Burmese Generals Gild Temples and Lock Up Foes
Source : Blaine Harden, New York Times
RANGOON To inoculate themselves against any outbreak of democracy, the generals who run this hermit dictatorship have begun two urgent missions of self-preservation.
Seeking support from the Buddhist majority, the junta is sprucing up old pagodas and building new ones on a scale that experts say is without precedent in the modern history of Southeast Asia. Nearly every day, a top general travels by armed motorcade to a recently restored pagoda. As state television records his piety, the general removes his shiny shoes and inspects a newly gilded Buddha.
The junta has a rather more robust Plan B. The generals, taking no chances, have locked up nearly all their political opponents.
In late September, they again ordered the house arrest of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the opposition leader whose party won a huge victory in a 1990 election that the generals ignored. Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, has spent more than six of the last 11 years locked in her house.
Senior leaders of her party have been imprisoned or placed under house arrest this fall. Two of the country's most influential monks, who in the past year wrote letters that begged the generals to talk to Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, are being watched by military intelligence.
The army halted huge opposition demonstrations 12 years ago by killing at least several hundred people and jailing thousands more.
Since then, the generals have doubled the size of the armed forces to more than 400,000, although the country, with a population estimated at 50 million, faces no serious foreign threat and has made peace with most armed ethnic minorities inside the country.
Military analysts say the buildup, which coincides with a steep decline in spending on schools and health care, is primarily aimed at preventing or, if need be, crushing civil unrest. Large numbers of troops are stationed in or around major cities.
In the last five years, the junta has forcibly resettled tens of thousands of potentially restive poor people from city centers to distant suburban slums. It has closed most urban universities and sent students off to new campuses in remote rural areas. Labor unions and all private civic associations are banned.
The military dictatorship, which seized power 38 years ago, has made it a crime to own a computer modem, send e-mail, enter the Internet or invite a foreigner into a private home.
The generals have also stopped allowing foreign journalists into the country, especially Americans. But starved for foreign currency, the military government began admitting sizable numbers of tourists after 1996.
This reporter visited the country in late October and early November as a tourist after the Burmese authorities had failed for nearly five years to grant journalist visas requested by The New York Times. Citizens can go to prison here for talking to foreign reporters.
For that reason, this report omits the names and blurs the identities of people who were willing to explain what life is like in a nation studded with giant green billboards that warn, "Crush all internal and external destructive elements as the common enemy."
A former political detainee, in his 40s, said he had been arrested by military intelligence for associating with a banned political party. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison at a secret trial at which there were no civilian witnesses. He did not have a lawyer.
Human rights groups say his experience is typical in a country where people are frequently jailed on murky charges and for extended periods. There are about 1,400 political prisoners in Burma, according to a U.S. Embassy count.
The former prisoner's incarceration began when guards forced a stinking cotton bag over his head and asked him questions for four days without letting him sleep. He said the bag, which kept him from seeing the faces of his interrogators, was fouled with sweat, mucus and blood. He recounted, "It smelled very awful, so bad you can't even imagine it."
He was later caught with a magazine in his cell. At the time, prisoners were not allowed to read or write. His punishment was three months in solitary confinement without access to a toilet or a shower. The Red Cross began prison visits in May 1999, and some prisoners now have access to reading material.
The prison where the man was confined is in a rural area more than 320 kilometers (200 miles) from his hometown. His wife and mother could afford to visit him once every three months. They were allowed to talk to him for 15 minutes in a room where one guard took notes on their conversation and another made sure that he never touched his wife or his mother.
The two women brought food that the former prisoner believes kept him and several of his prison friends alive. Between their visits, he said, he and other prisoners supplemented their diet of beans by catching and eating toads, bats and rats. They fried their catch on tin plates heated by burning plastic bags. He said rats were the heartiest meal one could catch in prison.
"Actually," he said, "it was very rare to see a rat. Everyone was after them."
In 1952, Norman Lewis, a British travel writer, noted that the Burmese "emerge into the sunshine immaculate and serene."
Although badly damaged by World War II, Burma then had the best health care system, the best civil service and the highest literacy rate in Southeast Asia. It since has become one of the world's poorest, least developed and most disastrously governed countries.
The World Health Organization this year ranked Burma second to last among 191 nations in the quality of its health care services (Sierra Leone was last). Most Burmese live on less than a dollar a day, 4 out of 10 children are malnourished, and the government spends 28 cents a year per child on public schools, according to the United Nations and the World Bank.
Yet the paradox of serenity and elegance persists. Most women and men still wear slongyis, or sarongs, many of them woven in brilliant colors. At rush hour in city traffic, women have a poised, almost regal way of sitting sideways on the back of a bicycle.
Passengers on insanely overcrowded buses do not seem impatient. Children smile from faces that their mothers have painted with a sweet-smelling sandalwood paste.
Rural areas appear to exist outside of time. Surrounded by emerald-green fields of rice, spotless bamboo houses are perfumed with garlands of flowers. Oxcarts outnumber cars. Preadolescent monks in crimson robes walk the streets, ringing bells and chanting - and adults, in response, fill their bowls with rice and fruit.
Unlike Thailand, where about 90 percent of the forests have been cut down, this country still has about half its forest cover.
The charming countenance of the people and the seductive beauty of the countryside, however, are misleading. Western governments and UN agencies say that the generals preside over an increasingly toxic mix of heroin and amphetamine smuggling, drug-money laundering, high-level corruption, forced labor, sexual exploitation of young women and an AIDS epidemic of African proportions.
Meanwhile, diplomats say they discern no significant divisions within the junta. The generals seem to have unlimited free time to inspect pagodas and make speeches about the glory of the pre-colonial past. It is a period when Burma was ruled by kings who built thousands of Buddhist shrines - a crusade for which they expected to accumulate merit.
Photographs at many spiffed-up pagodas show grateful citizens bowing to their generals, as they bowed centuries ago to their kings.
"It is propaganda," said an elderly monk in the north of the country. No matter how many pagodas they restore, the monk added, the generals will come back as rats.