CHAIN gangs of shackled prisoners, including political detainees, stand up to their knees in the Len River under armed guard in Burma's eastern Shan state, breaking stones to build a road connecting China and the Thai border along which heroin, young girlsand Japanese cars are already being transported.
A shuffling band of pathetic human wrecks, some clearly sick with fever, stagger from the river when they see a visitor.
One says: ''Please give a few cents to help buy some necessities - and something to smoke.'' Although some prisoners may be hardened criminals, a number of them possibly addicted to heroin, others are young men barely out of their teens.
The chains connect their ankles to their waists.
As the prisoner begins to speak again a guard with a rifle slung over his shoulder approaches; the prisoner moves away with a handful of currency and the cheroots that Burmese, male or female, like to smoke, muttering: ''I can't say more - it is forbidden.'' As the men work, stooping into the water for stones to construct a road in place of the present track, impassable in the wet season, there is an unnerving clanking of chains.
In a nearby village, a man in his 30s confides: ''My friend, a student from Rangoon, worked in chains on the road and now he is dead.'' Looking round nervously, as most Burmese do when talking to a foreigner - fear of the ruling military junta, the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC), grips the whole country - he adds: ''I can't say how he died - I am too afraid to repeat it.'' Many diseases, including malaria, have been rife in these areas for years, but the man seems to hint at something else.