It was hardly surprising that the Burmese opposition leader, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, went to the golden-spired ShwedagonPagoda on the night of her release from house arrest earlier this month to pray and make an offering. After all, it was at this Buddhist shrine, on Aug. 26, 1988, that she announced to half a million cheering people that she would "participate in the struggle for freedom."
In recent months, another temple has arisen near Rangoon's underused international airport at a cost of millions of dollars to house a huge natural rock resembling the Buddha. The temple has been constructed, at feverish pace, by Lieutenant General Khin Nyunt, Burma's feared and reviled spy chief. He is ranked No. 3 in the ruling military junta.
Burma is a superstitious land. These days it calls to mind the terrifying Haiti of François "Papa Doc" Duvalier I visited as a young correspondent. Papa Doc used his brutal civil militia, the Tontons Macoutes, as Khin Nyunt uses his "Military Intelligence," to ensure order. Papa Doc enlisted Haiti's voodoo religion to extend his grip on the Haitian people, always dressing in top hat and tails like Baron Samedi, the voodoo devil who haunts graveyards.
A cult of personality surrounds Khin Nyunt. The "New Light of Myanmar," the junta's xenophobic newspaper, publishes several photographs of him daily. Often he is shown making a Buddhist offering.
It is clear that members of Rangoon's privileged military caste are now deeply afraid of losing power. They see Slobodan Milosevic in court at The Hague. They remember how Nicholae Ceausescu was shot in Romania. They realize that, under democratic rule, they could end up in the dock themselves.
In an interview after her latest release, Suu Kyi, told me: "I think this is a far more delicate situation than any we have been in in the past." She spoke of the new political process, which should ultimately involve talks with the junta over power-sharing, as a "difficult balancing act."
Suu Kyi has already negotiated her own freedom of movement. She has made a brief trip out of Rangoon. But Burma's long-suffering people want to see what happens in practice. Khin Nyunt built his temple to gain "merit." As a Buddhist, he knows that those who gunned down students, oversaw torture in Insein jail, and stopped a dying man - Suu Kyi's late British husband - from seeing his wife for one last time by refusing him a visa, must have bad karma, under the Eastern cosmic law of cause and effect.
Next to his temple is an enclosure with three elephants, one of them a white elephant, which traditionally represents Burmese royalty. Burmese privately call this the "Khin Nyunt's elephant," in reference to his apparent delusions of grandeur. An engineer working as a taxi driver confided: "In my opinion, the elephant is brown, and most people think it is brown."
Next to the Shwedagon - where Suu Kyi went to worship after her release - is another temple, built by the country's former dicator, General Ne Win, now aged 92. Hardly anyone, except members of his family, visited it. But now even they cannot go.Some are in prison and Ne Win himself is under house arrest in his rambling villa beside Inya Lake.
Ne Win's temple is empty - indeed, you might call it a white elephant too. When his unpopular relatives were arrested for allegedly plotting a coup, they were found with three small voodoo dolls, made to resemble Burma's top three generals, including Khin Nyunt.
The writer, Southeast Asia correspondent of The Times of London, contributed this comment to the International Herald Tribune.