BANGKOK, Thailand -- After executing four killers from Thailand, Laos
and Myanmar last year, China's security forces have extended their
reach by uniting those countries along the Mekong River in a "war on
drugs" and arrested 812 people in the narcotics-rich Golden Triangle.
China's new push into Southeast Asia is described as an anti-drug
operation which began on April 19 and will end on June 20.
It includes protecting commerical and passenger ships on the Mekong
River against thieves, kidnappers and guerrillas.
Up to now, security forces from China, Thailand, Myanmar and Laos said
they confiscated more than two tons of drugs -- including heroin,
opium and methamphetamines -- plus guns and ammunition.
The 812 arrests include citizens from all four countries, plus
Vietnam, according to Lan Weihong, an officer at the Narcotics
Department in China's powerful Public Security Ministry.
Mr. Lan made the announcement at their "command center...staffed by
drug enforcement agents from all four countries," located in Jinghong,
a Mekong River port in the southern province of Yunnan, China Daily
reported on May 21.
The new center is a second-floor hotel room in Jinghong where more
than 10 officers work, alongside translators, allowing all four
nations to "sit in the same room and talk directly with each other,"
Mr. Lan said.
Previously, officials had to send documents and other evidence back to
their home countries and ask their superiors how to coordinate
cross-border raids, which slowed the process.
"Narcotics officers assigned to a four-nation campaign against
smuggling on the Mekong River say reducing red tape and improving
communication is boosting the war on drugs," China Daily said.
The officers also "protect merchant sailors and residents along the
major trading route through Southeast Asia," it said.
There was no immediate indication where the 812 suspects were
imprisoned after being busted in 560 cases during the past month.
It was also unclear where they might stand trial, which countries they
came from, or if they were being sent back to their own countries for
further investigation.
China led efforts to create the multinational squad which is backed by
armed patrol boats and other weaponry.
A few hundred miles longer than the Mississippi River, the Mekong
originates in Tibetan glacier-fed peaks in China's Qinghai province,
runs 2,700 miles, and empties through southern Vietnam into the South
China Sea.
But it is the river's midway section through the mountainous Golden
Triangle which interests the joint patrols.
The region is part of China's southern frontier -- where Myanmar, Laos
and Thailand meet -- and was dubbed the Golden Triangle in the 1950s
when warlords, rebels, criminals and corrupt officials in all three
countries became wealthy from illegal opium and heroin production.
Today, the Mekong's murky waters are a lucrative commercial lifeline,
especially Chinese goods exported south through Yunnan to be assembled
or sold in Southeast Asia or abroad.
As the region modernizes, illegal drug production has also increased,
and seizures are now alarmingly huge.
For example, police in Bangkok said they netted Thailand's
biggest-ever cache of illegal methedrine on May 22 when they retrieved
4.5 million speed pills, plus 60 kilograms of powdery "ice" -- a
colloquial term for smokeable methamphetamine.
The massive amount of stimulant drugs were in suitcases in an
apartment, which police raided before arresting three Thai couriers
who allegedly also possessed four guns.
In a separate raid on May 26, Thai police in the Golden Triangle near
Chiang Rai said they stopped a convoy of pickup trucks going to
Bangkok, arrested four minority ethnic hill tribesmen who were
couriers, and seized 600,000 methamphetamine pills.
Thailand points to Shan state in Myanmar -- also known as Burma -- as
the source of most such drugs.
Many of the region's illegal, makeshift laboratories producing
methedrine and ice are located there, though key chemicals in the
formula are often purchased in Thailand.
Shan state is also the world's second biggest source of illegal opium
harvests, which can be refined into heroin and morphine before being
smuggled abroad.
Many of Shan state's illegal drugs are carried by mules, ponies or
vehicles across porous jungle borders southeast into Thailand or
northeast to China.
Some Shan state smugglers also secretly ferry their cargo down the
Mekong to Thailand's Golden Triangle river ports of Chiang Saen and
Chiang Khong, where modern highways link to Bangkok.
Other Shan-based smugglers send their illegal drugs on speedboats
across a narrow section of the Mekong River into Laos, and then march
the loads across sparsely populated hills.
Those drugs are then brought from Laos across a different section of
the Mekong near Thailand's river ports, or north overland into China.
Last year in the Golden Triangle, China captured Naw Kham, an ethnic
Shan methedrine smuggler from Myanmar who was on the run in Laos after
being blamed for orchestrating the execution of 13 Chinese crew
members on two Chinese-flagged cargo ships on the Mekong in October
2011.
China executed Naw Kham and three other foreigners from Thailand, Laos
and Myanmar in March 2013, after convicting them in Yunnan.
Naw Kham initially confessed, then insisted he was innocent and blamed
rogue Thai soldiers for staging the 13 executions in a plot allegedly
involving deception, revenge and profit.
In response to the case -- which included discovery of 920,000
amphetamine pills -- Thailand, Myanmar and Laos began for the first
time to allow Chinese "border police" gunboats to lead four-nation
patrols on the Mekong River beyond China's territory.
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Richard S. Ehrlich is a Bangkok-based journalist from San Francisco,
California, reporting news from Asia since 1978, and recipient of
Columbia University's Foreign Correspondent's Award. He is a co-author
of three non-fiction books about Thailand, including "Hello My Big Big
Honey!" Love Letters to Bangkok Bar Girls and Their Revealing
Interviews; 60 Stories of Royal Lineage; and Chronicle of Thailand:
Headline News Since 1946. Mr. Ehrlich also contributed to the final
chapter, Ceremonies and Regalia, in a new book titled King Bhumibol
Adulyadej, A Life's Work: Thailand's Monarchy in Perspective.
His websites are
Asia-Correspondent
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Book
(Copyright 2013 Richard S Ehrlich)
