Pubdate: Tue, 14 Nov 2000 Source: New York Times (NY) Copyright: 2000 The New York Times Company Contact: 229 West 43rd Street, New York, NY 10036 Fax: (212) 556-3622 Website: http://www.nytimes.com/ Forum: http://forums.nytimes.com/comment/ Author: Blaine Harden FOR BURMESE, REPRESSION, AIDS AND DENIAL YANGON, Myanmar -- To inoculate themselves against any outbreak of democracy, the generals who run this hermit dictatorship have undertaken two urgent missions of self-preservation. Seeking support from the Buddhist majority in what used to be called Burma, the junta is sprucing up old pagodas and building new ones at a pace and on a scale that experts say is without precedent. 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. In an autumn that has been unkind to autocrats — Slobodan Milosevic failed to steal an election in Serbia and the youngest son of Indonesia's ousted president, Suharto, was convicted of corruption — the generals here are taking no chances. They 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. Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi, the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991, has spent more than 6 of the last 11 years under house arrest. Senior leaders of her party have been imprisoned or placed under house arrest. Two of the most influential monks, who wrote letters that begged the generals to talk to Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi, are being watched by military intelligence. The army halted huge pro-democracy demonstrations 12 years ago by killing several hundred people and jailing thousands more. Since then, the generals have doubled the size of the armed forces, to more than 400,000, though Myanmar, with a population estimated at 50 million, faces no serious foreign threat and has made peace with most of its armed ethnic minorities. 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 slums. It has closed most urban universities and sent students off to remote rural campuses. Labor unions and private civic associations are banned. No elections are scheduled; none seem likely. The generals have made it a crime to own a computer modem, send e-mail, sign on to the Internet or invite a foreigner into a private home. Since seizing power 38 years ago, the military dictatorship has renamed the country, renamed this capital (formerly Rangoon) and renamed scores of other cities, towns and religious shrines. Every few years, the generals rename themselves. After the 1988 retirement of the founding dictator, Gen. Ne Win, his handpicked successors decided to call their junta the State Law and Order Restoration Council, known inside and outside the country as Slorc. In 1997, as the generals opened the country to foreign investors and tried to soften their image, the name was changed to the State Peace and Development Council. S.P.D.C., though, has not caught on. People seem to relish calling their self-appointed leaders "Slorc." The generals have also stopped allowing foreign journalists into the country, especially Americans. But Slorc, starved for foreign currency, began admitting sizable numbers of tourists after 1996, which it proclaimed "Visit Myanmar Year." This reporter visited the country in late October and early November as a tourist after the Myanmar 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 article 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." In Jail, Fried Rat Is a Delicacy A former political detainee had been in prison for about six years when a cellmate told him about "Visit Myanmar Year." On hearing the news, he remembers laughing for hours in his prison cell. "We said that if any foreigner visits our cell for one night, then he will know the real Burma," he said. He is in his 40's and was arrested by military intelligence for associating with a banned political party. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison at a secret trial where there were no civilian witnesses. He did not have a lawyer. Human rights groups say his experience is typical. There are about 1,400 political prisoners in Myanmar, according to an American Embassy count. The former prisoner's incarceration began when guards forced a stinking blue cotton bag over his head and asked him questions for four days without allowing him to sleep. He said the bag, which kept him from seeing the faces of his changing cast of interrogators, was fouled with sweat, mucous and blood. "It smelled very awful," he said, "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. Unlike some unlucky prisoners who were not allowed to clean up after themselves, he said he was occasionally permitted to scrape excrement from his cell. For years after that, his only reading material was the odd scrap of newspaper he sometimes found in the wrapping of cheroots, local cigars that prisoners often traded for food. On one shard of newsprint, he said, he read the obituary of a cousin. The International Committee of the Red Cross began making prison visits here in May 1999 and some prisoners now have access to reading material. The prison where the man was confined is in an isolated rural area more than 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 only 15 minutes in a room where one guard took notes and another made sure he never touched his wife or his mother. In the months between those meetings, he said, he rehearsed all the things he wanted to tell his family. After years of practice, he said, he and his wife and mother learned to talk and listen at the same time. The two women brought food that the former prisoner believes kept him and several of his prison friends alive. In the long gaps 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." Deep Poverty, Still, Bright Smiles Half a century ago, Norman Lewis, a British travel writer, noted that the Burmese "emerge into the sunshine immaculate and serene." "There is no misery that manifests itself in rags and sores," he wrote in "Golden Earth" in 1952. 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 Myanmar second to last among 191 nations in the quality of its health care services. (Sierra Leone was last.) Most people here 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 United Nations agencies and the World Bank. Yet the paradox of serenity and elegance persists. Most women and men still wear longyis, or sarongs, many woven in brilliant colors. At rush hour in city traffic, women have a poised, almost regal way of sitting sideways on the backs of bicycles. Passengers on insanely overcrowded buses don't become impatient. Children smile at strangers from faces that their mothers have painted with 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. Every morning, preadolescent monks in crimson robes walk the streets, ringing bells and chanting — and adults, in response, fill their bowls with rice and fruit. Unlike prosperous Thailand next door, where 90 percent of the forest has been cut down, this country still has about half its forest cover. There is almost no paper trash in the villages; people value paper. The charming countenance of the people and the seductive beauty of the countryside, however, are misleading. Western governments and United Nations agencies say 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. Some of this results from peace deals the junta has struck in recent years with armed ethnic groups in the northeast of the country. Partly because Slorc does not have the power to stop them, these ethnic groups grow opium that is smuggled to China and India and make amphetamines sold in Thailand. Myanmar is the world's second-largest producer of opium, after Afghanistan. Slorc is not believed to be in the drug business itself, but it welcomes money from those who are. "The government actively encourages the investment of narcotics profits in the Burmese economy, as part of a strategy to wean the ethnic organizations from heroin production and to offset the shortage of foreign investment," according to the Country Commercial Guide published by the American Embassy in September. Many of the country's new hotels and offices have been built with drug money, the report said, which added that laundered narcotics profits have also supplemented government spending on roads and bridges. The State Department and several human rights groups say the junta, despite repeated denials, continues to use forced labor to build government projects and supply porters for the army. "Porters who no longer can work often are either abandoned without medical care or assistance, or executed," said this year's State Department report on human rights, citing what it said were credible reports. The experiment in allowing foreign investors into the country is floundering, as top generals have begun to seize the profits and assets of successful companies, according to local business executives and Western diplomats. Scores of foreign businesses, including major Japanese companies like Toyota and All Nippon Airways, have fled the country in the last year. A dentist who treats resident foreigners in Yangon said that in less than 12 months, the number of Japanese businesspeople in his patient pool has fallen to 300 from 700. Acting on orders of the prime minister, Senior Gen. Than Shwe, soldiers last year occupied a brewery in Mandalay after it became profitable with the help of $6 million in foreign investment. The main investor, Win Win Nu, a businesswoman living in Singapore, told The Far Eastern Economic Review in November that the success of the brewery made it "an easy target for greedy soldiers and bureaucrats." Denial Deepens an AIDS Plague By far the most serious public-policy problem in Myanmar is AIDS. The government's owns figures (which have not been made public inside the country) show that the infection rate among prostitutes has soared to levels that epidemiologists say compare to those in Africa. The infection rate among prostitutes in Myanmar's two largest cities averaged 47 percent last year — three times the rate in Thailand. "There is a catastrophe in Burma," said Dr. Chris Beyrer, an epidemiologist and director of international AIDS training at Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health. "It is what happens with an epidemic when you do nothing." The epidemic followed a huge increase in heroin addiction among users sharing needles, said Dr. Beyrer, a specialist in AIDS in Southeast Asia. A Slorc-financed report four years ago found that heroin use jumped "dramatically" in 1988, the year the democracy movement was crushed. According to Dr. Beyrer, that was when a flood of cheap heroin hit the market. A uniquely Burmese culture of sharing needles in tea stalls has contributed to an addiction rate that Dr. Beyrer said is among the highest in the world. A government study in the mid-1990's, which was deemed to be too sensitive to be released in Myanmar but was made available to scientists abroad, found that 4 percent of men and 2 percent of women were heroin users. About 57 percent of users injecting drugs have H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS, according to the most recent government figures. The virus has since moved from drug users into the sex industry, which Dr. Beyrer said has grown rapidly in the last decade — particularly among teenage girls — because of increased poverty and government programs of forced relocation. Two prominent doctors in the country said the generals are in denial about AIDS. Counseling is virtually nonexistent; condoms, which were banned by the generals until 1993, are prohibitively expensive for most people. Free AIDS testing is rare, and most people cannot afford the $10 test to determine if they have H.I.V. Once a patient is diagnosed, the doctors said, he or she usually dies within three months. There are virtually no anti-H.I.V. drugs in the country. There is also an acute shortage of antibiotics for tuberculosis, the biggest killer of infected people here. The virus is also spreading in jails, where prisoners can obtain food (often, a single egg) for a blood donation and where transfusion equipment is often reused without cleaning, according to Dr. Beyrer. The disease is spreading, too, in monasteries around Mandalay, according to a doctor who lives there. He said many infected young men, shunned by their families, move into monasteries to die. The doctor said he has treated a number of monks with AIDS, several elderly. Before they died, some of the monks told him that they contracted the disease by shaving their heads with razors shared inside the monastery. News about the AIDS epidemic, the flight of foreign investors or the country's reliance on drug money never appears here. All publications are censored, in a process that takes about a month for magazines. State-controlled daily newspapers and the evening television news concentrate on flowery accounts of the generals' doings, as well as long interviews with senior officers instructing the masses on correct ways to grow vegetables. "The fact is people turn off the TV when the news is shown," Brig. Gen. Zaw Tun, a deputy minister for national planning, dared to say at an economic conference in July, according to American diplomats who have talked with people who attended. "Only after the news hour, they switch the TV on again to view Chinese movies." The general has since lost his job. Long Shadow of 'The Lady' "The lady," as people here who are afraid to whisper her name call her, has again been locked up. It is dangerous to go near her heavily guarded home in Yangon. But even inside her house, where each morning before dawn she meditates, exercises on a Nordic Trak and listens to the BBC World Service, the Voice of America and Radio Free Asia, Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi torments the generals. The official press can't quite decide what to call the 55-year-old woman, who returned here in 1988 after 20 years in England. They use a number of snide and vulgar nicknames: "the stunt actress of democracy," "puppet doll," "England returnee miss" and, in a sneering echo from the Clinton White House, "that woman." She often is called "Mrs. Aris," a reference to her late husband, Dr. Michael Aris, an Oxford historian who died last year of cancer, although in Burmese usage a woman is not called by her husband's name. The junta's problem with her actual name is that it invokes the memory of her father, the most famous and revered man in this country's history, Gen. Aung San. He effectively created modern Burma before he was assassinated in 1947. He was a gifted military leader who believed in democratic, civilian government. The day of his murder is an important national holiday. General Aung San's daughter also happens to be a fine public speaker and a knowledgeable student of Buddhism. Despite Slorc's campaign of pagoda-building and its effort to discredit Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi, several senior monks said she enjoys the loyalty of many of the country's 400,000 monks. When the generals do let her out of her house, she consistently demands that all negotiations begin with recognition of the 1990 election. Her party won 80 percent of the seats; most of those who won are in prison. Until those negotiations begin, she says, she will support the sanctions on investment, travel and arms sales that have been imposed on Burma by the United States and several Western countries. (She insists that the country's name is Burma.) She has said, too, that her party will not be vengeful. The generals, however, do not believe her, according to Western diplomats who speak to them. They reportedly fear that they and their families will be forced to surrender their fortunes and will face prosecution or execution. In the dismal stalemate, the government is still trying to explain why it never really lost that parliamentary election. "Some of the voters wrongly cast their votes," argued The New Light of Myanmar, a government daily, in a full-page post-election analysis that ran in October, a decade after votes were counted. The piece reasoned that citizens misunderstood their patriotic duty in 1990 because they had been intoxicated by the "personality cult" of a "super political actress." How the Dead Make an Impact It has become a political act here to bury the dead. Slorc decreed in the mid-1990's that many urban cemeteries be closed. Some graves were moved, more were paved over. It was part of urban renewal in Yangon, Mandalay and several other cities, as Slorc geared up for "Visit Myanmar Year." The generals ordered new cemeteries built about 15 miles outside of Mandalay, far enough that bereaved families had to hire a motorized hearse. At $15 a funeral, many poor people in Mandalay found they could not afford to bury their loved ones. Private civic associations are illegal (as are private outdoor gatherings of more than five people), but two years ago about 20 individuals in Mandalay decided to take a risk. They raised money to buy a hearse and found a senior monk who allowed them to park it at his monastery. For a while, censors refused to allow the funeral society to be mentioned in any publication or the broadcast media. But the burial movement became a word-of-mouth sensation in Mandalay, and word of it spread to other large cities where generals had closed cemeteries. Swamped with donations from Burmese who could spare a few dollars and are reared in the Buddhist tradition of giving, the Mandalay funeral society raised money for eight hearses and had lots of cash left over. Founders of the society began buying medicines for poor people in hospitals. Last month they distributed about $1,000 worth of drugs to, among other patients, a woman with an ovarian tumor, a child with amputated feet and a man with cancer of the rectum. Their success is apparently angering the generals. "They say it makes them look bad," said one member of the group who has been warned to stop giving medicine to the sick. "They think we are rivals, but we are not rivaling them." Censors now allow local magazines to mention the funeral society, but all references to the distribution of free drugs are strictly banned. Bleak Present, Bleaker Future Burmese people talk hopefully, but passively, about the propitious power of the number 13. It's been 12 years since the uprising that nearly toppled the generals, they say. Next year, surely, something good will happen. But the lockdown of Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi and party leaders has, for the time being, halted all movement toward peaceful political change, opposition members admit. An armed insurrection against the army seems even less likely. The junta is stronger than ever. Outside leverage is limited. The generals maintain relatively peaceful relations in the region and are especially friendly with China, their principal source of arms. This country has perhaps the most fertile farmland in Southeast Asia, and usually produces enough rice and other food for its people. Finally, diplomats discern no significant divisions within the junta. They say the generals know they have too much to lose. Slorc, then, seems secure. The generals seem to have unlimited free time to inspect pagodas and make speeches about the glory of the precolonial past. That was when Burma was ruled by kings who built thousands of Buddhist shrines — a crusade for which they expected to accumulate merit. Photographs now on display 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, he added, the generals will come back as rats. - --- MAP posted-by: Richard Lake