Letter from Burma (r)

[moe@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]

Letter From Burma
Vipers on the Fairway; Snakes Can Be Anywhere in Rangoon. Even in Golf Shoes.
By Kevin Sullivan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, April 19, 1999; Page C01 

RANGOON?The hookers look like bridesmaids.

They line the steps of nightclub after nightclub in Chinatown here, pretty
tarts all in a row, color-coded pros in matching puffy satin dresses.

In the neon glare of one club, they're in identical bubble-gum pink. At the
club next door, the steep stairs are flanked by baby-blue dresses on the
left and dinner-mint green on the right -- bouncy bundles of swooshy satin
cascading like a Slinky down to the dirt sidewalk.

There don't seem to be many customers. Lots of bored-looking men hang about,
smoking fat cigarettes made from wood pulp, watching the giggling spectacle
on a sweltering night.

Touts hail cars passing along streets that are otherwise dark. There are
almost no working streetlights in this desperately poor capital, which has
been run into the ground by a military junta that has commanded Burma (which
it calls Myanmar) at gunpoint since 1988. Buildings that date to the British
colonial period, which ended with Burmese independence in 1948, are
crumbling and unpainted, leaving only the fading memory of what once was.

There are lovely sights as well: Buddhist monks in plum-colored robes and
Ray-Ban knockoffs; laughing children in crisp white school uniforms and
backpacks; the ancient Shwedagon Pagoda, which rises above Rangoon like a
mountain of gold and jewels.

About the only other interruptions in the decay are a few beautifully
preserved government buildings, billboards for Japanese electronics
companies and several fancy tourist hotels, including the Strand, a regal
colonial outpost that has undergone a multimillion-dollar restoration by a
Hong Kong-based resort developer.

Rooms there cost $500 or more a night, and the Strand Bar serves perfectly
chilled (British) gin-and-tonics while a three-piece band plays ragtime. But
just outside, barefoot beggars scrounge for handouts and drivers of trishaws
-- bicycles with a sidecar -- will cart you across town for a quarter.

The generals who run Burma have no discernible ideology. They seem to stand
for nothing more than the promise that tomorrow will be much like today.
They like to play golf in porkpie hats and saddle-shoe spikes. They put lots

of people in prison for embracing democracy. But beyond that, their
aspirations are unclear, and a four-day tour of this once-grand city offers
conflicting clues about exactly what they have in mind for their country.

Take prostitution. The generals are said to oppose it, and they seem to
spend a lot of time thinking about it. In one of the government's more
inventive anti-prostitution decrees, the generals two months ago ordered
that women could no longer work as staff in bars and restaurants. 

Yet the nightclubs in Chinatown are practically offering gift-wrapping with
your purchase, and nobody seems to mind. Like many things in Burma, that may
well be due more to economics than to moral standards. China, the country's
massive northern neighbor, is Burma's largest military and economic patron,
and impoverished Burma can't afford to insult Beijing by mistreating Chinese
ex-pats who own and patronize the glitzy discos.

The government does tightly control information moving in and out of the
country -- even monitoring the e-mail of foreign diplomats. Journalists
generally are banned, and those who visit as tourists must be careful about
talking to ordinary Burmese, who face harsh punishment for discussing
politics with foreigners.

One woman in her early twenties, who works in the service industry for a
tiny wage, can't say her name, where she works or anything else about
herself because she could be jailed for talking to a foreign reporter. But
she does quietly say that her dream is to be a schoolteacher. Trouble is,
the generals have closed the university again, as they have for more than
half the time since they took over 11 years ago. Asian universities are
often breeding grounds for political uprising, and the junta is taking no
chances.

So the young woman waits on customers, wasting her youth, bored, bored,
bored. "It's so stupid," she said.

At a tourist attraction elsewhere in the city is a 69-year-old man who was a
schoolteacher for years until 1988, when he participated in a big
pro-democracy demonstration. The military crackdown on that protest killed
3,000 people in six weeks and led to the government-by-gun that still stands
today. Civil servants who marched then were fired and blacklisted. So now
the aging scholar laments what he lost and what his students will never have. 

The government makes sure people know who's in charge. Soldiers conduct
random bed checks to see that people are sleeping in homes where they are
registered with the government. Sleeping in the wrong place can result in 10
days in jail. 

Security services listen to the telephone calls of almost every diplomat and
foreigner in town. At the monthly happy hour at the Australian Embassy, a
Burmese military intelligence officer sits at the end of the bar, watching
and listening for hours on end without speaking to anyone. "After being here
for a couple of years," said one European diplomat, "I have lost a terrible
amount of illusions and I have become terribly sad."

In most of the country, people survive mainly on subsistence farming, but
recent floods and droughts have made growing rice, potatoes and other crops

more difficult. The fields also have living danger: huge numbers of
poisonous snakes. Burma is said to have one of the world's highest rates of
death by snakebite. Golfers tell tales of having their shots land a few feet
from a poisonous snake, which is then dispatched by a caddie wielding a
five-iron.

But the poverty growing within and the international repudiation haven't
made the generals change much.

On Armed Forces Day recently, thousands of soldiers marched to a park in
downtown Rangoon to hear inspirational speeches by their generals. It was
March 27, the army's day to show off the spit-shine and polish of a
350,000-strong military machine. But most Burmese never had a chance to see:
It began before dawn and was held before an invitation-only crowd of family
and friends, who tossed flowers.

For a month beforehand, soldiers blocked off the main streets of the parade
route. Troops with rifles and long bayonets took up round-the-clock sentry
positions, frequently sweeping for land mines or bombs.

It's not just paranoia: The military knows it is, as one foreign resident of
Rangoon called it, a "fundamentally hated regime." 

So the soldiers march by, kept clear of the people by barbed-wire blockades.