The Southeast Asian Pocket War

By Matthew McDaniel
Maesai, Chiangrai, Thailand
March 5, 2001

Having lived in Maesia near the border for some ten years now and seen many a conflict at the border and the bridge and even a few Shan related shooting skirmishes, there was something increasingly odd about the latest conflict.

Back some 7 or 8 months before, an American military officer had told me that it wasn't his business but he knew for a fact that the US Military wanted into this area in the worst kind of a way.

Shortly thereafter Admiral Fargo of the Pacific command promised the Thais drug suppresion back up.

Immediately I began seeing increased incidents along the border within the villages of the Akha Hill Tribe people whom I work with. There was an immediate increase in the number of humvee vehicles in the area and military involvement on road blocks and road patrols.

On several occasions I saw Scorpion Tanks being moved at night into the region.

I anticipated the militarization of the region under the guise of the drug war.

I was told that the Cobra Gold excercise for 2001 would be a drug interdiction excercise in Chiangrai Province.

Immediately after his election Thaksin called for a tough stance on the border drug problems. And then immediately following that we had the mortar incident here in Maesai. It is not clear how the incident began and the Burmese friends of mine tell a very different story of the sequence as compared to the Thais. The Burmese feel the Shan tricked the entire incident and the Thai fell for it or were in on it.

At any rate, real or pretend, the visual justification was there for a conflict, numerous people were dead, and Maesai became fully militarized.

But even for such a miscalculated accident if that is what it had been, the Maesai incident continued to unfold as a much more serious event than what it might appear on the surface.

The quantity of military hardware increased along the border, what could be seen easily. The number of humvees, unimogs, and army camps set up along the highway to maesai began to grow and grow. This was more than a response to a few mortars.

But that was little indication compared to what was going on in the villages of the Akha where I work. Scores of humvees, lots of new army coming in who didn't have a clue about the area and were asking the Akha villagers where the border was, where the Wa and Burmese were dug in and when shots fired had last been heard?

Rice terraces began to support netting that concealed heavy artillery that could lob well over the villages and onto the Burma side. Mortars were dug in below the villages tossing mortars half the night over the village sometimes onto the Burma side up on the hill.

Further back from these villages we documented more than 135 trucks with armour moving into the forest behind the village. Full size tanks and track mounted artillery. Sometimes they came out in plain view of the village raising their large gun barrels skyward in targeting practice.

But the military equipment, the Shan actions and the continual flow and fortification of military equipment promised something deeper. Even the Akha commented that America had moved big guns south of Chiangrai to be close by in case the Thais took a loosing hand at things in the mountains.

Certainly one most vulnerable pocket where I had often worked the fields and ridges with the Akha could be cut in a moment. I wondered if it would be a sacrificial lamb? I could not see nearly enough troops to hold back a Wa and Burmese plunge off the facing ridges.

For a long time it had been known that the Chinese had wanted a corridor to Rangoon and the Indian Ocean for a port via Burma. It was speculated that their close ties with and in the Wa ranks would facilitate this. Mass movements of Wa villagers from the north of Shan state to populate along this corridor followed the logic.

But now a new logic appeared. India and Bangledesh joined the protest against Burma, and certainly Indian felt the China threat. China was busy grabbing off much of Shan state and on inspection I found that they had built every stone bridge from Monglar on the border with China to Tachilek at Maesai and the road should have been finished this year that far. But the bridges were done, I saw them all on one trip in November.

So now the final question was, were the Shan playing a pliable drug enforcement role with Thai help as a cover for an American blocking movement on Chinese ambitions that might destabilize the entire region?

Maybe the American One China policy had gone too far?

Whatever the case, drugs could safely continue to be produced in Burma as long as there were not good flowing roads and viable alternatives to the slave like labor the poor mountain people had the only option to provide in the cultivation of opium and production of heroin as well as the safe harbor for methamphetamine labs.

On the Thai side, the severe neglect the Akha villages faced, with no poverty alliviation aid, was blatant testimony to just how fake of a drug war this was, and the free flow of drugs through the willing and unwilling ranks of the some 300 Akha border villages was decimating the Akha community both from drug use and from the violent internal friction it was causing among the people both sellers, users and resistant bystanders.

Not to worry, a large new prison waited in Chiangrai for all the unlucky males.

With drugs, prostitution, forestry taking the land, new Thai settlers moving in and every flavor of wannabee missionary there was hazard enough to be overwhelming for the Akha people. A people who can not remember a time when their villages weren't being burned, their lands taken and themselves as a people being forced to move on.

Only this time there is no where left to go that was not a dead end.