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| Southeast Asia |
| Warlord Khun Sa is dead |
| 2007-10-30 |
| One of Asia's most notorious warlords, Khun Sa, has died in the Burmese city of Rangoon. He had reportedly been suffering from diabetes and high blood pressure. After almost 30 years of guerrilla warfare against the Burmese government, largely funded by his drugs empire, Khun Sa signed a peace deal in 1996. He then retired to Rangoon, where he lived under the protection of the military rulers, despite the US offering $2m (£1m) for his capture. He was once one of the world's most wanted men, with a vast drug-trafficking operation in the so-called Golden Triangle region, spanning the border of Thailand, Laos and Burma. With a private army numbering in the hundreds, he claimed to be fighting for independence for the Shan people - an ethnic minority group based mainly in Burma. His critics say his claims to be a freedom fighter were a ruse designed to give legitimacy to his drugs empire. Relatives and former colleagues of Khun Sa, who was in his mid-seventies, said he had died within the past week. The cause of death is still unknown. |
| Posted by:john frum |
| #2 Nice additional info 'moose, thanks for sharing. |
| Posted by: Scooter McGruder 2007-10-30 14:16 |
| #1 Back in the 1980s, I saw a videotaped interview of Khun Sa made with Colonel "Bo" Gritz, with some explosive allegations in it (from the Wiki): "In 1986, after a trip to Burma to interview drug kingpin Khun Sa regarding possible locations of U.S. POWs, Gritz returned from Burma with a videotaped interview of Khun Sa purporting to name several officials in the Reagan administration involved in narcotics trafficking in Southeast Asia. Among those named was Richard Armitage, who most recently served as Deputy Secretary of State during George W. Bush's first term as President. Gritz believed that those same officials were involved in a coverup of missing American POWs." Actually, the last part was not correct, as Khun Sa denied knowledge of any US POWs in his enclave, but pointed the finger right at Armitage as a major leader of the international drug trade. The man who had *sent* Gritz there in the first place, as head of the new office of POW/MIA. Khun Sa wanted Gritz to take a message back to D.C. that he was sick of the drug trade and wanted to transform his enclave into conventional agriculture with US assistance, to include farm equipment, fertilizer, pesticide and seed, but especially advisers to confirm that there was no more drugs being grown there. Khun Sa pointed out that this would cost only a fraction of the value of the drugs his enclave produced, and would slash world heroin production by a third to a half. Gritz enthusiastically returned to D.C. to tell them of the offer, and told his story to the ardently anti-drug Senator Dennis DeConcini, who was amazed and told him that he would call President Reagan immediately with the news, then call Gritz right back. He didn't, and suddenly, Gritz became "personna non grata" in D.C. Nobody would talk to him. Gritz, not being a complete dummy, got out of town in a hurry. Shortly thereafter, the US State Department demanded that the government of Burma attack Khun Sa's enclave with its army and take him out. Soon the Burmese newspapers were full of stories about a massive attack against the enclave by the Burmese army. But it was a lie. They didn't do squat, just put fake stories in the newspapers. Eventually Gritz returned to the enclave to find that a new, two lane highway had been built through the dense jungle, which was now being used to haul drugs in Thai military trucks from the enclave to Thailand. After that, Gritz made it his personal campaign to get Armitage, which Armitage was able to avoid until he finally retired, by jumping agencies as soon as a particular investigation was about to begin. Gritz himself mentally lost it after a while, and has become something of a kook, an ignominious end to a brilliant unconventional Vietnam warrior. |
| Posted by: Anonymoose 2007-10-30 09:50 |