PIANG PHRA CAMP, THAI-MYANMAR BORDER (dpa) – Nan Thaw fled to this border enclave last month with his wife and two small children to escape the Wa, a people in search of a new homeland.
“They took our farms and stole our pigs, chickens and even our clothes,” said Nan Thaw of the Wa, a Myanmar (Burmese) ethnic minority group of Mon-Khmer origin whose traditional lands are in the Eastern Shan State, a barren mountainous terrain that borders Yunnan province of southern China.
“We had to run away or starve,” said Nan Thaw, a former resident of Mong Klan village, about 15 kilometres to the west. Like 300 other Shans, his small family has erected a bamboo hut in Piang Phra, a hilltop camp just across the border from Hintek village, in Chiang Rai province of northern Thailand.
Some 50,000 Wa families, or about 200,000 men, women and children, have been settled along the border of Chiang Rai province since late 1999 as part of the Myanmar government’s mass migration policy.
The Wa, whose capital is Pang Sang, Shan State, have been opium farmers for decades, partly because their traditional lands in the mountainous eastern part of the Shan State are too barren and inclement for other crops.
Myanmar’s military junta in late 1999 announced plans to relocate hundreds of thousands of Wa opium farmers to the Thai-Myanmar border area as part of their commitment to eradicate opium growing by the year 2014.
Most of the Wa migrants have settled in new border towns, such as Mong Yawn and Mong Mai, but others have moved into villages and farms once occupied by Shan, such as Mong Klan, Mong Thon and Mong Hsat.
At least 15 Shan village headmen and civilian leaders from the three Shan villages have been arrested by the Myanmar army, and imprisoned in Mong Hsat jail since October last year, said Shan State Army (SSA) Lieutenant Colonel Gon Chin.
“They are using every way to drive the Shan out,” said Gon Chin. “They accuse the Shan headmen of breaking the law and imprison them indefinitely.”
The SSA, which six years ago was a faction within the Mong Tai Army of notorious drug warlord Khun Sa, claims to have cleaned up its act and denies any involvement now in the lucrative narcotics trade.
While such claims need to be taken with a grain of salt along the drug-infested border, what seems clear is that the SSA’s open military opposition to Myanmar’s junta has made the Shan people an easy target for the Myanmar army and their ally, the 7,000-strong United Wa State Army (UWSA).
“The Burmese are worried about the Shan movement,” said Sai Aung Mak, a spokesman for the Shan Restoration Council. “If the SSA movement gathers momentum, the border can be controlled by the Shan, then we will have the border trade.”
Aung Mak estimates that some 400,000 Shans have been displaced by the Myanmar army and Wa since 1996, shortly after their combined forces defeated Khun Sa’s Mong Tai Army (MTA) and became the chief force in the Golden Triangle.
The migration of the Wa to the border area, and their heavy involvement in the illicit production of methamphetamines and heroin, has already severely strained Thai-Myanmar relations.
Since February the Thai and Myanmar armies have engaged in several cross-border artillery clashes and an even fiercer war of words has ensued between the two governments.
While the Thais accuse the Myanmar military of turning a blind eye to the Wa’s lucrative drug trade, which will pump an estimated 600 million methamphetamine pills into the Thai market this year, the Burmese accuse Thailand of supporting the Shan rebellion against them.
Yangon has pledged to stop all drug production in the Wa areas along the border by the year 2005.
“The Myanmar government said they would take five years to stop this business, but we cannot wait that long,” said Thailand’s commander of the Third Army Region, Lieutenant General Wattanachai Chaimuenwong.
Besides the current drug problem, Wattanachai and many other observers foresee an escalation of ethnic fighting as a result of the Wa migration.
“There will be a big problem in the future, because this is the Shan area,” predicted Wattanachai. “But now the Wa have used their influence with the Burmese to use land that did not belong to them in the past.”
When the Wa move into Shan territory, they tell the displaced Shan families that they have been given permission from Lieutenant General Khin Nyunt, First Secretary of the ruling junta in Yangon, to claim their lands.
Khin Nyunt is the military leader who engineered Yangon’s alliance with the UWSA in the early 1990s, which others within the Myanmar military reportedly oppose.
“I don’t think the Wa can remain here comfortably,” said SSA Lieutenant Colonel Gon Chin. “If the Myanmar army stopped helping them the Wa could not remain here.”
