New Burmese Leisure Class: Army Capitalists
The New York Times - November 21, 2000
By BLAINE HARDEN
MANDALAY, Myanmar - Every morning and every evening in this city with the sweet-sounding name, thousands of poor people take a long, sullen look at how the other half lives.
Commuting by foot, on bicycles and packed into pickup taxis, the poor travel along a road that runs beside what they call "generals' village," a cluster of new mansions of a size and gaudy splendor that would not look out of place in the Hamptons.
Protected by high fences and set back behind well-tended lawns, the three-story houses have satellite dishes on the roofs, sport utility vehicles in the driveways and servants in the kitchens.
The poor do not choose to torment themselves twice each day with this vision of unattainable affluence. They have no choice. In the last decade the military government has forced tens of thousands of them out of their homes in downtown Mandalay. It sent them to a distant shantytown in a former rice paddy and gave them just one road back to town: past the generals' fine new houses.
The let-them-eat-cake quality of urban planning points to a new wrinkle in the military dictatorship that for four decades has ruled what used to be called Burma.
Having thrown off the egalitarian shackles of what they once called "the Burmese way to socialism," the generals and their families are getting rich and flaunting it.
Their conspicuous consumption, which many here describe as deeply offensive to Burmese traditions, seems to celebrate the rapidly widening gap between the very rich and the very poor.
Golf has become their game of choice. Wherever generals have gathered for work or play in the last five years, construction of golf courses has boomed, even as spending on schools and health care has fallen to per capita levels that are among the lowest in the world.
Children of the generals have become highly visible players in real estate, retailing, tourism and publishing. They typically do not invest their own money and rarely do any work, but they have their names on the businesses and collect their percentages, say local businessmen and Western diplomats.
The pre-eminent crony capitalist among the children of the brass is believed to be Sandra Win, daughter of the government's founding dictator, the now retired Gen. Ne Win. She is said to have interests in scores of businesses and major real estate developments.
"In the past few years, the ruling generals have turned more toward crony capitalism by rewarding personal friends and family members with preferential treatment," according to a Country Commercial Guide published here in September by the American Embassy.
"The result of this deliberate policy of corporate favoritism is to create a business environment in which personal connections to the generals, rather than business skills or technical merit, are the most important factors for corporate success."
There is not much space at the top of the money-grabbing pyramid here, Western diplomats say. Only a few hundred senior officers and their families, out of a military that has doubled in the last decade to more than 400,000 soldiers, are allowed to use their power to make themselves rich, the diplomats say.
Several local businessmen and journalists who cover business here echoed that assessment. None wanted their names published, because the government has a history of harassing, jailing and sometimes torturing critics.