Ajax
Ethnic Cleasing
America's Drug War Against The Hilltribe of Thailand

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Admiral Fargo, Pacific Command, We're Talkin To You

Does anyone know an Admiral Fargo?
Has Admiral Fargo ever met a hilltribe?

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Admiral Fargo Spouts Drug War
Akha Mah tells him what he can do with it!

For decades now the hilltribe of Thailand and Burma have been the slaves for the drug industry, ignored in favor of boycotts against brass clowns and Nike types. Hardly able to stay alive yet making billions of dollars for the drug barons and the military hardware makers who supply the toys to fight them. Such a balanced game, for it to stay on top the fence, would seem one and the same.

High in the mountains, the US embassy gave the nod as hilltribe villages were put on the march out of the valuable highlands to low end canyons with fever and disease and death. From a splendid view to a steamy graveyard they were made to march, leaving their years of cultivation, water management and terracing behind along with the cemetaries of their kin.

No mention of human rights was made then, despite the fact that the US knew how illegal it was. Human rights is only something you manipulate against your enemies, it has nothing to do with the humans the laws were intended to protect.

In the present, years later, there is no end in sight of Americas big mouthed drug war. Methamphetamine has replaced opium poppies and opium tar as the drug of choice. Crop substitution could best be described as starvation. The Wa, also a minority in the mountains, were driven from their homes in the decades past and now return in the thousands to the Thai border, hardly forgetful of when they were purged out of the area.

Meanwhile tribes such as the Akha, Lahu, Lisaw and Hmong continue to experience high arrest rates and imprisonment and all the associated violence as the drugs and chemicals flow through their mountain neighborhoods.

Maybe the Wa have seen what has been done to their less numerous counterparts, what would have been done to them, and have learned a lesson from it, promising no one any deals, surely not the drug war bosses from the US.

The recent capture of Khun Sa's second man in Tachilek and Maesai leads one to wonder if a criminal is being brought to American for justice, or if a witness is being brought in from the cold.

Khun Sa offered to sell all of his opium crop to Clinton. Clinton refused. Hardly because the US teams were inexperienced at buying what they wanted. Missionaries from way back can testify to the opium for guns and the guns for opium, all in the name of the communist monster.

Meanwhile the criminalization of drugs delivers on its promises of violence and destruction in the villages of the hill tribe people.

Drugs become the justification for any kind of brutal treatment at either the hands of renegades or the police. In the past when opium was the American unpardonable offense, old women were arrested for having a ball of opium in their house and are still doing life.

Now speed pills are the replacement, for an insatiable demand in Thailand it would seem, hill tribe people are arrested and beaten, without partiality, the young, the old and the feeble alike.

The brutalization started before the issue of drugs, the villages relocated into poverty, and continues with the arrests and carries on to trials without representation, conviction and incarceration into big new prisons, just waiting, where the newcomers are once again abused by the veteran prisoners, rapes and killings, all within the walls.

All in the name of America's drug war.

But you won't find one single US government backed poverty reduction program in any of these central and crucial border villages between Thailand and Burma. 282 of them Akha. USAID cannot answer why, nor can the Office of National Drug Policy in DC.

The lack of concern for the wellbeing of the villages in a most crucial and pivotal location makes one question very seriously what the hell is going on. No money for poverty reduction but Admiral Fargo can promise all kinds of Drug War toys to the Thais? Night vision equipment? Can that be any cheaper than day time food?

Thaksin wins the election, and in line with the escalation that was expected and occured since Admiral Fargo's visit to Thailand last summer, the rhetoric increases as do the border incidents. Thaksin is talking tough in the drug war too now, Bangkok Post front page headlines, gonna show those mountain people, recklessly jeapordizing the already fragile highland - lowland relationship in Thailand.

In addition, along the Wa / Burmese / Thai border there has been a significant increase in troups and shooting incidents, more than I have ever witnessed in ten years of running these hills to assist the Akha. Ngah Ngern Akha was forced to completely evactuate their village for five days (who will make up their lost wages?) while Thais and Burmese blasted back and forth at each other.

Course no one remembers the loyalty of these very same hilltribe during the late wars. Now they are no longer needed and are the enemy or the fodder at the border. Forestry and Petroleum Authority of Thailand have already planted thousands of rai of inferno making pine on what lands they used to farm. Now drugs are farmed. The right hand does not know what the left hand doeth. Then drugs were ok, now they aren't, before the Brits, now the Yanks.

Cobra Gold 2001 will be another escalation of the Drug War in Thailand, as will the helo project out of Pai come August.

Yet still not a square meal to be found in a hill tribe village.

In one village over from mine night before last the village chief was sitting in a friend's hut, his back against the wall, and was shot from behind from through the wall, his face blown off, his mouth and jaw gone, his heart shot out, two clips emptied into him. He was buried today. Only a few hundred yards from where another fellow was gunned some time back.

In my village, while I was gone, someone rides their motorbike into the village late at night, parks it near a hut and walks out of the village and onto the road. The cops on patrol from Mae Chan spot him, catch him and ask him where his motorbike is. He takes them to the hut where it sits out on the road, so in the middle of the night they break into the hut, turn on the lights, roust everyone, including all the women, go through all the bags, clothes and household goods you can fit in a grass roofed hut, and even so far as to make all the women take off their head dresses just in case they are hiding a kilo or two of speed pills under them in their hair somewhere.

This is your drug war, Admiral Fargo.

Do you know who a spirit woman is Admiral Fargo?

You don't come here and roust them, you or your boys.

You don't desecrate their houses, their bodies or their head dresses in your rough handed searches.

From now on when the Akha ask me who is bringing this hell down on them Admiral Fargo, I am going to tell them that YOU ARE. I am going to get your picture and I am going to distribute it in North Thailand and tell the Akha, this, this guy is who is killing you. He doesn't have time to feed you or help your kids to school, but he's got plenty of time to arrest you, pull off your head dresses and pistol whip you. He's got time to beat your old people, he's got time to hang your young men from the neck with electric cords, and he's got time to lay a wet cloth over your face in prison till you are dead, but he ain't got a clue who an Akha is.

He left all his humvees runnin their wide asses on the roads, big guns on top, soldiers at every checkpoint, searching vegetables and skirts.

Meanwhile the Thai kids keep dying, the Akha keep starving, and the environment is going to hell with all the roads needed to make way for all the wide assed humvees from Drug War America.

And these American Drug Warriors expect us to believe that the real drug barons who collect and launder all the money into green backs are dressed in hand dyed cotton skirts and livin the high life in a grass hut??

Isn't it time that Thailand stood up and put an end to this Second American War being imposed on them?

Admiral Fargo, please go home and take your Humvees from AM General with you.

Thank you very much,
The Akha Heritage Foundation
Maesai, Chiangrai, Thailand