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Narcotics are Burma's only growth industry, and the military regime relies heavily on drug money to keep the nation's economy afloat. By one estimate, 60% of all private investment in Rangoon was drug-related; Mandalay's economic boom has been fueled by narcotics. Drug money also provides most of Burma's hard-currency reserves. Burma's economy depends utterly on drugs. The biggest junkies of all were the generals themselves.
A Chinese tour group arrived at the museum with a flag-waving guide and embarked upon a high-speed tour. I pursued them upstairs. They paused before a glass cabinet containing toilet-roll covers (these had been crocheted by heroin rehab patients), then did a record-breaking lap of a room dedicated to the brief but glorious history of Mongla.
This was a room worth dallying in. Among the photos on display was one of Khin Nyunt cutting the museum's ribbon. Standing beside him was a tall, chinless man with piggy eyes dressed in Shan national costume. According to the caption, his name was Sai LeUn. He appeared in many photos, although none of the captions explained who he was. I had Burmese press reports that described Sai LeUn as "the leader of national races in the Mongla region." Another photo showed Khin Nyunt presenting him with a medal of honor for his "outstanding performance" in eradicating drugs in Mongla.
Which was all hilariously ironic. What the museum's captions didn't explain was that Sai LeUn was the Shan alias for Lin, the heroin kingpin who runs Mongla.
There was also a photo of Lin, a.k.a. Sai LeUn, presenting a brightly wrapped gift to a man identified as J. Dennis Hastert. Could this be Dennis Hastert, Illinois Congressman and Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives? Yes, it could: Hastert visited Burma with a delegation of Republican Congressmen in 1996, ostensibly to inspect drug-eradication methods. The delegation was wined and dined by the generals before visiting Lin in Mongla. It was unclear what Hastert achieved by meeting Lin, beyond unwittingly providing a priceless photo opportunity for a known heroin trafficker anxious to whitewash his recent past and recast himself as an antidrugs czar. Later I looked up Hastert's Web page and found a photograph of him holding a T shirt that read "Drugs Kill." I wonder if he gave one to Lin.
Lin was the chairman of something called the Mongla Action Committee on Narcotics, a committee reduced in number when another of its less-than-distinguished members was arrested in a sting operation by Thai police and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration and extradited to New York on narcotics charges. This was three months after Hastert's visit.
Did Hastert know he was pressing palms with a man whose refineries produced heroin sold on U.S. streets? Then again, why pick on Hastert? He was not the first American politician to pay his respects to Mongla's druglord, and probably won't be the last. In 1993, New York Congressman Charles Rangelformer chairman of the House Committee on Narcoticstook a delegation to meet Lin. Three months after Rangel's visit, the bullet-strewn corpses of Lin's three would-be assassins lay bleeding in the market. It seemed to me that Lin understood something his distinguished visitors did not, and it was this: if you shake the hands of enough prominent Americans, the blood on yours will eventually rub off.
There was so much more to see in Mongla: the gaudy casinos, packed with Yunnanese gamblers, where (it was rumored) millions of dollars of drug money was laundered; another zoo, the kind with lions and tigers; and not one but two exotic shows performed by Russian dancing girls. I wondered how far the Chinese visitors, whose money helped sustain Mongla, were fooled by its tacky glamour. A friend in Yunnan who knew of Mongla by reputation said the border town had been unflatteringly nicknamed "the anus of China." Yet the Burmese regime, touting Mongla as a tourist paradise risen from the ashes of all those drug-burning ceremonies, regarded it as a model of prudent development.
How did a place as bizarre as Mongla ever get built? As a veteran Burma watcher living in Thailand later explained, Lin and his allies had a novel approach to town planning. "You have to understand how these guys' minds work," he told me. "They're druglords. They can't travel the world. They're on every wanted list there isDEA, FBI, CIA, Interpol, you name it. So instead they stay put and buy a satellite TV with hundreds of channels, and this is how they see the world. But, of course, this gives them an incredibly warped view of it."
In this warped view, he continued, you first build the bars, casinos and whorehouses; then the ladyboy cabaret, Russian girlie shows and a circus arena to pester rare and magnificent animals in. You toy with plans for a school and a hospital, but forget about the court and the jailhouse since justice is summary and executions are carried out in the market place. Then you throw up a temple and a museum to dignify it all.
Maybe this was how all towns like Mongla got built. I wouldn't know, because I've never been anywhere remotely like Mongla.