A Fortune-Teller Told Me (62 page)

The figures bore him out. In 1948, when Burma became independent, the Golden Triangle produced thirty tons of opium. In 1988,
despite billions of dollars spent on international police operations and several attempts to destroy the opium at its source—for example, by spraying defoliants on the poppy fields—production had risen to three thousand tons. At the end of 1993 Khun Sa’s men expected a harvest of over four thousand tons. As it takes ten kilograms of opium to make one kilogram of refined heroin, there must be four hundred tons of pure “Chinese White” from the Land of the Shan going about the world. Never has humanity had such a quantity of drugs at its disposal, and never have the political and financial interests behind this traffic been so vast.

Khun Sa’s power, according to his “ministers,” lies in the fact that the Shan people support him, and that he has an army of forty thousand men who are absolutely loyal to him. This army is efficient, with iron discipline. If a deserter is captured, his head is cut off. If he is not caught within three months his parents’ heads are cut off and exhibited to his comrades as a warning. A soldier caught smoking opium or injecting heroin is sent to a reeducation center. The “cure” is ten days in a hole in the ground ten feet deep, followed by months of forced labor. A second offense means execution.

Khun Sa was certainly not the Che Guevara of the Shan, the revolutionary idealist his men wanted me to think he was. But the longer I stayed in Ho Mong, the more I was convinced that there was something equally false, and perhaps unjust, in the way he is depicted as the great villain responsible for all the suffering caused by heroin in the world.

At dawn, as the chilly town emerged from the nightly blanket of fog, women squatted in the open, lighting small wood fires under smoke-blackened pots to prepare breakfast. It was hard to believe that this place hidden in the jungle was really the capital of the new “evil empire,” as the Americans called it. Were these people really malicious spreaders of the eleventh plague, or were they mere pawns in a game controlled by far more powerful forces?

Making Khun Sa the scapegoat is convenient for many people, especially the Americans, who in the past had their own role in the affairs of the Golden Triangle and the drug trade. It was the CIA who after Mao’s victory helped the remnants of the Kuomintang army to settle in Burma and finance itself by growing opium. And it was the CIA, through the Thais, who supported Khun Sa when he joined the fight
against Communist guerrillas in Thailand. Nobody in Ho Mong denied that the drugs were produced there, and that Khun Sa financed his army and his state by taking 20 percent of the value of every transaction, from the purchase of opium in the villages to the export of heroin abroad.

How was the exporting done? They didn’t tell me. Drug-control agents working in Western embassies in Bangkok are sure that most of Khun Sa’s production passes through Thailand, and that plastic bags of “Chinese White” often travel in military and police vehicles. They estimate that from five hundred to a thousand officials are involved in the traffic. But they are not the only ones. “Most of these skyscrapers are built with money from drugs,” I was told by a European agent, pointing to the forest of new buildings rising in the center of Bangkok. “Drugs is one of the motors that drives this country’s economic miracle. People at the highest levels of society have their fingers in that pie.” Now and then you see the tip of the iceberg. The man who was about to become Prime Minister after the fall of the government responsible for the Bangkok massacre had to withdraw when it was revealed that the US had denied him an entry visa on suspicion of being a drug dealer. A well-informed person told me that the groups involved in drugs sponsor military and police cadets, so as to have them as accomplices years later when they become colonels and generals.

My interview with Khun Sa was fixed for the day before our departure. It took place among the orchids in the garden of his residence. I had the impression that he liked being interviewed by an “international press representative,” as I was called. He brought along a whole retinue of his men to enjoy the show, and his seraphic face opened in sudden laughter at my more provocative questions, no doubt partly for the benefit of his audience.

“General, you have had to do with drugs all your life. It was you, as a young man, who opened the first morphine factory in Burma. But now you present yourself as a fighter for the freedom of the Shan people. Is this not an excuse to go on doing your lucrative deals with drugs?”

Khun Sa lit a 555 cigarette. Speaking very slowly in Shan, which the
“foreign minister” translated, he replied: “First of all, the deals are not so lucrative as they seem to you. A shipment of heroin which is worth $1 million here with us, by the time it reaches your countries is worth $100 million. Then who makes the big profits? Certainly not Khun Sa. Certainly not the Shan.” He took a long draw on his cigarette and continued. “For over thirty years the truth about me and my people has been obscured by a curtain of lies about drugs, spread by our enemies. It is about time the truth came out. We have no secrets. You have gone everywhere freely, you have spoken to everyone, looked where you liked, haven’t you? Well, then, do I seem like the devil to you?”

“Not the devil, General; I don’t see the horns and the tail. But you can’t deny that most of the heroin which floods our countries comes from the opium fields that your people cultivate, from the refineries that you control, and is exported under the protection of your army.”

Khun Sa’s assistants appeared alarmed by the way I was talking to the General, but he seemed almost amused. “It is not I who force my people to grow poppies. It is the Burmese who force them to, because they attack us, because they take away our best land and force us to live in the mountains. I don’t control any refineries. The refineries are in the hands of foreign businessmen. As for transport, my army guarantees the security of the roads for everyone who uses them. I fight for the liberation of the Shan people. To finance this fight, I make those who profit from drugs pay taxes. That is all.”

I reminded him that a former American ambassador to Bangkok had recently called him “humanity’s greatest enemy.” I said, “Noriega has been captured, Escobal was murdered; aren’t you afraid your days may be numbered, General?”

“That ambassador, when he opens his mouth he doesn’t speak, he farts,” exploded Khun Sa, and the audience burst out laughing. “As for killing me—it’s possible. I have already survived forty-three attempts. Certainly someone will try again. But do you really believe that the problem of drugs would be solved by my death? If that were so, I really would deserve to die. But drugs are an older problem than Khun Sa. In the last century it was you foreigners who brought drugs to Asia and imposed them on us. Now it is Asia that sends drugs to the West. Perhaps it is a question of
karma
. The West is paying for its past actions.” I couldn’t say he was wrong.

“The growers and the addicts have nothing to gain from drugs. It is the dealers, the middlemen, who make the big profits.” Again I had to agree. I looked at him, trying to imagine what would happen if he really decided to stop the opium and heroin production. The dealers would kill him, I thought, and replace him with someone else who would serve their interests. The drug trade, like every other mega-business, has become part of the world system of investments and profits which knows no national boundaries and no morality.

In my mind I ran over the picture of international drug trafficking: the foreigners hanged in Penang for having a few grams in their pockets; the naive Englishwoman who agreed to carry a package for a “friend” and who was now rotting away in a Bangkok prison; the poor addicts who, thinking they can make an easy profit, buy some drugs cheaply in the mountains around Chiang Mai only to be turned in by those who sold it to them, because if the police intercept a certain number of “amateurs” every year, the professionals can move freely. All small fish compared to the sharks—the predators sitting safely on the top floors of banks, in insurance company boardrooms, in police headquarters or government offices.

When suppertime came Khun Sa invited me to dine with his people. He had me sit beside him, and without an interpreter, in Chinese, we ended up talking about his childhood. His father was Chinese, and had died when he was three years old. His mother had remarried, but she too died two years later. Khun Sa grew up without going to school, and it was only as an adult that he learned to read and write. He laid great emphasis on the fact that the recruits in his army studied from early childhood. At sixteen he stole some rifles and became a bandit. He opened a morphine factory to finance his gang. He had had many children with different wives, the last of whom had died not long ago. I asked him when he was born.

“February 22, 1934,” he said.

“At what time?”

“In those days they didn’t record the time, but I think it was in the morning.”

We ate at a round plastic table, served by some very young soldiers. The food was Shan; very good, with lots of cooked vegetables. To drink there was only water. With age-old peasant courtesy Khun Sa occasionally
wiped his chopsticks with his lips and put into my bowl some especially choice morsel which he picked out of the common pot.

As we parted he invited me, in the Chinese manner, to return again whenever I had time. The sympathetic impression I had of him that first day at the guest house remained.

The only thing I had not done by now in the Land of the Shan was to see a fortune-teller. I had heard that the abbot of the pagoda was a good astrologer, and on the last night I asked to see him. He was already in bed, but Bertil and I were unusual visitors and he was woken. Our interpreter was a monk who had worked in an American hospital during the Second World War.

When everything was ready the abbot sat, wrapped in a big orange blanket, in the lotus position in front of a low table, pen in hand for his calculations, and asked me the usual question. “I was born on February 22, 1934,” I replied. “I don’t know the time, in those days it was not recorded, but I think it was in the morning.”

Nobody noticed anything, and the monk, after long calculations, began his litany:
“You had a difficult childhood, without a guide. Perhaps you lost your parents when you were very young. Your life is a life of adventures, of risks. You are generous with others, and people love you. In your heart there have been a number of women, and you have had many children. You yourself don’t know exactly how many.”
(This was remarkable.)

“This is not a good year for you. It is a period of great tension. A critical period. You must take great care of your health; there is a chance that you may have an accident and that you will need an operation. The danger comes from the fact that you are a person who likes to move about in the dark, at night, and now you must be very careful about doing this. The greatest danger is between September 24 and November 22. You must also be very careful of what you say. Even words may put you in danger. You have many enemies and you are always creating new ones. Your life has always been in danger.”

I was extremely impressed. The man whom the monk described was not me, it was the General. I had given Khun Sa’s birth date instead of mine partly as a joke, partly because I was tired of hearing the same
things again and again. I felt guilty about having deceived the monk, but it was too late to turn back.

“When will I die?” I asked.

“You will not pass your sixty-seventh birthday,”
said the monk.
“You will die before it.”

“How? Murdered?”

“No. From an operation. Take care of your kidneys and your heart. You will be in great danger in 1996. If you survive 1996, then your life will become better afterward.”
^*

“What about money?” I asked.

“You are one who has many expenses. Often you lose money because someone cheats you, and to get it back you have to cheat others.”
He studied his sheets of calculations, then looked at me as if something did not seem right. I was afraid he had seen through my trick. Then he said:
“Yours is a strange horoscope, a horoscope full of mysteries. Few people really know who you are, whether you are a good person or a bad one.”