Khun Sa
Khun Sa was an ethnic Han drug lord and warlord. He was born in Hpa Hpeung village, in the Loi Maw ward of Mongyai, Northern Shan State, Burma. Before he assumed the Shan name "Khun Sa" in 1976, he was known primarily by his Chinese name, Zhang Qifu.
In his early life, Khun Sa received military equipment and training from both the Kuomintang and Burmese Army before claiming to fight for the independence of Shan State and going on to establish his own independent territory. He was dubbed the "Opium King" in Myanmar due to his massive opium smuggling operations in the Golden Triangle, where he was the dominant opium warlord from approximately 1976 to 1996. Although the American ambassador to Thailand called him "the worst enemy the world has", he successfully co-opted the support of both the Thai and Burmese governments at various times. After the American Drug Enforcement Administration uncovered and broke the link between Khun Sa and his foreign brokers, he "surrendered" to the Burmese government in 1996, disbanding his army and moving to Yangon with his wealth and mistresses. After his retirement some of his forces refused to surrender and continued fighting the government, but he engaged in "legitimate" business projects, especially mining and construction. He died in 2007 at the age of 73. Today, his children are prominent businesspeople in Myanmar.
Biography
Early life
He was primarily known by his Han Chinese name, Chang Chi-fu. When he was three years old, his father died. His mother married a local tax collector, but two years later she died as well. He was raised largely by his Han grandfather, who was the headman of the village in which he was born, Loi Maw. The Han side of his family had been living in Shan State since the 18th century.He received no formal education but had military training as a soldier with Chinese Nationalist forces that had fled into Burma after the victory of Mao's Communists in 1949.
Although his stepbrothers were sent to missionary schools, the only formal education that Khun Sa received as a boy was spending a few years as a Buddhist novice, and for the rest of his life he remained functionally illiterate. In the early 1950s he received some basic military training from the Kuomintang, which had fled into the border regions of Burma from Yunnan upon its defeat in the Chinese Civil War in 1949. He formed his first independent band of young men when he was sixteen, and when his organization grew to several hundred men he became independent of the Kuomintang. After establishing his independence he frequently switched sides between the government and various rebel armies, as the situation suited him.
Militia leader and opium trade
In 1963 he re-formed his army into a local "Ka Kwe Ye" unit, under the control of the northeast command of the Burmese army, which was based in nearby Lashio. In return for fighting local Shan rebels, the government allowed him to use their land and roads to grow and trade opium and heroin. By allowing them to be financed by opium production, the Burmese government hoped that these local militia units could be self-supporting. Many government-supported warlords, including Khun Sa, used their profits from the opium trade to buy large supplies of military equipment from the black markets in Laos and Thailand, and were soon better equipped than the Burmese army.By the late 1960s Khun Sa was one of the most important and powerful militia leaders in Shan state. He held an important pass in Loi Maw, restricting the movements of local communist rebels. During the period, while he was nominally supporting the Burmese government, he maintained contact with Kuomintang intelligence agents.
Through the 1960s Khun Sa became one of Burma's most notorious drug traffickers. He challenged the local dominance of the Kuomintang remnants in Shan State, but in 1967 he was decisively defeated in a battle involving both the Kuomintang and the Laotian army on the Thai–Burma–Laos border. In that battle he led a convoy of 500 men and 300 mules into Laos, but the convoy was ambushed by Kuomintang forces en route. As the battle was going on, the Laotian army bombed the battleground and stole the opium. This defeat demoralized him and his forces. The Laotian army continued to ambush his mule trains for the next few years, and his military strength declined.
Capture
In 1969, delegates from a local ethnic rebel group, the Shan State Army, began to hold secret talks with Khun Sa, attempting to persuade him to change sides and join them. He expressed interest, but details of the meeting were discovered by the Burmese army, and he was arrested On October 29, 1969, at Heho Airport in Taunggyi while returning from a business trip in Tachilek, near the Thai border. After his capture he was charged with high treason for his contacts with the rebels, and he was imprisoned in Mandalay. While imprisoned Khun Sa read Sun Tzu's the Art of War and Luo Guanzhong's Romance of the Three Kingdoms, after which he developed a political philosophy that he exercised later in life: “In politics there are no lifelong friends, and no lifelong foes... They change according to the gains and losses. A good leader must be able to take advantage of every change and utilize it.”After Khun Sa's arrest his militia unit dissolved, but his more loyal followers went underground, and in 1973 abducted two Soviet doctors from a hospital in Taunggyi, where they had been working. A division of soldiers from the Burmese army were tasked with rescuing the doctors, but failed. The doctors were ransomed for Khun Sa's freedom, and he was subsequently released in 1974. Khun Sa's release was secretly brokered by Thai General Kriangsak Chomanan. After his release Khun Sa maintained a good relationship with Chomanan, and in 1981 secretly contributed $50,000 US to support him in a Thai election campaign.
In Thailand
During the next two decades, from 1974 to 1994, Khun Sa became the dominant opium warlord in the Golden Triangle. The share of heroin sold in New York originating from the Golden Triangle rose from 5% to 80% during this period, and Khun Sa was responsible for 45% of that trade. The DEA assessed that Khun Sa's heroin was 90% pure, "the best in the business". During the height of his power, in the 1980s, Khun Sa controlled 70% of the opium production in Burma, and built a large-scale infrastructure of heroin refining factories to dominate the market for that drug. He may have once supplied a quarter of the world's heroin supply. He commanded 20,000 men, and his personal army was better armed than the Burmese military. His notoriety led the American government to put a $2 million bounty on him. The American diplomat to Thailand referred to him as "the worst enemy the world has".After his release Khun Sa went underground, and in 1976 rejoined and reformed his forces in Ban Hin Taek, in northern Thailand, close to the border with Burma. Soon after he began to reform his forces he adopted the Shan name "Khun Sa" for the first time. He renamed his group the Shan United Army, began to claim that he was fighting for Shan autonomy against the Burmese government, and told international reporters that his people only grew drugs to pay for clothes and food. In 1977 he offered to take his territory's entire opium crop off the black market by selling it to the American government, but his offer was rejected.
Although Khun Sa was not the mastermind of the local drug trade, he controlled areas where drugs were grown and refined. The owners of the local heroin refineries were from Bangkok, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, and paid Khun Sa in exchange for the protection of his army. American government workers, who visited Khun Sa's compound in 1977 to negotiate with him, believed that the Thai government tolerated his presence on Thailand's northwestern border in order for his army to serve as a buffer between them and more radical revolutionary groups active in Laos and Burma at the time.
Return to Burma
After combined forces of the Thai military and remaining Kuomintang in Thailand defeated entrenched Communist rebels in Northwest Thailand in 1981, American officials began to pressure the Thai government to expel Khun Sa. In July 1981, Thai authorities announced a 50,000 baht bounty on his head. In August this was raised to 500,000 baht, "valid until 30 Sept. 1982". In October 1981 a 39-man unit of Thai Rangers and local rebel guerillas attempted to assassinate Khun Sa at the insistence of the US Drug Enforcement Administration. The attempt failed, and almost the entire unit was wiped out. In January 1982 a 1,000-man force of the Thai Army appeared at the borders of his base area. The Thai force consisted of Thai rangers from Pak Thong Chai, local paramilitary border police from Tak, and several airplanes and helicopter gunships. The battle lasted for four days, with heavy casualties on both sides. At the conclusion of the battle Khun Sa was forced to retreat back into Burma.Within a year of losing his base in Thailand, Khun Sa rebuilt his army, defeated a local Burmese rebel group along the Burmese border between Shan State and Northwest Thailand, and took control of the region. He relocated his base of operations to the border town of Homein, established a local heroin-refining industry, and resumed a working relationship with the Burmese military and intelligence services, who again tolerated his presence in return for fighting other ethnic and communist rebels. He maintained a cordial relationship with the highest-ranking Burmese general in the region, Maung Aye, and established relationships with many foreign socialites and business people, including Lady and Lord Brockett, and James "Bo" Gritz. In 1984 his forces bombed the fortified residence of his rival, Li Wenhuan, in Chiang Mai. His organization maintained a trade organization in the government-held city of Taunggyi and re-established cordial relations with the Thai intelligence service after relocating to Burma.