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In Burma, the Generals Take No Chan



Subject: In Burma, the Generals Take No Chances

International Herald Tribune, Wednesday, April 21, 1999

In Burma, the Generals Take No Chances 

Government at Gunpoint /Random Bed Checks

By Kevin Sullivan Washington Post Service

RANGOON - 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 at gunpoint since 1988. 

Buildings that date from 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 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 of a
U.S. dollar.

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 ordered two months ago
that women could no longer work in bars and restaurants. 

Yet prostitution is rife at the nightclubs in Rangoon's Chinatown, 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 northern neighbor, is
Burma's largest military and economic patron, and impoverished Burma cannot
afford to insult Beijing by mistreating Chinese expatriates who own and
patronize the glitzy discotheques.

The government does tightly control information moving in and out of the
country, even monitoring the electronic 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 20s, who works in the service industry for a tiny
wage, cannot 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 of the time since they took over 11 years ago. 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 rules
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 is 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 without speaking to anyone.

''After being here for a couple of years,'' a European diplomat said, ''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. 

But the poverty growing within and the international repudiation have not
                made the generals change much.

On Armed Forces Day recently, thousands of soldiers marched to a park in
central Rangoon to hear inspirational speeches by their generals. It was
March 27, the army's day to show off the spit 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 bayonets took up round-the-clock sentry
positions, often sweeping for land mines or bombs.

It is not just paranoia: The military knows that 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.
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