Smuggling drugs to save lives: an Insight reporter accompanies Christian Freedom International on a mission to deliver medical aid to free Karen villagers in war-ravaged regions of Burma

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Sept 16, 2002 | by Hans S. Nichols

Smuggling drugs into Burma may be harder than smuggling them out. And the drugs being smuggled into that country are not narcotics but medicine to treat malaria, upper respiratory infections and dysentery. Because it is destined for a region controlled by an ethnic tribe that is at war with the military junta, Rangoon labors to keep it out at any cost.

Not that Rangoon isn't engaged in narcotrafficking. According to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, Burma supplied 69 percent of the world's heroin last year. Just last month a shipment from Burma of 1.5 million amphetamine tablets was intercepted at the Thai border--and was called "relatively small" by one Thai official.

Still, in June, the U.N. Drug Control Program (UNDCP) issued a report praising the military junta for drug-interdiction. "The only people who believe that the junta isn't involved in the drug trade is the UNDCP," says Maj. Gen. Anu Sumitra, a Thai intelligence official with more than 36 years in his country's special forces. He tells INSIGHT, "We read these U.N. reports and think they're damn silly."

Intelligence experts such as Gen. Anu believe the Burmese junta has turned a blind eye to the illegal-drugs economies of the pro-Rangoon groups along the border. The junta bristles at any such suggestion, pointing to a 1989 cease-fire that it signed with the Wa tribe demanding that the Wa reform their drug-trading ways by 2005. Since then, INSIGHT has learned, the Wa opium cultivation has increased and its amphetamine production has skyrocketed. Both are of course sources of taxable income for the junta in Rangoon and local authorities.

On the other hand, there's not much profit in importing humanitarian medicine. Enter Christian Freedom International (CFI), a human-rights group based in Front Royal, Va., that smuggles medicine into the Karen state, a province in eastern Burma. For more than 50 years the Karen people have been fighting for self-determination against a wearisome series of totalitarian regimes in Rangoon. As a result, the region is divided between the Karen National Union (KNU), a pro-independence and largely Christian group, and the junta's State Peace and Development Council (SPDC) and their local proxy forces, the Democratic Karen Buddhist Army (DKBA).

While the fighting has claimed many lives, malaria is still the region's biggest killer. CFI Executive Director Jim Jacobson says, "This is a region where people are absolutely cut off from any outside assistance. It's essential that we reach them because they are dying from very treatable diseases."

Early one monsoon morning, CFI's medical smuggling operation sets out from Mae Sot, a border town in Thailand, traveling in a truck belonging to the 7th Brigade of the KNU. That affiliation helps the drugs get past the half-dozen Thai checkpoints on the way to the Moei River. Since the Karen have a certain reputation for ruthlessness and can cross the border with ease, local Thai troops do their best to stay out of their way. On this day in late July, riding in the 7th Brigade truck, the boxes of medicine and INSIGHT'S reporter are waived through all six checkpoints and reach the banks of the Moei, muddy as the Mississippi and about as wide as the length of a football field.

Just upstream from an SPDC river checkpoint, the smugglers wait for their boat. Timing is crucial, and once the coast is clear a boat rumbles into earshot. This sampan, a narrow, shallow riverboat, leaves Thailand and then hugs the Burmese bank, motoring upstream in a morning mist that soon turns to a lashing rain. But the rain, as uncomfortable as it is, provides invaluable cover. On the way back, when the sun makes a rare appearance, the white faces in the boat will have to be hidden behind a tarp from SPDC snipers in the hills above.

When the craft is beached at the 7th Brigade headquarters, the boxes of medicine quickly are unloaded and carried across a bulging stream to the other side of the compound, where they are dropped at Freedom Hospital No. 1, an L-shaped hut with dirt floors, 12 bamboo beds and no electricity. Some medicine will be distributed here, but most of it will be loaded onto the shoulders of backpack medics who will hump it deep into the jungle where many villagers are too sick to move.

Sometimes the medics are protected by an armed KNU patrol, but mostly they travel alone. A journey that would take half a day in the dry months can take two full days during the rains. Swift rivers rise to the neck as the sky unloads stinging pellets of rain, not to mention the occasional leech falling from the bamboo branches above. At every step, mud sucks at the legs well past the ankles. While it is less slippery a few feet from the path, the area is so pregnant with land mines that few dare take the road less traveled.

Even though the backpack medics treat noncombatant villagers, they operate mostly in KNU-controlled areas. As such, they are considered hostile by the SPDC and the DKBA, making their work extremely dangerous. "We just lost one of our medics, who made the mistake of going into a village he didn't know. The SPDC was in the village and he was shot," says Jacobson.