Burma's Generals Losing Their Grip

[waterly@xxxxxxxxx]

                   Guardian Newspapers Limited  
                                  
                   February  9, 1997, Sunday

Note: This is someting that we were expected last year, in which the SLORC
was going to be defended by some businessmen and some dictators supporting
countries, especially ASEAN's members. We were no wonder for that
outcome--unless democearic forces are able to be resisted to topple down the
current rulling regime known as SLORC--but we will darg down the SLORC in
1997-1998. Keep my words firmly!!

HEADLINE: TERROR GIVES WAY TO ANGER:  BURMA'S  GENERALS LOSING THEIR GRIP

 HIGHLIGHT:
   Victoria Clark in Rangoon sees the dictatorship hit a crisis of confidence

 BODY:
    'I T'S NOT MUCH of an inconvenience really. The soldiers are used to me
by
now - it's been about four months, after all . .  .' The speaker is a
Westerner,
working for a major tobacco firm whose advertisements glare from Rangoon's
billboards.

    Lunching in the air-conditioned cool of a smart, new Rangoon hotel, he is
chatting about the joys of living next-door to Aung San Suu Kyi on University


                                                                             
Avenue. It has been quiet since a couple of military checkpoints, (designed
to
stop Suu Kyi meeting her supporters) sealed off their section of the street,
and
anyway the location is too desirable to move.

    Apparently his conscience is not pricked by this daily reminder that
something is very rotten in the state of  Burma  - so rotten that
international 
pressure to boycott the country shamed the American company Pepsico into
pulling
out a fortnight ago.

    Fear of consumer boycotts at home have sent Heineken, clothing
manaufacturer
Osh Kosh B'Gosh, Apple computers and Walt Disney to the exit door and Kodak
may 
be next in line. More ominous still for major corporations are the bans and
penalties slapped on by the state of Massachusetts and a sprinkling of
American 
cities on companies doing business with  Burma.  Faced with the choice of
trading with the military State Law and Order Council, Slorc, or losing
lucrative contracts in US cities and states, companies are opting to stay out
of
 Burma. 

    Mumbling about how the 'Western media have got it all wrong', the tobacco
merchant concentrates on his prawn soup instead.  Like all foreign
businessmen
in this country - the size of France and Britain together - which should be
the 
richest in South-East Asia, he sees huge profits and fears idle political
chat


                                                                             
could cost him his job.

    His neighbour Suu Kyi, the Nobel Peace Prize winner, is not sympathetic.
She
has demanded that foreign investors and tourists boycott  Burma  in protest
at
Slorc, which has ruled the country since 1988 and robbed her of her landslide
election victory in 1990.

    'Unless they get on with the Slorc they could lose everything they have,'
she says.  'That in itself shows it is not a fit economy for investment.'

    It is early afternoon and hot but she is composed and smiling, with a
bunch 
of jasmine in her hair. We have had to meet in the home of U Kyi Maung, one
of
her right-hand men, to avoid me being turned back at the checkpoints. A
police
car lurks outside the gate, a clutch of young men in denim jackets and
longyis
(sarongs) stand smoking in the shade of a palm. One smiles sweetly and takes
my 
photograph as I arrive. 'Don't worry about them,' says Suu Kyi with a laugh.
'Just point your own camera back at them - they'll run away.'

    After five years under house arrest, the petty restrictions seem to her
'footling' and an encouraging sign that the regime is, if not split in its
strategy where she is concerned, at least showing signs of having hit a
crisis
of confidence. The Observer, February 9, 1997                         



                                                                             
    There are other signs. 'Visit Myanmar Year', the Slorc's quick solution
to
fill the almost empty state coffers with foreigners' hard currency, got off
to a
long-delayed start last November.  Nearly 50,000 students seized the
opportunity
to stage the biggest protest against the Slorc since the bloody uprising of
1988, and spoilt the grand opening.

    Tourists have mainly stayed away. The Slorc has had to revise the figure
for
the projected number of visitors down from half a million to a still wildly
optimistic 220,000.

    Rangoon's dozens of sparkling new hotels have the sad air of white
elephants.  Suu Kyi can look out of her window across the Inya Lake and count
on
the fingers of one hand the number of windows lit at night in the
multi-storey
Mya Yeik Nyo Deluxe Hotel.

    'So much for their tourism boom. I've even less work this year than
last,'
says one disgruntled guide employed to traipse around Rangoon's golden
Shwedagon
Pagoda.

    'You know what Slorc really stands for?  Stupid Lousy Officers Ruling the
Country,' he laughs, without bothering to check who might be listening for
such 
heresy. 
    Suu Kyi knows that the time when the Slorc had the population cowering in
silent terror is rapidly passing as anger takes it place. 'The economy has
been 
stagnating since 1995 and people have realised that the Slorc is not going to
be
able to deliver the economic goods.'

    These days the crowds crouched on foot-stools at pavement teashops on a
balmy evening do not turn to gape at the sight of a convoy of military
vehicles 
careering down a main avenue hooting their horns and jumping red lights. They
pointedly ignore it.

    The display of military hardware, a few light armoured personnel carriers
parked in the compound of the city hall since the December demonstrations,
sends
a loud and threatening signal to the people which makes a nonsense of the
propaganda billboards around the city claiming that the people's desire is to
'oppose those relying on negative elements, acting as stooges, holding
negative 
views' - a jibe aimed at Suu Kyi and her husband, Oxford professor Dr Michael
Aris.

    But 'the people's desire is only the Slorc's desire', says Phone, a young
driver who works for a foreign-owned car firm but supports Suu Kyi's request
that foreigners refrain from investing in  Burma. 
    His miserable salary of $ 25 a month is at least an improvement on the $
20 
he was making as a civil servant but he has spent all his savings on
obtaining a
passport, work permit and visa from the authorities by bribery, and dreams of
escaping to Singapore.

    Foreign businessmen protest that the Slorc made a giant effort to assure
the
Burmese of a better future when it cut short decades of malfunctioning
socialism
at the end 1992 and set a new capitalist course, opening the country to trade
and investment. Some Burmese might agree.

    Aung San Suu Kyi recently expelled two of her own party members for
suggesting that her radical anti-foreign investment stance may be losing her
support. But for farmers, paid a pittance for their rice by the state, for
the
hundreds of political prisoners languishing in prison and for people like
Phone 
who are desperate enough to flee the country, the new capitalism is no
consolation, let alone a panacea.

    Phone's German boss makes no apology for doing business in  Burma.  'I
think
that we can help here by showing different ways of thinking and doing things.
Already the Slorc's power is not concentrated in such few hands. Things are
improving, everyone says so. There are many more places to eat out, much more
to
do.'
                                                                           
    Phone complains that his boss is 'stingy'.

    Another foreign businessman, a British management consultant working for
a
Malaysian firm, complains bitterly at the missed opportunities for British
business because too much attention is paid to the 'long-haired enthusiasts'.
They are the same sort of people 'who ruined things for Barclays bank in
South
Africa' by forcing it to withdraw at the height of the apartheid era.

    'It's a crying shame,' he says. 'Unskilled labour here costs $ 8 a month,
skilled only $ 12.'

    On a ferryboat across the soupy Irrawaddy River, a zoology student
complains
about the Slorc's closure of his college since December's student
demonstrations. He now works as a porter at one of the new hotels and is
planning to take a night job as a builder at another hotel. But if he ever
finishes veterinary college, the most he can aspire to is a state salary of $
20
a week, like his father who is a doctor.

    H IGH up country, in an old colonial hill station where the Home Counties
-style villas still have names such as Pine View and Rose Villa, locals say
that
the military at the town's officers' training academy are getting restive.
 They
are angered by low pay and the way their seniors in Rangoon and in the


                                                                             
lucrative poppy -growing areas to the north are lining their pockets by
corruption and extortion.

    In  Burma's  second city, Mandalay, there is deeper anger at the drugs
money
flowing in from Shan province, which is fuelling a building frenzy to rival
Rangoon's.

    One of the city's shaven-headed pongyi (monks), clad in a red toga, joins
me
at a teashop. He flicks through my guidebook in search of a photograph of Suu
Kyi, 'a quality woman', news of whom he receives via the BBC Burmese service.

    'One monk can rule a village but five military cannot, because we have
morality.  It is the military who are afraid of the monks because they know
the 
people love us,' he says.

    He is right. The Slorc is busy trying to buy the affection of the monks,
a
highly influential part of the population, a quarter of a million strong.
Photographs showing Slorc generals giving a stove or furniture to one of the
monasteries feature regularly in the official mouthpiece of the regime, the
New 
Light of Myanmar. 
    Hludu Daw Amar, 82, is one of  Burma's  best-loved writers whose low-tech
printing shop in a Mandalay street is in stark contrast to shops filled with
Korean televisions and garish Chinese toys.

    She dare not write about today's  Burma  for fear of the censor. Her
youngest son, like his two brothers before him, is serving a 10-year jail
sentence on suspicion of having contacted the Burmese Communist Party.

    'There is nothing so strange about my story; it is the sad story of so
many 
Burmese families,' she says, adding wearily in her Raj English: 'They are
watching me like anything, military intelligence in mufti.'

    She voices the common anxiety that China is invading  Burma  with the
cheap 
goods and weapons it sells to the Slorc.  Burma's  army numbers 300,000,
almost 
twice the size it was when the Slorc took power, with almost 30 per cent of
government revenue being spent on arms, according to the US embassy in
Rangoon. 

    Western observers in the capital point out that  Burma's  foreign
exchange
reserves are at their lowest since 1988 and that there is only enough to
cover a
fortnight's imports.  Some are predicting more upheaval come the summer rainy
season - traditionally a tough time for the economy. The Observer, February
9, 1997                         



                                                                             
    The latest challenge to the Slorc is coming from rebellious ethnic groups
which, since 1989, have had a ceasefire with the Slorc in return for the
promise
of funds for their struggling regions. Several recently decided that the
Slorc
had not kept its promises and withdrew co-operation, while the oldest group,
the
Karen National Union, has never co-operated.  So the military's most tangible
success, the silencing of much of the ethnic revolt that has rumbled for
decades, may evaporate.

    Suu Kyi is glad that the groups have 'come to the conclusion that unless
there is a general political settlement they'll never be secure' but she
takes a
long view.  'It's as if people have never seen dictatorships collapse. All of
them are shored up by arms and they all collapse in the end.'

LANGUAGE: ENGLISH

LOAD-DATE: February 10, 1997