Read the story in TIME magazine

STONE AGE
Burma’s generals have made their country a global byword for backwardness
By Andrew Marshall   Photos by James Nachtwey/VII

Whenever I visit Burma, I have a ritual: I look up a name in the Rangoon telephone book. Every year a new directory is published, but the listing remains “Aung San Suu Kyi, Daw,” followed by Rangoon’s most famous address “54 University Avenue” and a telephone number. The number never seems to work. When I tried it during my recent trip, the Nobel laureate and leader of the National League for Democracy (NLD) was enduring her third stint under house arrest since 1989. But seeing her celebrated name in the book always seems both extraordinary and reassuring.

I had returned to Burma to see old friends. Last year was particularly terrible for the long-suffering nation. In February came the near collapse of the private banking system, then in May the savage “Black Friday” attack on Suu Kyi by state-sponsored thugs, who killed or injured scores of her supporters and so provoked tough new economic sanctions by the U.S. In the past, either event might have sparked a popular uprising on the scale witnessed in 1988, when the Burmese military shot and jailed thousands of demonstrators. The reaction this time—nothing, not a peep of protest—reflects how ruthlessly the Burmese junta has terrorized its own people. Washington’s sanctions have boosted morale among Burma’s embattled democrats, but they promise little apart from further poverty and desperation in a country ravaged by military greed and incompetence. The military is now a state within a state, with the best housing, education and healthcare reserved for soldiers and their families.

In downtown Rangoon, the effects of economic stagnation are easy to spot. Unfinished office and apartment blocks loom over the skyline like Olympian tombstones. With most international companies long departed, billboards advertise mostly local products, such as Spirulina (“Beer That Makes You Young Forever”), or nothing at all. Like in a city at war, fruit and vegetables are cultivated in the grounds of public buildings. Part of the front lawn of the seldom-visited Drug Elimination Museum, built to whitewash the regime’s dubious antinarcotics record, has been turned into a pomelo orchard. Power shortages still plague the capital, as they did during my first visit more than seven years ago, and emergency generators clog the pavements. With municipal water supplies equally erratic, joke the Burmese, it’s lucky the government isn’t responsible for providing air.

Rangoon has grown seedier without becoming more prosperous. Karaoke pickup joints have spread like a nasty rash across the city from their original reserve in Theingyi Bazaar, a multistory firetrap of sex clubs run by Wa and ethnic-Chinese drug traffickers under the protection of Burmese military intelligence. Even the few positive changes seem, on closer inspection, not much to shout about. For example, Rangoon now boasts a dozen or so cybercafes, but they charge a dollar an hour—more than the average daily wage—and deny access to hundreds of sites deemed “inappropriate.” Who surfs what is easy to plot, because Burma has only two Internet-service providers: one state run, the other owned by the son of military-intelligence chief General Khin Nyunt. The universities, traditionally crucibles of antigovernment protest, are open again—but only for master’s students; the rest must study by correspondence or at campuses far from the city. Job prospects for graduates remain bleak, which is why Rangoon’s taxi drivers are the world’s most overqualified. “Everyone is misplaced in this country,” shrugs a young cabbie with a master’s degree in marine biology. “Graduates drive taxis; soldiers run the government.”

If you want to eat the best pickled-tea-leaf salad in Rangoon, possibly in all of Burma, go to Mrs. Greedy’s tea shop, a collection of plastic furniture occupying the pavement opposite Sule Pagoda. And if you want to talk without fear of being overheard, do what my Burmese friend Ko Myo did when I met him there one evening: lift up one of Mrs. Greedy’s tables and set it down several feet from the nearest customers. Even then you talk in an undertone. It’s a reminder that despite Burma’s tourist-friendly veneer—how many dictatorships have inspired so many coffee-table books?—the junta has not gone soft in its dotage. “They watch us all the time,” says Ko Myo (which, to protect him, is not his real name).

Young, handsome and smarter than a truckful of generals, Ko Myo is a teacher by profession and my guide to the arcane politics of Burma. Thankfully, he’s a patient one. On my first trip to Burma, he had bravely taken me to the house of a prominent democrat. Stupidly, I had no idea who she was or what risks Ko Myo had taken to bring me there. Today, he takes a spoonful of tea-leaf salad and shakes his head in mock disgust. “To think I risked a 10-year prison sentence for that,” he says.

Ko Myo and I share an obsession with George Orwell’s 1984, though, unlike him, I don’t have to live it. He insists that Burma resembles Orwell’s dystopia more with each passing year, from its crippling power cuts to the desperate popular obsession with the lottery. (Everyone in Burma seems to play the numbers.) But when I compare him to Winston, the rebellious protagonist who dares to trust his co-worker Julia, Ko Myo frowns and looks uncharacteristically glum. “There are no Winstons in this country,” he says quietly. “People here don’t even trust themselves anymore.” Although he supports the U.S. sanctions, Ko Myo does not believe they will topple the regime, and now—after years of staying to help his country—he is one of many Burmese leaving in desperation and disgust. It takes hundreds of dollars and months of waiting to get a passport, and the Rangoon office that issues them is now besieged by applicants. It helps to be male. Stung by foreign criticism that Burma is exporting sex workers, the regime now makes it nearly impossible for young women to go abroad. Ironically, this is fueling the local sex industry, which employs burgeoning numbers of painfully young girls.

At Mrs. Greedy’s, Ko Myo lent me his copy of 1984, one of a collection of banned or sensitive books that he disguises in brown paper and risks another lengthy prison term for circulating. I reread it one afternoon in my hotel room with the curtains drawn, emerging hours later to discover that two military-intelligence agents were harassing the staff about my identity and movements. Their timing was unnerving. Orwell’s “Hate Week” parades have a modern Burmese equivalent. Mass rallies had been staged at stadiums nationwide to support a “road map” to democracy launched by Khin Nyunt, one of Burma’s ruling troika of generals, just weeks after U.S. sanctions were announced. The rallies were organized by the regime’s political wing, the Union Solidarity and Development Association, which has millions of members but only because state employees must join or lose their jobs. At one meeting in the ancient capital of Pagan, thousands of people “enthusiastically and unanimously” approved Khin Nyunt’s scheme, reported the New Light of Myanmar. The newspaper’s photos showed people sitting rigidly in perfect rows, looking miserable. Pagan is not a populous town, so to meet the Wagnerian standards set by meetings elsewhere in the country, people had to be ferried in from Mandalay in hundreds of minibuses requisitioned by order of the regional commander.

Khin Nyunt’s road map envisages elections and a new constitution but mentions neither a credible timetable nor Suu Kyi, who led the NLD to a convincing victory in the 1990 election. My Burmese friends regard the whole scheme as a sop to the regime’s supporters in Asia or just another stalling device—either way, more of a roadblock than a road map. (The U.S. State Department recently dismissed it as “hype.”) The late dictator General Ne Win, who seized power in 1962, launched the disastrous “Burmese way to socialism,” which bankrupted the country. Now his protege Khin Nyunt is effectively peddling the “Burmese way to democracy.” No wonder people have to be press-ganged into cheering for it.

They are also being press-ganged into something else: national service. Last year, the regime ordered civil servants to undergo a month of military training. Teaching a restive, resentful population how to fight seems a tactical blunder, but trainees are only given sticks, not rifles, and I hear that those with 15,000 kyat (about $17) can buy themselves out. The Burmese military is stronger than ever—nearly 40% of the national budget goes to the armed forces, making them the second largest in Southeast Asia after Vietnam’s?but also more paranoid than ever. The state-run media is obsessed with Iraq: newspapers carry dozens of articles about suicide bombings, tumbling U.S. troop morale and rising casualties while state TV lifts footage from CNN and dubs over its own gloating commentary. The specter of military intervention has haunted the generals since the 1988 uprising, when the U.S. parked an aircraft carrier in the Indian Ocean. The toppling of Saddam Hussein raises genuine hopes among Burmese that their despots will be next. The U.S. embassy in Rangoon even received messages reading “Please invade us.” But the saturation media coverage of Iraq has served a domestic purpose. “This is our government’s way of telling us, ‘America has its hands full, so don’t expect it to come to your help,’” says a Burmese journalist.

I headed north for Mandalay, Burma’s second-largest city, which I had first visited via dilapidated train from Rangoon, a trip so punishingly long that giant spiders had spun terrifying webs from the luggage racks by the time we arrived. On this occasion, I went by air, which meant landing at one of the most eerie monuments to Burma’s economic mismanagement: Mandalay International Airport. Topped with baroque spires to recall the palatial splendors of Burma’s royal past, the airport was completed in 2000 at an estimated cost of $150 million. Today, ox carts ply its grand, four-lane approach road while the building slumbers in near darkness. The departure and arrival boards are empty, possibly nonfunctioning. Passengers check in for a handful of daily flights, then clump down a dormant escalator to a stifling departure lounge, where they fan themselves with their boarding cards.

The junta evidently believed a lavish new airport would transform Mandalay into a regional business hub. However, most goods still arrive in the city by the usual overland route. Mandalay is the terminus of the Burma Road, its trading lifeline to neighboring China, and the main reason the economy has plodded along without ever breaking down catastrophically (so far). Another reason is the nation’s staggering agricultural wealth.

For centuries, travelers have depicted Burma as an agrarian paradise so fertile that, as one saying goes, a farmer tickles the earth with his hoe and it laughs a harvest.

Although nobody starves in Burma, poverty and malnutrition exist and are by some accounts increasing. Outside Mandalay, I visited the families of migrant workers who live in squalid lean-tos on the wide, refuse-strewn banks of the Irrawaddy River. They labor for subsistence wages, shoveling sand from dredging boats or hauling illegal timber. Often there’s not enough work to go around, and sometimes—for example, when the dredgers run out of fuel—there’s none at all. Sickness is everywhere. “I have a husband and three children,” said a woman dressed in rags, “and one of us is always ill.” Nearby, a dying 18-month-old child, as skeletal as a famine victim, clung to a slightly older sister pot-bellied with disease. Just offshore, tourist boats skimmed past on day trips to more photogenic places.

What wealth exists in Mandalay belongs to Chinese immigrants, who arrived in their hundreds of thousands in the 1990s and now dominate the city’s commercial life—much to the resentment of its original residents. The city is also a favored refuge of Wa and Chinese drug traffickers, who cruise the city’s free-for-all intersections in dark-windowed late-model Land Cruisers and Pajeros. Like native Mandalayans, I negotiated the streets by bicycle or trishaw, or else flagged down a 40-year-old Mazda B600 taxi, Burma’s answer to the Trabant. Exploring the pot-holed backstreets, I came across extravagant faux-classical mansions towering over otherwise destitute neighborhoods where poor sanitation feeds regular outbreaks of cholera and pariah dogs nose through uncollected rubbish. In Burma, it seems, there are only two kinds of new buildings: museums constructed to celebrate the elimination of the narcotics trade and drug villas built on its proceeds.

Mandalay might be Burma’s second-largest city, but its community of democrats is small and easily terrorized. A local NLD leader was jailed for five years for seeing a foreign reporter. I arrived in Mandalay to news that Win Mya Mya, a prominent NLD member who had had both arms broken in the Black Friday attack, had been shifted from a military hospital to a prison cell at nearby Shwebo. Her relatives were still forbidden to see her.

By the time of the attack, Suu Kyi had been attracting large and increasingly bold crowds. The enthusiastic response from ethnic areas was especially galling to the generals, because it challenged their long-cherished notion that only the Burmese military can unite the country’s disparate ethnic groups. The regime’s emphatic response to this rising euphoria was an assault so calculating and sadistic that skull fragments and clumps of bloody hair littered the road where it took place. Suu Kyi was detained with about a hundred of her party members, including elderly deputy Tin Oo; both Suu Kyi and Tin Oo are still under house arrest. The authorities shut NLD offices nationwide, although last week the party’s Rangoon headquarters was allowed to reopen. The party rank and file remains traumatized. Later, I would meet a stalwart too fearful to carry his NLD membership card but who instead defiantly scratched his membership number from memory on the corner of a newspaper.

Since Black Friday, more state-sponsored violence had erupted. The evening before my arrival, a hundreds-strong posse of government thugs had razed a Muslim neighborhood in Kyaukse, a town not far from Mandalay. Ten people had burned to death, including a pregnant woman. Burma is home to anywhere from 2 million to 8 million Muslims?it’s impossible to be more accurate because most are denied Burmese citizenship and therefore don’t appear in official records. They are often the target of state-orchestrated violence incited (the theory goes) to distract everyone else from their own meager lot. An older Burmese friend reminded me how Ne Win had provoked anti-Chinese riots in 1967 to divert attention from the rising price of rice.

The unrest mutated and spread in the following days. I watched truckloads of armed soldiers thunder through Mandalay’s ill-lit streets. Some areas were placed under curfew; people said it had been more than a year since the city had been so tense. Then troops opened fire on a crowd of protesting monks, killing at least two and injuring many. From nearby towns came reports of more disturbances, news of which arrived in Mandalay on buses and trucks and spread with viral stealth through the city’s network of trishaw drivers. Hiring one to check out the dark, deserted streets, I was struck by how well suited trishaws were to disseminating news. With me leaning forward in my seat and the driver bent slightly with the exertion of pedaling the rutted tarmac, he could whisper into my ear without anyone noticing, let alone hearing. He told me that eight charred bodies from Kyaukse had arrived at the city morgue. “The government killed them!” he said in a Gollum-like hiss. “The government killed them all!”

I returned to Rangoon, and the unrest seemed to follow. Muslim businesses in the capital were attacked by what observers claimed were soldiers disguised as monks; monasteries were under a heavily guarded curfew; bars and tea shops were closing early. Later, two bombs exploded, one on the outskirts of the city, which injured many people, the other outside an army museum. Then, last month, came reports of small demonstrations on campuses as far north as Myitkyina. Despite all this, none of my Rangoon friends were predicting an imminent 1988-style uprising. “People are just too scared,” said one. DONATE BLOOD, urged the ads in state newspapers. Burma’s democrats already have, by the bucketful.

Much of this shadowy violence was probably perpetrated by the state itself and conceivably augured a distant leadership conflict. Some Burma watchers talk of a split between the regime’s hard-liners and moderates, a wishful hypothesis that essentially boils down to two people. The so-called moderate is the ageless, reptilian Khin Nyunt, the newly fashioned “Prime Minister General,” who is always conspicuously equipped with a sidearm during official visits, even to kindergartens. His rival is Than Shwe, the top general and archetypal hard-liner. To encourage unity, the Burmese military has always promoted loyalty before brains, and Than Shwe is the result. He is even the thinly disguised butt of a joke in a popular Burmese magazine in which three students are boasting about their uncles. The first says, “My uncle has no arms, but he has swum across the Irrawaddy River five times.” The second says, “My uncle has no legs, but he has climbed the Golden Rock Pagoda 10 times.” The third says: “So what? My uncle has no brain, and he runs the country.” If that joke seems spiteful, consider this: diplomats report that Than Shwe firmly believes that Union Solidarity and Development Association rallies are genuine expressions of mass support.

Walking through downtown Rangoon, I noticed with horror how acres of historic buildings have been demolished to make way for the modern towers the junta hopes will dominate the capital’s skyline by 2006, when Burma is to chair the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and host its the summit. Most of these projects, including the inauspiciously named Twin Towers, sit idle for lack of investment. Ordinary Burmese feel baffled and betrayed by the encouragement their oppressors get from Asia’s leaders. Privately, Southeast Asian diplomats insist they are heaping more backroom pressure on Burma than their abysmal public showing suggests. One dearly hopes so. ASEAN now faces the prospect of showcasing its member states’ considerable achievements in a country that is a global byword for backwardness and brutality.

The junta promises to reconvene next month a national convention on a new constitution. Yet the arrest, surveillance and intimidation of opposition figures continues, Amnesty International notes in a March 31 report, while as many as 1,400 political prisoners—many of whom should by rights participate in the convention—still languish in prison. Ambiguous public remarks by Burmese Foreign Minister Win Aung, followed by the release from house arrest of two senior NLD leaders last week, have raised hopes that Suu Kyi and party vice chairman Tin Oo will soon be freed, too. We’ll see. The convention’s success depends on much else besides. It is far from clear whether Suu Kyi, even if freed, would be allowed to attend or whether delegates will be able to speak freely. Some delegates were sentenced to long jail terms for criticizing the last convention, which collapsed in 1996. All this fuels the suspicion that the generals merely want the upcoming convention to rubber-stamp a constitution that would preserve their grip on power.

The military has already proved false an age-old Burmese saying, “The night cannot get darker after midnight.” Poverty, fear, the paucity of opportunities, the remorseless persecution of the best and the brightest, the slow extinguishing of hope: what was once unimaginably bad in Burma has grown worse with each passing year. And yet, while writing this, I receive an e-mail sent at great risk by Ko Myo in which he has listed the names of 10 men, women and children, aged 13 to 70, along with their professions: housewife, merchant, student, mother-to-be. These people, he says, were all incinerated by the state thugs at Kyaukse. For their sakes, I believe, pessimism is not an option. We have a duty to hope. I pick up the phone and try that number on University Avenue again. It rings.