Drug warlord Khun Sa dies at 73

Drug warlord Khun Sa, variously described as among the world’s most wanted men and a great liberation fighter, has died in Rangoon, Burma at the age of 73.

Khuensai Jaiyen, a former secretary of Khun Sa who works with ethnic Shan minority guerrilla groups, said his former boss died in Burma’s largest city Rangoon on October 26, 2007 according to his relatives.

The cause of death was not immediately known, but Khun Sa had long suffered from diabetes, partial paralysis and high blood pressure.

A Burmese official in Rangoon confirmed the death. He was cremated Tuesday morning, the official said on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to speak to the media.

The cause of death was not immediately known, but Khun Sa had long suffered from diabetes, partial paralysis and high blood pressure.

His body had been kept since October 26 at a cemetery on the outskirts of Rangoon called Yay Way where the cremation took place, said a cemetery worker, who asked not to be named for the same reason.

Khun Sa was born on Feb. 17, 1934, according to Bertil Lintner, a leading expert on Myanmar who interviewed him several times. His father was Chinese and his mother Shan; they lived in the northern Shan state. He changed his name from Chang Chi-fu, also spelled Chufu or Shee-fu, to his nom de guerre, Khun Sa, in the 1970s.

A historian of Southeast Asia, the late Michael Leifer, described him as a “shiftless youth with a criminal disposition.”

Khun Sa had lived in seclusion in Rangoon since 1996, when he surrendered to the country’s ruling military junta who allowed him to run a string of businesses behind a veil of secrecy.

Khun Sa, portrayed himself as a liberation fighter for the Shan, heading up the Shan United Army, later the Mong Tai Army, in Burma's northeastern Shan State.

Khun Sa, son of a Chinese father and a Shan mother, once was the leading drug lord in the so-called Golden Triangle where Myanmar, Laos, and Thailand meet.

At that time the USA offered a multi-million dollar award for his capture. Khun Sa claimed to be leading a liberation army on behalf of the oppressed ethnic Shan minority.

His father died when he was young and his mother became the mistress of a local tax collector, according to Mr. Lintner. He received no formal education but had military training as a soldier with the Chinese Nationalists, who fled into Burma, which is now known as Myanmar, after the victory of Mao Zedong’s Communists in 1949.

He entered the opium business in 1963, when the Burmese government authorized him and others to form militias allied with the central government as a way of outsourcing the job of fighting rebel groups. Within a year he broke his ties with the Burmese army and established an independent fief in the northernmost reaches of Burma, near the border with China.

His early career was marked by failure. He challenged the dominance of the Nationalists in the Golden Triangle drug trade, but lost in battle. He was captured by the Burmese central government and imprisoned from 1969 to 1974.

Soon after his release, he rejoined his supporters in the northeast and set up a base in Baan Hin Taek, along the mountainous border near the Thai city of Chiang Rai. His drug network grew and soon came to dominate the Burmese heroin trade.

In the 1980s and 1990s much of the drugs that passed through his network were shipped to the United States. In 1990, the Drug Enforcement Administration calculated that 45 percent of all heroins that reached the United States came from the Golden Triangle. Historians have differed on his power.

He was illiterate and a front-man for an organization dominated by ethnic Chinese from Yunnan Province that still operates. He was basically a country bumpkin. He was a peasant and never the brains behind the organization.

But Alfred McCoy, who chronicled the rise of the Golden Triangle in “The Politics of Heroin,” described Mr. Khun Sa as “the only Shan warlord who ran a truly professional smuggling organization capable of transporting large quantities of opium,” and was “the first of the Golden Triangle warlords to be worthy of his media crown as ‘kingpin.’ ”

Khun Sa enjoyed cultivating that image. In an interview with the now-defunct Bangkok World newspaper, he called himself the “King of the Golden Triangle.”

Embarrassed and under strong pressure from the United States, Thai authorities sought to banish Mr. Khun Sa from Thailand.

In 1980, the Thai prime minister, Prem Tinsulanonda, ordered the air force to bomb his base but failed to dislodge him. In 1982 the Thai army led by Gen. Chavalit Yongchaiyut, who was later to become prime minister, launched a large-scale assault. Mr. Khun Sa lost 130 men in the ensuing battle and retreated into Myanmar, where he continued to run his heroin business.

Little is known about his life in Yangon after his surrender to the Myanmar authorities. Mr. Kon Jern, the Shan commander, said Khun Sa was held under house arrest. Other reports have said he lived comfortably if not lavishly. He had three daughters and five sons, according to Mr. Lintner, all of them educated abroad.

At the height of his notoriety, Khun Sa presided over a veritable narcotics kingdom, carved out of jungle valleys and complete with satellite television, schools and surface-to-air missiles in the drug-producing Golden Triangle region where Burma, Thailand and Laos meet.

But his surrender to the Burmese authorities in 1996 led to dramatic declines in cultivation of opium poppies in the Golden Triangle and foreshadowed the region’s eclipse. Although this year’s opium harvest in Myanmar increased by about 30 percent over last year, the Golden Triangle produces only 5 percent of the world’s opium, down from 70 percent three decades ago. Afghanistan is now the world’s largest producer.

At the height of his power, in the 1980s, he controlled an estimated 70 percent of the country’s heroin business, which enabled him to finance an army of tens of thousands of soldiers and large-scale heroin laboratories.

For nearly four decades the charismatic warlord claimed to be fighting for autonomy for the Shan, one of many ethnic minorities who have battled Burma’s central government for decades.

But narcotics agents around the world used terms like the “Prince of Death” to describe him and the United States offered a US $2 million reward for his arrest.

“They say I have horns and fangs. Actually, I am a king without a crown,” he told this reporter who visited his remote headquarters of Ho Mong in 1990 after an 11-hour mule ride.

The wily operator sought a less hostile environment in Thailand, setting up a hilltop base protected by his sizable Shan United Army. But when the Thais got too embarrassed by having a drug kingpin on their soil, he was driven out in 1982 and lodged himself in Ho Mong, an idyllic valley near the Thai frontier inside Burma.

There, the chain-smoking warlord entertained visitors with Taiwanese pop songs, grew orchids and strawberries, and directed a flow of heroin to addicts around the world. At one point, Washington estimated that up to 60 percent of the heroin in the United States was refined from opium in his area.

Khun Sa claimed he only used the drug trade to finance his Shan struggle. Peter Bourne, an adviser to former US President Jimmy Carter, called him “one of the most impressive national leaders I have met.”

Khun Sa argued that only economic development in the impoverished Shan State, still one of the major sources of the world’s heroin, could stop opium growing and its smuggling to the “drug-crazed West.” “My people grow opium. And they are not doing it for fun. They do it because they need to buy rice to eat and clothes to wear,” he once said.

He carried out a one-way correspondence with US presidents, offering to sell Washington the entire crop of opium in exchange for funds to implement his development plans for the Shan.

But in 1989, he was indicted for heroin trafficking by the US District Court in New York and his extradition to the United States was requested.

Khun Sa continued to war with the central government and rival ethnic guerrilla groups like the Wa until 1996 when the junta, which had once threatened to hang him, offered him amnesty. He disbanded his Mong Tai Army of about 10,000 fighters and moved to Rangoon.

Although difficult to confirm, reports said he lived a life of luxury in a secluded compound, having been awarded concessions to operate a transport company and a ruby mine along with other businesses.

There was speculation that he was still involved in the narcotics trade, which was largely taken over by his former enemies, the Wa.