Recent Trip to Burma

Sure sounds like the right place for a holiday! Have fun!

Time Magazine Asia

April 26, 2004 / Vol. 163 No. 16

Stone Age


The military strongmen who rule Burma have made the country a global byword for backwardness and brutality
BY ANDREW MARSHALL


Whenever I visit Burma, I have a ritual: I look up a name in the Rangoon
telephone book. Every year a new directory is published, but the listing
remains "Aung San Suu Kyi, Daw," followed by Rangoon's most famous
address "54 University Avenue" and a telephone number. The number never
seems to work. When I tried it during my recent trip, the Nobel laureate
and leader of the National League for Democracy (NLD) was enduring her
third stint under house arrest since 1989. But seeing her celebrated name
in the book always seems both extraordinary and reassuring.

I had returned to Burma to see old friends. Last year was particularly
terrible for the long-suffering nation. In February came the near
collapse of the private banking system, then in May the savage "Black
Friday" attack on Suu Kyi by state-sponsored thugs, who killed or injured
scores of her supporters and so provoked tough new economic sanctions by
the U.S. In the past, either event might have sparked a popular uprising
on the scale witnessed in 1988, when the Burmese military shot and jailed
thousands of demonstrators. The reaction this time-nothing, not a peep of
protest-reflects how ruthlessly the Burmese junta has terrorized its own
people. Washington's sanctions have boosted morale among Burma's
embattled democrats, but they promise little apart from further poverty
and desperation in a country ravaged by military greed and incompetence.
The military is now a state within a state, with the best housing,
education and healthcare reserved for soldiers and their families.

In downtown Rangoon, the effects of economic stagnation are easy to spot.
Unfinished office and apartment blocks loom over the skyline like
Olympian tombstones. With most international companies long departed,
billboards advertise mostly local products, such as Spirulina ("Beer That
Makes You Young Forever"), or nothing at all. Like in a city at war,
fruit and vegetables are cultivated in the grounds of public buildings.
Part of the front lawn of the seldom-visited Drug Elimination Museum,
built to whitewash the regime's dubious antinarcotics record, has been
turned into a pomelo orchard. Power shortages still plague the capital,
as they did during my first visit more than seven years ago, and
emergency generators clog the pavements. With municipal water supplies
equally erratic, joke the Burmese, it's lucky the government isn't
responsible for providing air.

Rangoon has grown seedier without becoming more prosperous. Karaoke
pickup joints have spread like a nasty rash across the city from their
original reserve in Theingyi Bazaar, a multistory firetrap of sex clubs
run by Wa and ethnic-Chinese drug traffickers under the protection of
Burmese military intelligence. Even the few positive changes seem, on
closer inspection, not much to shout about. For example, Rangoon now
boasts a dozen or so cybercafés, but they charge a dollar an hour-more
than the average daily wage-and deny access to hundreds of sites deemed
"inappropriate." Who surfs what is easy to plot, because Burma has only
two Internet-service providers: one state run, the other owned by the son
of military-intelligence chief General Khin Nyunt. The universities,
traditionally crucibles of antigovernment protest, are open again-but
only for master's students; the rest must study by correspondence or at campuses far from the city. Job prospects for graduates remain bleak, which is why Rangoon's taxi drivers are the world's most overqualified. "Everyone is misplaced in this country," shrugs a young cabbie with a master's degree in marine biology. "Graduates drive taxis; soldiers run the government."

If you want to eat the best pickled-tea-leaf salad in Rangoon, possibly
in all of Burma, go to Mrs. Greedy's tea shop, a collection of plastic
furniture occupying the pavement opposite Sule Pagoda. And if you want to
talk without fear of being overheard, do what my Burmese friend Ko Myo
did when I met him there one evening: lift up one of Mrs. Greedy's tables
and set it down several feet from the nearest customers. Even then you
talk in an undertone. It's a reminder that despite Burma's
tourist-friendly veneer-how many dictatorships have inspired so many
coffee-table books?-the junta has not gone soft in its dotage. "They
watch us all the time," says Ko Myo (which, to protect him, is not his
real name).

Young, handsome and smarter than a truckful of generals, Ko Myo is a
teacher by profession and my guide to the arcane politics of Burma.
Thankfully, he's a patient one. On my first trip to Burma, he had bravely
taken me to the house of a prominent democrat. Stupidly, I had no idea
who she was or what risks Ko Myo had taken to bring me there. Today, he
takes a spoonful of tea-leaf salad and shakes his head in mock disgust.
"To think I risked a 10-year prison sentence for that," he says.

Ko Myo and I share an obsession with George Orwell's 1984, though, unlike
him, I don't have to live it. He insists that Burma resembles Orwell's
dystopia more with each passing year, from its crippling power cuts to
the desperate popular obsession with the lottery. (Everyone in Burma
seems to play the numbers.) But when I compare him to Winston, the
rebellious protagonist who dares to trust his co-worker Julia, Ko Myo
frowns and looks uncharacteristically glum. "There are no Winstons in
this country," he says quietly. "People here don't even trust themselves
anymore." Although he supports the U.S. sanctions, Ko Myo does not
believe they will topple the regime, and now-after years of staying to
help his country-he is one of many Burmese leaving in desperation and
disgust. It takes hundreds of dollars and months of waiting to get a
passport, and the Rangoon office that issues them is now besieged by
applicants. It helps to be male. Stung by foreign criticism that Burma is
exporting sex workers, the regime now makes it nearly impossible for
young women to go abroad. Ironically, this is fueling the local sex
industry, which employs burgeoning numbers of painfully young girls.

At Mrs. Greedy's, Ko Myo lent me his copy of 1984, one of a collection of
banned or sensitive books that he disguises in brown paper and risks
another lengthy prison term for circulating. I reread it one afternoon in
my hotel room with the curtains drawn, emerging hours later to discover
that two military-intelligence agents were harassing the staff about my
identity and movements. Their timing was unnerving. Orwell's "Hate Week"
parades have a modern Burmese equivalent. Mass rallies had been staged at
stadiums nationwide to support a "road map" to democracy launched by Khin
Nyunt, one of Burma's ruling troika of generals, just weeks after U.S.
sanctions were announced. The rallies were organized by the regime's
political wing, the Union Solidarity and Development Association, which
has millions of members but only because state employees must join or
lose their jobs. At one meeting in the ancient capital of Pagan,
thousands of people "enthusiastically and unanimously" approved Khin
Nyunt's scheme, reported the New Light of Myanmar. The newspaper's photos
showed people sitting rigidly in perfect rows, looking miserable. Pagan
is not a populous town, so to meet the Wagnerian standards set by
meetings elsewhere in the country, people had to be ferried in from
Mandalay in hundreds of minibuses requisitioned by order of the regional
commander.

Khin Nyunt's road map envisages elections and a new constitution but
mentions neither a credible timetable nor Suu Kyi, who led the NLD to a
convincing victory in the 1990 election. My Burmese friends regard the
whole scheme as a sop to the regime's supporters in Asia or just another
stalling device-either way, more of a roadblock than a road map. (The
U.S. State Department recently dismissed it as "hype.") The late dictator
General Ne Win, who seized power in 1962, launched the disastrous
"Burmese way to socialism," which bankrupted the country. Now his protégé
Khin Nyunt is effectively peddling the "Burmese way to democracy." No
wonder people have to be press-ganged into cheering for it.

They are also being press-ganged into something else: national service.
Last year, the regime ordered civil servants to undergo a month of
military training. Teaching a restive, resentful population how to fight
seems a tactical blunder, but trainees are only given sticks, not rifles,
and I hear that those with 15,000 kyat (about $17) can buy themselves
out. The Burmese military is stronger than ever-nearly 40% of the
national budget goes to the armed forces, making them the second largest
in Southeast Asia after Vietnam's-but also more paranoid than ever. The
state-run media is obsessed with Iraq: newspapers carry dozens of
articles about suicide bombings, tumbling U.S. troop morale and rising
casualties while state TV lifts footage from CNN and dubs over its own
gloating commentary. The specter of military intervention has haunted the
generals since the 1988 uprising, when the U.S. parked an aircraft
carrier in the Indian Ocean. The toppling of Saddam Hussein raises
genuine hopes among Burmese that their despots will be next. The U.S.
embassy in Rangoon even received messages reading "Please invade us." But
the saturation media coverage of Iraq has served a domestic purpose.
"This is our government's way of telling us, 'America has its hands full,
so don't expect it to come to your help,'" says a Burmese journalist.

I headed north for Mandalay, Burma's second-largest city, which I had
first visited via dilapidated train from Rangoon, a trip so punishingly
long that giant spiders had spun terrifying webs from the luggage racks
by the time we arrived. On this occasion, I went by air, which meant
landing at one of the most eerie monuments to Burma's economic
mismanagement: Mandalay International Airport. Topped with baroque spires
to recall the palatial splendors of Burma's royal past, the airport was
completed in 2000 at an estimated cost of $150 million. Today, ox carts
ply its grand, four-lane approach road while the building slumbers in
near darkness. The departure and arrival boards are empty, possibly
nonfunctioning. Passengers check in for a handful of daily flights, then
clump down a dormant escalator to a stifling departure lounge, where
they fan themselves with their boarding cards.

The junta evidently believed a lavish new airport would transform
Mandalay into a regional business hub. However, most goods still arrive
in the city by the usual overland route. Mandalay is the terminus of the
Burma Road, its trading lifeline to neighboring China, and the main
reason the economy has plodded along without ever breaking down
catastrophically (so far). Another reason is the nation's staggering
agricultural wealth.

For centuries, travelers have depicted Burma as an agrarian paradise so
fertile that, as one saying goes, a farmer tickles the earth with his hoe
and it laughs a harvest.

Although nobody starves in Burma, poverty and malnutrition exist and are
by some accounts increasing. Outside Mandalay, I visited the families of
migrant workers who live in squalid lean-tos on the wide, refuse-strewn
banks of the Irrawaddy River. They labor for subsistence wages, shoveling
sand from dredging boats or hauling illegal timber. Often there's not
enough work to go around, and sometimes-for example, when the dredgers
run out of fuel-there's none at all. Sickness is everywhere. "I have a
husband and three children," said a woman dressed in rags, "and one of us
is always ill." Nearby, a dying 18-month-old child, as skeletal as a
famine victim, clung to a slightly older sister pot-bellied with disease.
Just offshore, tourist boats skimmed past on day trips to more photogenic
places.

What wealth exists in Mandalay belongs to Chinese immigrants, who arrived
in their hundreds of thousands in the 1990s and now dominate the city's
commercial life-much to the resentment of its original residents. The
city is also a favored refuge of Wa and Chinese drug traffickers, who
cruise the city's free-for-all intersections in dark-windowed late-model
Land Cruisers and Pajeros. Like native Mandalayans, I negotiated the
streets by bicycle or trishaw, or else flagged down a 40-year-old Mazda
B600 taxi, Burma's answer to the Trabant. Exploring the pot-holed
backstreets, I came across extravagant faux-classical mansions towering
over otherwise destitute neighborhoods where poor sanitation feeds
regular outbreaks of cholera and pariah dogs nose through uncollected
rubbish. In Burma, it seems, there are only two kinds of new buildings:
museums constructed to celebrate the elimination of the narcotics trade
and drug villas built on its proceeds.

Mandalay might be Burma's second-largest city, but its community of
democrats is small and easily terrorized. A local NLD leader was jailed
for five years for seeing a foreign reporter. I arrived in Mandalay to
news that Win Mya Mya, a prominent NLD member who had had both arms
broken in the Black Friday attack, had been shifted from a military
hospital to a prison cell at nearby Shwebo. Her relatives were still
forbidden to see her.

By the time of the attack, Suu Kyi had been attracting large and
increasingly bold crowds. The enthusiastic response from ethnic areas was
especially galling to the generals, because it challenged their
long-cherished notion that only the Burmese military can unite the
country's disparate ethnic groups. The regime's emphatic response to this
rising euphoria was an assault so calculating and sadistic that skull
fragments and clumps of bloody hair littered the road where it took
place. Suu Kyi was detained with about a hundred of her party members,
including elderly deputy Tin Oo; both Suu Kyi and Tin Oo are still under
house arrest. The authorities shut NLD offices nationwide, although last
week the party's Rangoon headquarters was allowed to reopen. The party
rank and file remains traumatized. Later, I would meet a stalwart too
fearful to carry his NLD membership card but who instead defiantly
scratched his membership number from memory on the corner of a newspaper.

Since Black Friday, more state-sponsored violence had erupted. The
evening before my arrival, a hundreds-strong posse of government thugs
had razed a Muslim neighborhood in Kyaukse, a town not far from Mandalay.
Ten people had burned to death, including a pregnant woman. Burma is home
to anywhere from 2 million to 8 million Muslims-it's impossible to be
more accurate because most are denied Burmese citizenship and therefore
don't appear in official records. They are often the target of
state-orchestrated violence incited (the theory goes) to distract
everyone else from their own meager lot. An older Burmese friend reminded
me how Ne Win had provoked anti-Chinese riots in 1967 to divert attention
from the rising price of rice.

The unrest mutated and spread in the following days. I watched truckloads
of armed soldiers thunder through Mandalay's ill-lit streets. Some areas
were placed under curfew; people said it had been more than a year since
the city had been so tense. Then troops opened fire on a crowd of
protesting monks, killing at least two and injuring many. From nearby
towns came reports of more disturbances, news of which arrived in
Mandalay on buses and trucks and spread with viral stealth through the
city's network of trishaw drivers. Hiring one to check out the dark,
deserted streets, I was struck by how well suited trishaws were to
disseminating news. With me leaning forward in my seat and the driver
bent slightly with the exertion of pedaling the rutted tarmac, he could
whisper into my ear without anyone noticing, let alone hearing. He told
me that eight charred bodies from Kyaukse had arrived at the city morgue.
"The government killed them!" he said in a Gollum-like hiss. "The
government killed them all!"

I returned to Rangoon, and the unrest seemed to follow. Muslim businesses
in the capital were attacked by what observers claimed were soldiers
disguised as monks; monasteries were under a heavily guarded curfew; bars
and tea shops were closing early. Later, two bombs exploded, one on the
outskirts of the city, which injured many people, the other outside an
army museum. Then, last month, came reports of small demonstrations on
campuses as far north as Myitkyina. Despite all this, none of my Rangoon
friends were predicting an imminent 1988-style uprising. "People are just
too scared," said one. DONATE BLOOD, urged the ads in state newspapers.
Burma's democrats already have, by the bucketful.

Much of this shadowy violence was probably perpetrated by the state
itself and conceivably augured a distant leadership conflict. Some Burma
watchers talk of a split between the regime's hard-liners and moderates,
a wishful hypothesis that essentially boils down to two people. The
so-called moderate is the ageless, reptilian Khin Nyunt, the newly
fashioned "Prime Minister General," who is always conspicuously equipped
with a sidearm during official visits, even to kindergartens. His rival
is Than Shwe, the top general and archetypal hard-liner. To encourage
unity, the Burmese military has always promoted loyalty before brains,
and Than Shwe is the result. He is even the thinly disguised butt of a
joke in a popular Burmese magazine in which three students are boasting
about their uncles. The first says, "My uncle has no arms, but he has
swum across the Irrawaddy River five times." The second says, "My uncle
has no legs, but he has climbed the Golden Rock Pagoda 10 times." The
third says: "So what? My uncle has no brain, and he runs the country." If
that joke seems spiteful, consider this: diplomats report that Than Shwe
firmly believes that Union Solidarity and Development Association rallies
are genuine expressions of mass support.

Walking through downtown Rangoon, I noticed with horror how acres of
historic buildings have been demolished to make way for the modern towers
the junta hopes will dominate the capital's skyline by 2006, when Burma
is to chair the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and host
its the summit. Most of these projects, including the inauspiciously
named Twin Towers, sit idle for lack of investment. Ordinary Burmese feel
baffled and betrayed by the encouragement their oppressors get from
Asia's leaders. Privately, Southeast Asian diplomats insist they are
heaping more backroom pressure on Burma than their abysmal public showing
suggests. One dearly hopes so. ASEAN now faces the prospect of showcasing
its member states' considerable achievements in a country that is a
global byword for backwardness and brutality.

The junta promises to reconvene next month a national convention on a new
constitution. Yet the arrest, surveillance and intimidation of opposition
figures continues, Amnesty International notes in a March 31 report,
while as many as 1,400 political prisoners-many of whom should by rights
participate in the convention-still languish in prison. Ambiguous public
remarks by Burmese Foreign Minister Win Aung, followed by the release
from house arrest of two senior NLD leaders last week, have raised hopes
that Suu Kyi and party vice chairman Tin Oo will soon be freed, too.
We'll see. The convention's success depends on much else besides. It is
far from clear whether Suu Kyi, even if freed, would be allowed to attend
or whether delegates will be able to speak freely. Some delegates were
sentenced to long jail terms for criticizing the last convention, which
collapsed in 1996. All this fuels the suspicion that the generals merely
want the upcoming convention to rubber-stamp a constitution that would
preserve their grip on power.

The military has already proved false an age-old Burmese saying, "The
night cannot get darker after midnight." Poverty, fear, the paucity of
opportunities, the remorseless persecution of the best and the brightest,
the slow extinguishing of hope: what was once unimaginably bad in Burma
has grown worse with each passing year. And yet, while writing this, I
receive an e-mail sent at great risk by Ko Myo in which he has listed the
names of 10 men, women and children, aged 13 to 70, along with their
professions: housewife, merchant, student, mother-to-be. These people, he
says, were all incinerated by the state thugs at Kyaukse. For their
sakes, I believe, pessimism is not an option. We have a duty to hope. I
pick up the phone and try that number on University Avenue again. It
rings.

Andrew Marshall is the author of The Trouser People: A Story of Burma in
the Shadow of the Empire