Penh, March 25. Photograph by: Tang Chhin Sothy, AFP/Getty Images
Discovery of slain Chinese crew highlights problem of criminal drug trafficking
By Jonathan Manthorpe,
Vancouver Sun
November 7, 2011
Four countries bordering the lawless region where the Mekong River flows through the notorious Golden Triangle have agreed to joint security operations after 13 Chinese sailors were killed [by Thai soldiers] in an incident stemming from the area's re-emergence as a centre for drug manufacture and trafficking.
The agreement between China, Laos, Burma and Thailand comes after an Oct. 5 attack on two Chinese-owned cargo boats plying the Mekong between Burma, Thailand and Laos.
In the following days, 12 bodies, bound or handcuffed and with bullet wounds to the head or slashed throats, were found floating in the Mekong in northern Thailand.
Another body was found on one of the two Chinese-flagged river boats, the Yi Xing 8 Hao and the Hua Ping.
Thai soldiers found 520,000 methamphetamine pills, known as yaba in Thailand where it is a highly popular drug, on one ship and 400,000 pills on the other.
The first accounts from this wild region, ruled by ethnic clan warlords and once the source of much of the world's street heroin until the rise of Afghanistan's poppy fields, were that Thai soldiers came across the boats which had apparently been hijacked by fighters for Nor Khan, a militia leader of the Shan minority who is notorious for piracy on the Mekong.
The Thai soldiers, said this story, fought a fierce half-hour battle with the men on the boats, who fled, leaving the cargo of drugs behind.
In this first account, Nor Khan's men had killed and dumped the bodies of the Chinese crewmen and were using the captured boats to transport the yaba to the Thai market.
But that story never quite held water, and its defects became apparent at the end of last week when nine Thai soldiers were charged with killing the Chinese sailors.
The soldiers deny the charges.
It is well known in the region that for some years the Thai army has sent special forces anti-narcotics units into neighbouring Burma and Laos because of the unwillingness or inability of those governments to stem the flow of smuggled drugs.
What has made the Oct. 5 incident different from many others is that it became known and could be pinned on the Thai army. That is largely because Chinese diplomats demanded information because of a public outcry in China against the killings.
In all probability, quiet deals will be done and the story will go away, not least because it seems it was the Chinese sailors, not the hill tribe warlord Nor Khan, who were smuggling the yaba into Thailand.
That gives an insight into the criminal end of the spectrum of China's economic expeditions into Southeast Asia and, in this case, its program of dynamiting rapids to make the Mekong a navigable waterway.
Chinese shippers have come to dominate the river trade and according to the Chinese news agency, Xinhua, 116 of the 130 ships engaged in this business are Chinese-owned.
Among those were the two boats involved in the Oct. 5 incident; at least one of those is owned by Chinese tycoon Zhao Wei, who uses it to supply his Kings Romans Casino, which he established in 2007 in Laos' Tonpheung district on the Mekong.
Zhao's casino in Laos is highly successful and is believed to have hurt the business of other casinos, especially across the Mekong in Burma.
But Zhao has excellent protection, especially from his old ally Lin Mingxian, a Chinese-born half-Shan warlord who built a drugs-and-gambling empire at Mongla, just inside Burma from where he lured about 350,000 Chinese tourists every year.
Lin has become a kingpin in a massive trade in manufacturing and trafficking methamphetamine drugs. At the core is an alliance of the National Democratic Alliance Army - once the Communist party of Burma to which Lin, a Red Guard in the 1970s, was sent from China as a "volunteer" - and the much larger United Wa State Army whose senior commander is known drug trafficker Wei Xuegang.
Both these groups use Burma's Mekong river port of Sop Lui to transport their yaba.
The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime said in a September report that up to 20 million people in the region use yaba and that use is growing dramatically year by year.
Some authorities see Zhao's Kings Romans Casino in Laos as an outpost of the narcotics empire and part of the distribution network for yaba to Thailand and beyond.
Indeed, what seems to have set off the string of events that led to the death of the 13 Chinese sailors was a raid on Kings Romans Casino by Chinese and Lao officials on Sept. 26.
The investigators found what the Thai media reported as two sacks of yaba pills carrying the logo of the United Wa State Army. But despite finding the drugs and the equivalent of $1.7 million in cash at Zhao's casino, the Chinese and Laotian officials did not have enough political muscle to close it down.
It looks as though the Thai special forces unit had inside information, and was watching for Zhao's cargo boats.
jmanthorpe@vancouversun.com
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