SE Asian nations torch US$1 billion worth of seized drugs
YANGON: Myanmar, Thailand and Cambodia torched nearly US$1 billion worth of seized narcotics on Monday, a defiant show of force as police struggle to stem the rising flow of drugs in the region.
The burnings, to mark the UN’s world anti- drugs day, follow another year of record seizures of narcotics from the remote borderlands of Myanmar, Laos, southern China and northern Thailand.
Myanmar in particular remains one of the world’s great drugproducing nations, a dark legacy of decades of civil war in its frontier regions where troops and ethnic rebel forces have vied for control of the lucrative trade.
Armed gangs churn out vast quantities of opium, heroin and cannabis and millions of caffeinelaced methamphetamine pills known as “yaba” which are then smuggled out across Southeast Asia.
An estimated US$ 385 million was burnt in three official ceremonies around Myanmar on Monday, according to a senior police officer in the capital Naypyidaw.
At the biggest bonfire in Yangon, huge clouds of smoke filled the sky as authorities set fire to stacks of opium, heroin, cocaine and methamphetamine tablets worth almost US$ 230 million.
“We burnt a record amount of drugs today ... because police have seized more in recent years,” drug enforcement officer Myo Kyi told.
On an industrial estate on the outskirts of Bangkok, Thai authorities incinerated some US$ 589 million worth of drugs including 7,800 kilogrammes of yaba pills and 1,185 kilogrammes of the more potent crystal methamphetamine.
And in Cambodia, officials burned 130 kilogrammes of drugs estimated to be worth some US$ 4 million. The huge seizures are often touted as proof these countries are making inroads into the vast regional drug trade.
But law enforcement agents say they are just the tip of the iceberg as producers ramp up production to meet growing demand across Southeast Asia and increasingly in Bangladesh and India.
And unlike their Latin American counterparts, cartel leaders in the Golden Triangle are rarely ever arrested or killed.
The senior officer in Naypyidaw said almost all of the drugs burned at Myanmar’s official ceremonies originated in the eastern state of Shan in areas controlled by ethnic armed groups.
The kingpins are the United Wa State Army, a 25,000-strong militia known as Asia’s most heavilyarmed drug dealers who boast their own autonomous territories on the border with China and have close links with Beijing.