Burmese citizens detail government involvement in drug trade

A group of Burmese villagers far from the big cities took the law into their own hands last week.

Fed up with government refusal to act against drug gangs, the Kachin Anti-Drug Committee made a citizens' arrest of a woman they called the kingpin distributor in the region, about 450 miles north of the country's major city, Rangoon, also called Yangon.

And when they searched the woman's home they found two notebooks, which seemed to detail huge payments to the leaders all three government teams supposedly detailed to handle the country's war on drugs - army, police and special drug units.

The citizens' group said they have found details of bribes totaling more than $500,000 - an astronomical amount in local terms, yet easily affordable by the big-time heroin and methamphetamine makers and smugglers who smuggle in northern Burma.

The group called in a foreign NGO, Global Witness, to have its back while it makes details of the alleged bribery and drug rackets known to the central government.

With the country's first clearly democratic election due in two weeks, the allegations are likely to hurt the regime of current president Thein Sein, a former army general. In Southeast Asia, including inside Burma, it has long been common knowledge that drug cartels have continued to deal in heroin and meth by bribing key officials.

It has never been clear how far up the chain such bribery works, but government forces have not made a single arrest or shut down a major drug maker or distributor since the country began to shed its military dictatorships and turn to democratic elections four years ago.