The death of Khun Sa has been announced - what was his career and who benefits from his death now?
The Death of Khun Sa
According to reliable reports from Rangoon (Yangon), Khun Sa is dead – his body has been cremated and his ashes scattered in the sea. Thus comes to an end one of the most extraordinary careers of the modern world – a freedom fighter or, as some would say, a terrorist or warlord, a major producer and smuggler of heroin, the terror of the Kuomintang in Thailand, one time number one wanted person in the USA and, indeed, indicted in an American court, yet a man who was able to live peacefully in his own fiefdom for many years, surrounded by orchids and the Shan women he preferred to keep him company.
Khun Sa was born into a Shan-Chinese family in a region not far from what has come to be known as the ‘Golden Triangle,’ that still largely wild area joining China, Burma and Laos and extending to the northern tip of Thailand. He lost his father and then his mother at an early age and was brought up in isolation from his siblings. His life from an early age became one of soldiering, and supporting that soldiering with cash-friendly heroin. Many factions fought in the region, from the Burmese army to the Kuomintang elements which fled across the Chinese border after their defeat in the Civil War. There are still various armed ethnic minority groups fighting for their independence or, at least, freedom from persecution by the Burmese authorities. Khun Sa achieved such success in military terms that he was able to establish territory of his own in Homong, along the Thai-Burmese border, where he lived ringed by a powerful personal army and sold gems. He was eventually persuaded to live in Rangoon, in equal luxury it appeared, in an incident which many claim was the result of military action. Like so much else about Khun Sa’s life, evidence is contested and apparently changeable.
In some ways, the death of Khun Sa comes as an opportune moment for the Burmese junta. The generals went to a great deal of trouble to offer Khun Sa a deal that would keep him quiet after his relocation from Homong to Rangoon – clearly, since there seems to have been little if any impact upon the flow of illegal drugs after the move, the networks and contacts that he had established continued to operate the trade. Who else, therefore, could be implicated in these activities? Very high ranking names have been whispered and the end of the potential threat that Khun Sa represented by revealing information comes at a moment when particular pressure is placed on the junta. There is probably more than one other government which will also be relieved.
