In March this year, the outside world got its first glimpse of Burma's new secret' capital, Nay Pyi Daw, when foreign journalists were invited to the junta's annual military parade, 300 miles north of Rangoon in the midst of malarial scrub jungle, deep in the heart of nowhere.
No tourists have visited Nay Pyi Daw. It is off limits to foreigners, as is much of the country. For most visitors to Burma, the dictatorship remains hidden. With its five-star hotels, exotic festivals and seemingly easy-going people it is easy to see how visitors leave with an overwhelmingly positive image of the country. But the normality is deceptive. Signs of oppression are subtle and, in turn, more sinister: outsiders don't see the networks of informers and the suppression of any form of dissent.
Few know, for example, that the glittering Shwedagon pagoda in Rangoon, considered the spiritual heart of Burma, was where Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi gave her first speech challenging the junta.
Burma is currently controlled by one of the largest standing armies in South-East Asia, with almost half a million men under arms. The military dominates every sector of Burmese society and the people are little more than vassals of a feudal dictatorship. Driven by greed and a paranoid quest for total power, the generals show no sign of relinquishing their grip on the population.
The junta's rule has been defined by brutality. In 1988, after years of repressive military rule and self-imposed isolation from the rest of the world, hundreds of thousands of demonstrators took to Burma's streets calling for a return to democratic rule. The army responded by opening fire on unarmed civilians, killing thousands. In 1990, when Aung San Suu Kyi's party won a landslide victory in the elections, the junta ignored the results. Instead they placed her under house arrest and harassed, jailed and tortured her supporters. In 2003, after being released, Aung San Suu Kyi and her supporters were attacked by a pro-junta mob. Dozens were killed. She was once again placed under house arrest. Over the 18 years in which she has been actively involved in Burmese politics, she has spent 11 years in confinement, becoming the world's best-known prisoner of conscience.
The regime tolerates no dissent. There are more than 1100 political prisoners in Burma today. This is a country where telling a joke about the regime is punishable by seven years' hard labour. Torture and abuse within the prison system is routine. Bo Kyi, a former political prisoner now in exile in Thailand, was tortured into writing a confession that was not true. He was made to sit in stress positions with a hood over his head. He was beaten for eight days and eight nights until he lost consciousness. After signing the made-up confession, he was placed in solitary confinement. Bo Kyi was lucky to survive the ordeal; at least 130 political prisoners have died in custody.
My trip to the new capital, Nay Pyi Daw, was for the occasion of Armed Forces Day, considered the birth date of the modern Burmese army and the most important date in the junta's calendar. Two years ago I tried to photograph Armed Forces Day, when it was held in the former capital in Rangoon. I was stopped by soldiers at road blocks. The area had been sealed from the general public. I did get one glimpse of the junta in action, though: the taxi I was in at the time drove past an intelligence officer with several policeman leading a handcuffed man down a deserted street. For a split second the regime revealed itself and then it was gone, replaced by the normality of an ordinary day in the bustling capital.
This year, I was invited to attend Army Day in Nay Pyi Daw, along with a number of other foreign journalists - the regime was ready to show off its new capital. Meaning Seat of Kings', Nay Pyi Daw, is a strange, gleaming confection of official hotels, ministries and government housing set in the baking plains of central Burma. The ruling junta, known as the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC), has spent billions building this new city. While the generals sit in splendid isolation in this largely empty metropolis, they have slashed spending on healthcare; according to UN figures, Burma's healthcare budget is now the lowest in the world. Poverty and malnutrition are widespread, with a quarter of Burmese living on less than a 50p a day and a third of children under the age of five are malnourished.
The Burmese junta forced thousands of people to work on infrastructure projects to develop its capacity for international tourists. Many were children who can still be seen working on roads throughout the country. Military spending, meanwhile, has skyrocketed. Despite chronic power shortages, leaving much of the country in almost permanent blackout, the military junta's new capital is lit-up by 24-hour electricity.
The decision to move the capital from Rangoon came suddenly. The military junta offered little explanation, issuing only the following statement: "Due to changed circumstances, where Myanmar Burma is trying to develop a modern nation, a more centrally located government seat has become a necessity."
The move has been the subject of much speculation in this secretive state. One theory is the junta's fear of invasion by the United States, particularly in the wake of events in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Burmese regime is the focus of one of the largest human rights campaigns in the world. For years the US and EU has imposed economic sanctions criticising their abuse of human rights. A few months before the move to the new capital, the US included Burma in a list of "outposts of tyranny", along with North Korea. The generals have responded by ignoring this criticism and retreating still further.
For this reason, many believe that the move was strategic. Nay Pyi Daw is more centrally located and is adjacent to other parts of the country where insurgents still operate. By moving the capital to this area, a stronger military presence would be able to deal with the insurgencies more effectively, and would also be in a better position to defend themselves against foreign invasion. As the ruling clique of soldiers have a background in jungle warfare and know little of the outside world, this move reflects a siege-like mentality in the face of what it sees as a hostile world.
Burma is one of the most ethnically diverse countries in the world, with more than 35 distinct races. It is also home to the longest-running civil war in history, as various ethnic armies have fought against the Burmese junta for autonomy or independence. The current army offensive against the ethnic Karen has sent 40,000 people fleeing, the worst attack in 10 years. There are already more than a million internal refugees hiding in a landscape of burned villages, forced labour, rape, free-fire zones and landmines. A further 140,000 refugees live in camps on the border with Thailand.
Members of another ethnic group, the Kayan, were also forced to seek refuge in Thai refugee camps. Among them, are the Padaung, a tribe known the world over for its women who wear golden hoops around their necks. These women have ended up in tourist camps in Thailand where, for a fee, visitors can photograph them. The women are billed as natives of Thailand. What most tourists to these camps don't realise is these people are refugees who have fled the continuing conflict in Burma.
After checking into my hotel at Nay Pyi Daw, I left for a press conference held at the Ministry of Information, a featureless block with a large conference room full of chairs, uniforms and flags. Also in attendance at the briefing, were members of the local state-sponsored media (there is no independent press in Burma, all publications are censored), government officials and a few uniformed soldiers. The conference was opened by the Minister of Information, Brigadier General Kyaw Hsan, a small, bespectacled man in a shiny green uniform. The content of his talk consisted of numerous clarifications' presumably because the outside world had either got it wrong or had not understood "the true situation" as seen from the generals' perspective. It went on for hours and the boredom was palpable, the rigid tedium and humourless formality of the event was written even on the minister's face. By the time questions came, it was clear that no one was going to talk outside what they were permitted to talk about, and there seemed little point in asking anything; those who did were treated to long and rambling answers.
I wandered around the room to look at the various displays on the walls put on for our benefit. They presented a sanitised vision of Burma for outsiders to see. They showed conditions in prisons, AIDS prevention programmes, drug eradication schemes and improvements to the education system. The whole thing looked like a press conference, but it wasn't about imparting real information. It was little more than a smokescreen - as if a series of denials would be enough to counter the overwhelming evidence of the military's abuses. The concentration was on form and formality.
The reported prostitution boom in the new capital was never touched upon, and there was a fleeting mention of the AIDS crisis. Burma may be the world's greatest contributor to new strains of HIV. Virtually all the strains of HIV now circulating in Asia come from Burma, and the military junta is doing almost nothing to stop the increasing rate of transmission. It was only five years ago that the junta publicly admitted their country had an HIV problem. Yet, by 2004, Burma's entire budget for combating AIDS was just US$22,000. Today that figure has risen to $200,000, but it is still too little to counter a potentially explosive epidemic.
Thirty-year-old Cho Cho Win contracted the disease after an abusive home life in poverty-stricken Burma. Like millions of others seeking a life free of poverty and oppression, she sought work as a domestic servant in neighbouring Thailand. Having safely crossed the border, she managed to organise passage to Bangkok through a broker. She was escorted to Bangkok by a Thai policeman as she had no passport or documents of any kind. He then raped her. And, instead of being taken to a household in Bangkok, she was trafficked to a brothel. The policeman was paid the equivalent of £280 by the brothel owner for delivering Cho Cho Win. Luckily, after a few days, she managed to escape with another women and return to the border.
Cho Cho Win later contracted HIV from her husband. Her family abandoned her on learning she had been infected and she was taken in by a Burmese NGO in Thailand. She was housed in a shelter in a town on the Thai side of the border with four other women and their children, all of whom are HIV positive. Unlike the vast majority of HIV-positive people in Burma, she was given access to anti-retroviral drugs.
In August 2005, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria - an independent financing body created by the United Nations - withdrew its funding from Burma (which consisted of a budget of almost $100 million). The fund blamed the junta for placing travel restrictions on its staff and other obstructions. Foreign donors alarmed at the spread of AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria in Burma are working on a new $100-million fund to replace the Global Fund called the "Three Diseases Fund". But for many like Cho Cho Win it was too late; she died in February of this year.
The junta, however, prefers to gloss over the severe social problems in its country and present Burma to outsiders almost as theatre. After the press conference, I drove around Nay Pyi Daw and saw more attempts at reality control. Soldiers appeared out of nowhere in an attempt to prevent me from photographing a deserted roundabout. One camera crew was stopped from filming when they talked to a group of workers on the road. An intelligence officer emerged from nowhere to ask the workers what they had told the foreigners. When the camera crew saw this, they returned and started filming him but he put his hand over the camera lens and ordered them to leave. My driver wouldn't let me take pictures in certain quarters of the capital for fear that he might be arrested. The most extravagant piece of theatre I saw at Nay Pyi Daw, however, was at the parade ground on Armed Forces Day.
On the morning of Armed Forces Day, the foreign press were driven in a convoy of flashing cars to the parade ground some 45 minutes away from our hotel. Beneath three large statues of warrior kings, who have risen from the dead to be glorified by the military, some 15,000 troops took to the vast parade ground. The parade was an awesome spectacle, presenting an image, not of an army besieged, but of one convinced of its own righteousness and determination. But again, what was being presented was misleading.
Despite the massive amounts of military spending in Burma, soldiers of the lower ranks are poorly managed and resourced. Corruption and nepotism is widespread. The army has the highest number of child soldiers in the world, with some as young as 11. In some cases children are kidnapped and sent to military training camps where they are routinely beaten, and brutally punished if they try to escape. Many were forcibly recruited and brutalised in the frontlines of the civil war where they are now forced to fight and carry out human rights abuses against civilians. As a result, morale among enlisted ranks is low and the army is plagued by desertion. But there was nothing to give that impression on this year's Armed Forces Day and there were no child soldiers to be seen.
After the troops had stood to attention in formation, there was silence as they waited for their supreme commander. The junta chief, General Than Shwe, arrived in a shiny black Mercedes. He stood in the morning sun without faltering and delivered a speech rebuking countries such as the United States that have taken the junta to task over its human rights record. His voice echoed over thousands of helmeted soldiers: "Judging from lessons of history, it is certain that powerful countries wishing to impose their influence on our nation will make any attempt in various ways to undermine national unity."
Displaying little sign of his reported ill-health, the general vowed to "crush, hand-in-hand with the entire people, every danger of internal and external destructive elements obstructing the stability and development of the state". With his 10-minute speech completed, a medal-bedecked Than Shwe inspected his troops from the sun roof of his stretch Mercedes and drove off, followed shortly after by his marching troops.
There seemed little point in staying longer in this Potemkin city. I left Nay Pyi Daw as soon as I could. Sitting in the plane as it thrummed in the evening light high above central Burma, I left with a sense of bewilderment. Many of the soldiers and officials I met had been extremely polite and friendly, but I felt a massive void that only confounded my understanding of their world. My visit only widened the chasm of understanding still further.
For the senior leadership, cut off for decades, they have no real need to engage in the outside world. Its simply easier to dismiss alternate views out of hand and retreat into this bizarre capital they had constructed for themselves. And this sense of isolation only furthers an arrogant righteousness of their role in the future of their country. As I peered through the evening mist to the darkness below, the democratic desires of Burma's long-suffering people seemed as far away as ever.