Notes on a Fascist Disneyland : Behind Burma’s Enchanting Facade, a Police State Tightens the Screws

THERE IS A SURREAL and, at the same time, ethereal quality to Burma’s capital city of Rangoon. At dawn, Buddhist monks in rust- or wine-colored robes fan out through the city, walking from house to house with shiny, black-lacquered begging bowls, silently accepting offerings of rice or fish. They pass through streets and parks where palm readers and astrologers unlock the secrets of life, where snake oil salesmen and sundry merchants of miracles patiently minister to their customers. Throngs of women and children--their faces decorated with smears of yellow makeup made from thanaka bark--and men in striped or checked skirtlike longyis press along crowded sidewalks covered with cheap black-market goods.

Rangoon--and much of Burma--has the look of an object that has recently been removed from a time capsule. Book stalls display texts dating back 40 years and magazines of only slightly more recent vintage. The satellite dish has yet to arrive, and neither has McDonald’s. For a capital of more than 2 million people, there are relatively few automobiles and no skyscrapers.

Central Rangoon is a spectacular quilt of British colonial buildings painted from a dizzying palette of pastels. The tallest building, the 32-story Shwedagon Pagoda, looms above the city from Singuttara Hill to the north. A massive, bell-shaped, 11th-Century Buddhist shrine, the Shwedagon is said to embody the essence of the Burmese soul. It is surrounded by several acres of smaller stupas, pavilions and animist icons--man-eating ogres, lions, crocodiles, sphinxes and Buddhas too numerous to count--”glistening with its gold,” wrote Somerset Maugham, “like a sudden hope in the dark night of the soul.” Amid such fantastical sights and against the country’s overwhelming natural beauty, a visitor may at first be oblivious to the other Burma. But behind the country’s exotic backdrop, there is a claustrophobic, enervating and frequently vicious police state. “This country,” one Western diplomat observed, “is a fascist Disneyland.”

Less than two years ago, Burma’s military ruthlessly suppressed a nationwide pro-democracy movement that came close to toppling Gen. Ne Win’s 26-year-old dictatorship. During seven months of demonstrations starting in March, 1988, an estimated 1,000 people died in Rangoon; as many as 5,000 perished nationwide. Thousands of civil servants, pro-democracy activists and students were imprisoned; many were tortured. Thousands more fled to Burma’s borders with Thailand and China, where they joined about 25,000 armed ethnic insurgents waging an inauspicious war against the 200,000-member Burmese army.

Today, the unrest in Burma no longer boils up in massive public demonstrations but instead seethes in private. Nevertheless, the crackdown has not ended, and Burma--by government fiat now called Myanmar--is a country where people are arrested for imagined crimes and held without charge or trial, where it is illegal to criticize the government and its leaders and where nearly everyone is, privately, critical of the government and hence anyone is fair game.

Even the concessions offered to the pro-democracy movement do little more than divert attention from the tightened state control. Next week, on May 27, the government will sponsor a general election for a constitutional assembly--the first multiparty election in 30 years. Virtually everyone believes that it will be an unmitigated fraud. But even if the vote is fair, there is little doubt that the current government will stay in control since it has the power to ensure that any representative assembly will remain impotent.

Many Burmese may still hope that the election will lead to a new government, but the past two years of brutal repression have intimidated most people and left them resigned to the fact that little is likely to change. “People are very afraid,” a monk told me in Mandalay, in central Burma. In Rangoon (now known as Yangon), a laundryman asked me what I thought of Burma. When I told him, lamely, that I liked it very much, he courteously but firmly admonished me. He said, “Here we have no freedom.” And in a small confectioner’s shop, a merchant whispered to me, “This country is very dangerous, very dangerous.” As he spoke, he looked furtively about and politely asked me to leave.

AMID THE IDEOLOGUES, mass murderers, goons, kleptomaniacs and madmen, the pantheon of 20th-Century dictators surely will include 79-year-old Ne Win. Born Shu Maung, he took the name Bo Ne Win (“Bright Sun”) when he became one of the so-called Thirty Comrades who were given military training by the Japanese during World War II. The Thirty Comrades were leaders of Burma’s nationalist independence movement, which came into its own in the 1920s and ‘30s.

In 1948, the British departed from their crown colony, and Burma plunged into an enormously destructive civil war in which the army of the Karen ethnic minority nearly overthrew the government. During the decade that followed independence, the nation was thrown into near chaos. Thus, when Ne Win seized power in a coup in 1962, many Burmese welcomed military rule. Burmese nationalists believed that the country needed time to exorcise demons left behind after decades of colonialism and time to create an identity without foreign interference. But by the spring of 1988, the Burmese people concluded that the dictatorship had long since lost any claim to legitimacy.

Like other tyrants, Ne Win had one standard for the nation and another for himself. He advocated a return to traditional values and established Buddhism as the national religion, but he has never overcome his own reputation as a gambler and womanizer. (Ne Win has married seven times, twice to the same woman.)

Ne Win slammed Burma’s doors to the outside world and implemented an inept brand of socialism that quickly destroyed the most promising economy in Southeast Asia. His government championed a nationalism riddled with racism and xenophobia. Among the Burman majority, it nurtured hatred of the Karen, Mon, Shan and other ethnic groups living near Burma’s borders. And the government seized the property of the entrepreneurial Chinese and Indians, expelling hundreds of thousands of the latter from the country.

Ne Win surrounded himself with military men who knew nothing about running a complex bureaucracy or economy. He bought their loyalty at a premium, providing them with special subsidies, rations and private shops that allow officers to live far better than ordinary citizens.

Reclusive and superstitious, the balding, bespectacled Ne Win is a product of a culture more attuned to mysticism and magic than to the Western systems inherited from the British. He made fundamental economic decisions after consulting astrologers and betrayed a range of eccentricities that defy easy categorization. He summarily ordered motorists to drive on the right rather than the left side of the road to neutralize a rightist threat to his government. In August, 1988, he tried to counteract the anti-government protests through a ceremonial marriage to and honeymoon with a 25-year-old beauty.

Fascinated by numerology, Ne Win believes that the number 9 has extraordinary powers. After devaluing most of the country’s currency in September, 1987, he ordered new notes issued in denominations of 45 and 90 (4 + 5 = 9). Many government events have been scheduled for dates that are based on the number 9, including the May 27 election.

The reasons behind the 1988 upheaval were the very fabric of Ne Win’s rule. But if a single incident were to be identified, it would probably be the government’s decision to demonetize the currency. Over night, more than half of the country’s bank notes became worthless. Many Burmese saw their savings wiped out. Students awoke to learn that their tuition money had evaporated. The devaluation led to a student rampage in Rangoon, but it was quickly stifled as the government closed the universities and sent students home to the provinces.

Ironically, the trigger for the broad-based movement was a largely apolitical incident in March, 1988--a brawl between students from the recently reopened Rangoon Institute of Technology and a handful of drunks over the kind of music to be played in a local tea shop. The next day, when the students learned that one of their assailants was the son of a local Ne Win functionary, they attempted to lodge a protest with the official. After their request was turned down, they proceeded to destroy his office. This series of events led to a march by hundreds of students and a confrontation with the riot police, who opened fire on the students, killing one and fatally wounding six others. One group of protesters was herded into a police van for several hours; 41 people suffocated.

Between March and August, Rangoon and other major cities were rocked by demonstrations, general strikes and government reprisals. On March 16, riot police fired on a student demonstration in Rangoon, killing an estimated 200 people. The same day, they reportedly gang-raped three young girls. Later in the week, the government again closed the universities after arresting more than 1,000 students.

Some of those released told of beatings and torture. Students described cells packed with hundreds of people in which it was impossible to sit or lie down and recounted interrogations during which they were forced to kneel on sharp pebbles or crouch in an unnatural “motorcycle” position for hours on end.

As demonstrations spread throughout the country, the government seemed to bend to the public will. In July, Ne Win resigned from what was then the country’s sole political party. But any hope for change was crushed when his replacement, Sein Lwin, was announced. Widely known as The Butcher because of his role in suppressing the university demonstrations, Sein Lwin imposed martial law on Aug. 3. On Aug. 8, 1988--or 8/8/88 as it’s known--a general strike brought Rangoon to a standstill. Tens of thousands of people marched in the streets. Shortly before midnight, the army shot at unarmed demonstrators in front of the city’s centrally located Bandoola Park. The government claimed that only five people were killed, but foreign diplomats said the death toll ran into the hundreds. Burmese now refer to Bandoola Park as “our Tian An Men Square.”

Two days later, government troops shot doctors and nurses who were treating wounded demonstrators at Rangoon General Hospital. The same day, enraged civilians beheaded several policemen. During this mayhem, Sein Lwin resigned and was replaced by Maung Maung, author of a flattering biography of Ne Win. General strikes and massive demonstrations culminated Sept. 18 in yet another change in government.

In a carefully orchestrated coup, the government was reorganized under a military junta called the State Law and Order Restoration Council. Better known by its acronym, SLORC, it designated as chairman another Ne Win loyalist, army chief-of-staff Gen. Saw Maung. Meanwhile, Ne Win had all but disappeared from public view, although he was widely believed to be calling the shots, Oz-like, from behind the curtain.

The SLORC embarked on a campaign of propaganda and intimidation designed to re-establish the authority if not the legitimacy of the country’s oligarchy. “They did not appoint a respectable civilian facade government,” one Western diplomat told me in Rangoon. “Rather, they chose to harass, arrest and shoot people.”

Today in Rangoon (the name means “end of strife”) and other major cities, arrests have come to be expected, and unexplained disappearances are not unheard of. A 10 p.m.-to-4 a.m. curfew remains in effect. Outdoor gatherings of more than five people are still banned. Burma’s universities remain closed. One professor I spoke to said faculty members are required to report to work every day even though there are no classes, just so the government can keep tabs on them.

Public demonstrations have been reduced to hit-and-run actions by small groups of students. The only people who feel safe to speak freely are children, who shout anti-government slogans and destroy pictures of Ne Win in school. One 10-year-old boy told me his classmates shout “We want democracy” every day.

The boy’s father is stoical about the children’s outspokenness. “What are they going to do?” he asked. “Shoot them?”

TO AN OUTSIDER, the most visible manifestation of the military junta’s presence has been the construction of hundreds of red billboards blaring SLORC pronouncements in English and Burmese. They read like the tirades of a Stalinist graffiti artist. “Only when there is discipline will there be progress,” says the 20-foot-long sign in front of Bandoola Park. At the entrance to Shwemawdaw Pagoda, built 1,000 years ago to house two hairs of the Buddha, a billboard carries the ominous message, “Crush all destructive elements.”

There is another sign of the SLORC’s rule, which most visitors to Burma would probably not see--a massive demolition and relocation program in which no less than 100,000 of the country’s poorest people have been forced from their homes. Some estimates put the total number of people evicted as high as 350,000. Often moved in the middle of the night to places miles away from their jobs and relatives, these people use what little income they have to pay for new homes and increased transportation costs. In a report on the evictions in Rangoon, the government-run Working People’s Daily explained: “We are setting up new satellite towns with a view to providing homes to those who do not have houses of their own and to turning the city into a modern one.”

“They are trying to depopulate the cities,” a Western diplomat told me, “especially of those who were most vehement in the (1988) protests.”

I saw one of the satellite towns outside the city of Taunggyi, northeast of Rangoon: rows of one-room, barracks-style shacks set along unpaved roads. A civil servant told me that 3,000 people were forced to move there during the monsoon season. Six months later, these homes still had no water or electricity.

Another diplomat who saw an evacuated community in Rangoon said “it looked like a war zone.” He said anyone who refuses to move is arrested.

Meanwhile, the economy under the SLORC has gone from bad to worse. The inflation rate is as high as 50%; the price of rice quadrupled between 1988 and 1989, and the possibility of another devaluation discourages people who have money to deposit it in banks. As a result, there is almost no money to invest or to pay off the $5 billion foreign debt. The only thing that has kept Burma’s economy afloat is a thriving black market.

Although the Burmese government has done its best to root out its enemies, it remains surrounded by them. In fact, had Ne Win deliberately set out to alienate every man, woman and child in his country, he hardly could have done a better job.

At a party in Rangoon, my host surveyed friends gathered in his living room, turned to me and said, “You know, we’re all government employees here.” Then he shook his fist in my face and added, “And we’re all against the government.”

Another Burmese told me that all her countrymen hate the government. When I related her comment to another man and asked what he thought about it, he smiled and said, “I like to hear that, but I don’t dare to speak it.” In a rural village, a doctor complained to me about his low salary and the lack of medicine to treat his patients. “Ninety-nine percent of the people want a change of government,” he said.

For most Burmese, hope rests on the death of Ne Win or a military coup. While the SLORC has been preparing for an election that, theoretically, will pave the way for a return to a parliamentary system, it is difficult to take the election seriously. A recent editorial in the Working People’s Daily claimed that “the election commission is taking all necessary measures to make sure that the election to be held is just and fair.”

Some of the “necessary measures” taken since the unrest in 1988 include imprisoning or placing under house arrest the three most popular opposition leaders, all of whom have been banned from participating in the election; arresting more than 4,000 anti-government demonstrators and prohibiting speeches or campaign literature that “denigrate or impair the dignity” of the ruling junta.

“I don’t know anyone who believes in the election,” a diplomat told me. A businessman in Mandalay at first disagreed: “After the election,” he said, “things will get better.” But after a long pause, he modified his prediction: “Either they will get better or they will get worse.”

WHEN DISCUSSING elections, the Burmese agree on only one thing: In a free and fair election for a new head of state, a 44-year-old woman named Aung San Suu Kyi would win by a landslide.

Elegant, self-possessed and thoughtful, Suu Kyi was nonetheless an unlikely candidate to challenge the dictatorship. She left the country at age 15, married an Englishman and returned to Burma in 1988 to care for her dying mother.

Suu Kyi proved to be not only a forceful politician but also a powerful symbol. She is the daughter of Gen. Aung San, founder of the Burmese army, a leader of the Thirty Comrades and a man revered as the father of Burmese independence. Aung San was assassinated in 1947 when Suu Kyi was an infant. Today, his statue stands near the Shwedagon Pagoda, and the anniversary of his death is celebrated every year as Martyrs’ Day.

During the 1988 demonstrations, thousands of protesters carried posters of Aung San, and this outpouring of respect for her father, along with a continuing lack of leadership among the protesters, no doubt helped persuade Suu Kyi to enter the public arena. She made her first appearance on Aug. 26 at the Shwedagon Pagoda, delivering a speech to a crowd of a million people. “I could not, as my father’s daughter, remain indifferent to all that was going on,” she said. “This national crisis could, in fact, be called the second struggle for independence.” Suu Kyi’s speech catapulted her to the forefront of the pro-democracy movement.

During the next 10 months, Suu Kyi toured the country, making bold speeches in which she attacked Ne Win by name, calling the dictator a megalomaniac who would do anything to hold on to power. In a country where most people were afraid to speak out, Suu Kyi was fearless. She said Ne Win continued to control what she called the fascist junta, blamed the dictator for ruining Burma’s economy and called on the military to overthrow him.

Despite constant government efforts to intimidate her and the ban on demonstrations, Suu Kyi drew crowds of thousands. In one famous incident, an army captain ordered his men to shoot her as she led a group of supporters down a street. Suu Kyi told her followers to remain behind while she walked on to confront the soldiers alone. As she approached, a major intervened and rescinded the order to shoot.

A short distance from Suu Kyi’s home in Rangoon, the junta has erected a billboard that carries the inscription: “Anyone who gets riotous, destructive and unruly is our enemy.” Suu Kyi has not seen the billboard, and there is little danger that she will get out of control. Since July, she has been under house arrest.

Like Corazon Aquino in the Philippines in 1986, Suu Kyi has become the leading symbol for change in Burma. Precisely what sort of change she would bring about is unclear. But to most people, it makes no difference--Suu Kyi stands for democracy, the dictatorship does not. She is its antithesis and its nemesis. “Aung San Suu Kyi is like a goddess,” said one Rangoon resident. “Her name is like magic.”

IN THE ABSENCE of any perceptible avenue of change within the system, between 4,000 and 7,000 Burmese--mostly students--have fled the cities and the interior to join the ethnic insurgent armies camped in the mountains and jungles along Burma’s borders. All told, there are about 25,000 ethnic insurgents arrayed against the Burmese army, including members of the Karen, Kachin, Shan and Mon tribes. All these groups say they want autonomy, and all have been fighting a low-grade civil war with the government and, at times, among themselves, for decades.

In camps on Burma’s eastern frontier with Thailand, students occupy hastily contrived wood shelters patched with sheets of newspaper and plastic. There are no mosquito nets, and nearly everyone suffers from malaria. In one camp, I watched teen-agers in ragged, sun-bleached clothing undergoing rudimentary military training, using bamboo sticks for guns. Few of the students have weapons, and it is unlikely they will get them soon.

The newcomers at the borders are there because they believe they have no other choice. At home, they faced arrest or worse. Aung Naing Oo is typical. A third-year student at the University of Rangoon, he spoke to me at Manerplaw, headquarters of the 5,000- to 8,000-member Karen National Liberation Army. Aung Naing Oo said he fled to the Thai border and joined the revolution in September, 1988, just before the pro-democracy movement was put down. He said his family does not know where he is. “I sent a message before I left that I was going underground,” he said. Aung Naing Oo said he wanted to overthrow the military regime and achieve democracy.

When I asked him what he meant by democracy, he replied, “People talk democracy, democracy, democracy, but they don’t know exactly what it is.” He told me he only became aware of its meaning during the demonstrations when he looked the word up in a dictionary. “We are learning,” he said.

When I suggested that he and his colleagues faced an impossible struggle, he replied: “Everybody knows that, but we have to hope. If somebody doesn’t have hope, he doesn’t come here.”

No doubt most Burmese wish the students well. But during the past few months, a major military offensive has routed thousands of students from their camps. They have joined the 40,000 Burmese refugees already in Thailand.

The situation for the ethnic rebels is almost as bleak. I happened to be at a Karen camp when the Burmese attacked, using heavy mortars. The rebels, outmanned and outgunned, retreated in less than 24 hours. No fewer than five other Karen camps have fallen during the past year.

Rebel leaders say these defeats are not significant. Gen. Bo Mya, president of the Karen National Union--the political arm of the Karen rebel army--insists that he is involved in a guerrilla war and that his men can simply move to new locations and continue fighting. But the Karen finance their war by controlling the lucrative teak trade, as well as by extorting taxes from merchants moving goods in and out of Burma. Lower-level officials within the union acknowledge that the recent string of defeats has had a devastating effect on Karen resources.

There is, however, a thin silver lining to the otherwise bleak picture of the students’ and rebels’ resistance. Their alliance is a first in Burma, where for 40 years the Burman population has been taught by Ne Win that the Karen and other border groups are barbarians. While the rebel groups have no explicit alliance with the leading opposition parties in the country, their goals, broad though they may be, are virtually identical. Taken together, the rebel and student opposition at the border combined with the barely legal opposition in Burma represent a pro-democratic alternative to the SLORC.

According to Tu Jai, a leader of the Kachin Independence Organization, which fields an 8,000-member army: “There are two sides (in Burma), the government side and the people’s side. And the government is already isolated, so this is a very good condition for us to overthrow the regime.”

DESPITE TU JAI’S assessment, Burma watchers in Rangoon and outside the country say the rebels are in no better position to get rid of Ne Win than are the voters in next week’s election. In fact, the scenarios for change in Burma are limited.

For the rebels to succeed, they would need massive foreign assistance. None is on the horizon. For the democratic opposition, on the other hand, the issue is survival. The opposition can endure only if there is continued economic and diplomatic pressure on the dictatorship.

The scenario heard and discussed most frequently is a rebellion within the armed forces--salvation by the very people who suppressed the pro-democracy movement. One ex-member of the Burmese air force, now in a Karen rebel camp, told me that there are many in the military “who want a revolution, who are ready to participate in a coup.” But only a few dozen soldiers have actually defected.

A Burmese civil servant takes a slightly more optimistic view: “The military is sitting on the fence.” he said, “They are waiting to see which way things go.” This man and others say there will be no coup until there is the necessary catalyst--such as another round of massive public demonstrations in which the armed forces are again called on to shoot innocent civilians.

Many Burmese hope the May election will be that catalyst--that the anticipated fraud will provoke people to take to the streets and that the next time citizens stand up for democracy, a sizable faction of the military will stand beside them. In the meantime, the SLORC appears determined to perpetuate Ne Win’s dictatorship.

In the shadow of the Shwedagon Pagoda, the Burmese government that is too broke to provide sewers or clean water for most of its citizens has been engaged in a costly construction project for the past six years. Under orders from Ne Win, it is building the Pagoda of the Great Victory--a substantial, as yet ungilded stupa, crowned with precious stones, that rises from a dusty construction site at the foot of Singuttara Hill. Following the example of Burma’s ancient kings, it is the aging dictator’s wish to someday be laid to rest in this pagoda. Most Burmese hope that Ne Win’s wish will be granted soon.

In addition to Ne Win’s tomb, the SLORC has come up with money for one other less grandiose construction project in Rangoon. It has built a thick, turreted wall, painted maroon and punctuated every few yards with gun slits, that runs along a main thoroughfare and loops around the ministry of defense. “It’s a shooting gallery if anything happens,” one Western diplomat suggests. Remarked another, “While the walls are coming down in Europe, they are going up in Rangoon.”