Gandar Mount P.S.O

It is small city on the hill-top in east Mong Su township but a lot of various nationals and tribes are living and striving to get money not only in a short time but also making a massive profit, by hardiness, although it is hazardous to them.

To the mountain city, where the natural ruby stones are dug and sold them as being good business, the merchants or visitors must depend on 4 wheel truck driving about 2 hours along mountainous route from botom of the mountain.

The ruby stones each weight from 2 to 20 carats could be found after diging out for 7 meters or more deeper and about 4 square-meters wide.

Many hard-laborers who risk to do across the country settle down here and try their luck.

The capitalists inclding Chineses, Indians, Burmese, Shans, Wa Army and Thais are waiting to buy alot of ruby stones.

The quality of the ruby is similar to ruby from Pai Lin of Cambodia.

The best ruby in the world is in Moe Goke mine in Burma and it is strictly controlled by the Burmese Junta.

The Junta allows only the Opium King Pins such as Lo Shin Han, Khun Sa and Way Zu Gong who pay revenue to run gem mines.

The alleged Mong Su city has since 1990 been popular with it’s beautiful red-ruby as the ruby-stones were firstly found by the Palawng tribe, who regularly living around the mountain area, during in rainy season.

But later after 1999 the situation in the city had apparently changed into turbulence because of inflowing original Chinese from mother land as in one hand, increasing drugs and weapons trafficking business in the area is on the other hand.

Merchants and capitalists are using the currency of US Dollar, Chinese Yuan and Thai baht only.

No electricity in the mountain-city but some,who are able to bring in a small petrol-engine for electricity from China, have own private electricity.

About 20,000 residents in the city strive to be rich only and also not to live in poverty while the country is being poverty-stricken situation.

Among the smugglers,hundreds of Thai involved in the arms, drugs and gems trafficking are also found in the City.

Thai traffickers, speak Shan and English for business talks (as Thais and Laos can talk to each other by using own language), run between the mountain city and Mae Sai border where their bosses or regular customers or investors are on alert in Takilek because of having better security than in Mae Sai.

For an example, short guns Pistols and Revolvers are being popular in the Ruby-land every body who have a lot of money ordered the guns from the Thai smugglers to use it for self- protection or resold them to others.

The Thai traffickers venture to do both illegal methamphetamine and guns business while they have friendships with the Red Wa Army and Shan Army forces, which had agreed cease-fire with the Burmese Government since 1998, being active around the mountain.

About 4,000 of Shans and Wa soldiers from the both armed groups are depending on these illegal business for their survival as long as they are alloted to base here by their high ranking leaders from Headquarters.

Only the majors and captains from each group command their soldiers and control their high income.

About 1,000 Burmese soldiers whose commanders must be friends with the cease-fire groups depend on the tax-payment from the Wa and Shan as well as from the wealthy Chinese-groups who run gambling dens business and brewery.

Two drug courier are able to carry 10,000 drug-pill, driving motorcycle from the mountain to the Thai border by gungle route.

The drug courier however have to hire the Shan motorcyclist who is familiar with the jungle route to avoid the Burmese security gates setting up for checking passengers who travel by cars and trucks loading with goods.

One amphetamine pill produced and sold by Wa army cost only 30 baht when sold it in border it would cost 100 baht.,the border price. A new revolver cost 40,000
baht and a new pistol coast 50,000 baht.

Both must be USA and Italy made as they preferred to use it than China made.

The used shot guns in good condition are also bought but cheap.

New or used short guns are collected in Mae Sai.

Muslim separatist leaders launched protests in June saying that the Indian Government’s plan was aimed at changing the demography of the Muslim-majority region.

More than two months of angry protests have left at least 42 people dead in Indian-administered Kashmir, most of them killed when soldiers opened fire on Muslim protesters.

The Government has tried to crush the ongoing freedom struggle by harassing Kashmiris and using brutal force on them.

The strike was called by Jammu Kashmir Coordination Committee, whose members include Muslim separatist leaders and representatives of businesses, lawyers and government staff.

Key leaders Syed Ali Shah Geelani, Mirwaiz Omer Farooq and Mohammed Yasin Malik were kept under house arrest and released on September 1 2008, after a week long of detention.

The unrest was triggered by a government move to hand over land to a Hindu shrine.

In the early 1800s the British East India Company’s imports of Chinese tea, rare silk and Eastern spices were of far greater value than England’s coarse exports to China.

To balance this trade deficit and open up more ports to British merchants, England smuggled Turkish
and Indian opium into China, ignoring a Chinese ban on the drug.

As tea imports into England rose, so did opium imports into China.

Eventually the Americans involved in this lucrative trade,and in the 1950s the lead of one of the largest smuggling companies was Franklin D.Roosevelt’s grandfather Warren Delano II.

Near the end of the 19th century ethnic Chinese Triads,which started in the 17th century as an underground network of patriotic citizens who opposed the conquering Manchus from Mongolia, derived their name from a Chinese concept that identifies the the three sides of an equilateral triangle with man, heaven and earth.

Their members were involved in various failed revolutions over the centuries,and most triads slowly evolved into convenient vehicles for thinly veiled thuggery.

The Triads attracted adventurers who found the upward path blocked in normal society.

By the 20th century their main resources and activity were the heroin trade, extortion, gambling and prostitution.

Members held meetings, not to resolve political problems but to assign assassination jobs to Red Poles, as their hit men were called.

From the very beginning China’s most powerful triad members, the Chiu Chao, helped facilitate the opium trade.

The Chiu Chao were a seagoing people from southern China who migrated to many Southeast Asian countries.

In time, the Chiu Chao dominated smuggling and opium traffic along the China coast.

When Westerners imagined wicked Chinese pirates smuggling gold bars, drugs and frightened maidens,and lurking in the dark recesses of the Spice Islands, they were picturing the Chiu Chao Kingpins heading major banks in the region control the international narcotics trade from the Golden
Triangle of Indochina through Bangkok.