PREVIEW / ASIAN ELECTIONS : Myanmar Regime Keeps Tight Grip As Voting Nears

In recent months, the face of Yangon, formerly Rangoon, has been changing as authorities build concrete-and-mesh dividers down the center of its boulevards and erect elevated pedestrian walkways over streets.

In most other countries, the improvements would be welcomed as a desperately needed civic face lift in a city left run-down by years of economic stagnation. But in the capital of Myanmar, formerly Burma, there always seems to be a sinister explanation.

Western diplomats in the capital report that the street dividers apparently are designed to prevent crowds from marching in protest against the government, as happened in 1988. The pedestrian overpasses, they contend, are intended to serve as elevated gun platforms for troops in the event of disturbances. Thousands of people were shot in the 1988 protests.

As Myanmar goes to the polls May 27 in its first multi-party elections in 30 years, the country is faced with many such contradictions.

Rather than being applauded by the outside world for proceeding with the elections, the military regime in Myanmar is widely condemned for locking up the main opposition leaders, muzzling free speech in the campaign and leaving ambiguous what authority, if any, the newly elected constituent assembly will be allowed to have.

Because the government has declared that results will not be released for at least 21 days after the balloting, many opposition figures conclude that the outcome will be rigged.

“The government is trying to deceive the people,” Moe Thi Zun, chairman of the All-Burma Student Democratic Front, declared recently. “It’s very clear that this will not be a free and fair election.”

The country has been sealed off to foreigners for the elections, with the government barring foreign journalists and tourists from observing the voting.

In the weeks leading up to the vote, London-based Amnesty International accused the military regime, known as the State Law and Order Restoration Council, of widespread human rights abuses.

“The security forces seem to have almost unrestricted authority to carry out arbitrary arrests, to detain prisoners incommunicado for months without charge or trial and to interrogate them using torture,” the human rights group said in a statement.

Western diplomats said that if the upcoming election is truly fair, the clear winner should be the National League for Democracy. But league leader Aung Sang Suu Kyi, the daughter of an independence hero, was placed under house arrest last July. Another league leader, Tin Oo, a retired army general, was sentenced to three years’ hard labor.

Meanwhile, about 250,000 people in Yangon have been forced from their homes and resettled in distant, undeveloped areas. Described officially as “slum clearance,” the project is believed by Western diplomats to be aimed at disfranchising thousands of league supporters in the capital.

The government recently has been criticized as well for selling off the country’s few remaining resources, such as teak forests. Apparently, the profits are financing army campaigns against ethnic rebellions along the Thai-Myanmar border, where groups such as the Karens have been virtually crushed in recent weeks after 40 years of agitating for autonomy.

While Gen. Saw Maung, who seized power in a coup in September, 1988, remains officially in charge, many in Myanmar believe that true power still flows from Gen. Ne Win, who ruled for 26 years beginning in 1962. A protege of Ne Win, Maj. Gen. Khin Nyunt, head of military intelligence, is widely believed to wield the most power in Myanmar.

Ne Win led the nation from being one of Asia’s best-educated and most economically developed into a hermit state that ranks as one of the least developed in the world.