Word: mongla
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Travel in Burma for long enough and you will eventually hear the name, often whispered with something approaching awe: Mongla. It sounds a bit like Shangri-la, and for some Burmese?who have lived under military rule since 1962?it is. "There are no soldiers there," marveled one Burmese friend. "There it is like," he struggled to find a word to describe a place without Burmese soldiers. "There it is like democracy...
...Well, not quite. Situated in Burma's Shan state, less than a mile from the Chinese border, Mongla is ruled by a brutal heroin trafficker and has an unsavory reputation as a freewheeling center for gambling and prostitution. Yet, curiously, the Burmese regime is promoting it as a model town. Why? To find out, I hired a car and driver and set out for Mongla?the town that drugs built...
...What happened next was extraordinary. Rather than take on Lin and his well-equipped private army, Burma's generals cut a generous deal with him. In return for keeping the peace, Lin was granted immunity from prosecution and full autonomy in the Mongla region. The regime also gave him lucrative business concessions in gold, timber and gems, as well as?crucially?tacit permission to trade in opium...
...Drugs made Lin a very rich man, but they were only one source of his enormous income. Mongla was a transshipment area for smuggling Chinese laborers through Thailand and into America. For this service the laborers paid up to $40,000 each; some paid again with their lives. Three hundred Chinese hailing from Lin's territory were aboard a ship that ran aground off New Jersey in 1993. Scores of them drowned trying to swim ashore through heavy seas...
...Meanwhile, Mongla grew. Casinos and other tourist attractions were built, and soon thousands of Chinese day-trippers from neighboring Yunnan province were pouring over the border to visit them. Later I picked up an official tourism leaflet, written in Chinese, which described Mongla as "a beautiful and prosperous region (with) unique natural scenery and curious local customs." One of those curious customs was public executions. Lin governed his private fiefdom with medieval brutality. On one occasion three men suspected of plotting to assassinate him were dragged into the busy market and machine-gunned to death by his teenage bodyguards...