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Rebel armies` running on narcotics trade along border with Myanmar

IRNA

    
Guwahati, Oct 7, IRNA -- A flourishing narcotics trade along India`s 
border with Myanmar was helping scores of rebel armies getting 
finances for running their violent military campaigns, officials 
Tuesday said. 
"In India`s northeast, narcotics trade and insurgency are close 
allies with militants trading in heroin and other forms of drugs to 
procure arms to continue with their secessionist campaigns," an Indian
intelligence official told IRNA. 
India`s northeast has earned the notoriety of being the launching 
pad for drug trafficking into the rest of the country with the region 
sharing borders with the heroin-producing "Golden Triangle" of 
Thailand, Laos and Myanmar. 
India and Myanmar share a 1,643 kilometer (1,018 mile) unfenced 
border. 
"Poppy grown on the Indian side of the border is transported into 
Myanmar for refining and the refined heroin either finds its way to 
Thailand or is routed back into the northeastern Indian states of 
Manipur, Nagaland, Mizoram, and Meghalaya," the official said. 
There are at least 30 outlawed separatist groups active in seven 
northeastern states with demands ranging from secession to greater 
autonomy and the right to self-determination. 
"The porous border with Myanmar is helping the trade in narcotics 
drugs," a senior official of the Narcotics and Border Affairs of 
Manipur said requesting anonymity. 
A number of frontline Indian militant groups have bases inside 
Myanmar and operates in tandem with some ethnic rebel groups in the 
Kachin region. 
Experts say Myanmar`s military junta turns a blind eye to drug 
production and trafficking as a way of ensuring peace among ethnic 
minority groups, who have been restive for decades. 
The international borders along the northeastern states have 
been the favourite hunting ground for smugglers to sell weapons to 
the region`s insurgent groups for decades, Mizoram Chief Minister 
Zoramthanga told IRNA by telephone from state capital Aizawl. 
The chief minister was himself a top former guerrilla leader of 
the Mizo National Front (MNF) before the outfit surrendered in 1986 
to join over-ground politics in Mizoram. 
Most of the weapons, including AK-47, AK-56 assault rifles, 
mortars, 40 MM rocket launchers, pistols and revolvers, find its way 
first into the Arakans, a mountainous area in Myanmar, from parts of 
Thailand and Cambodia. 
/210 
End