What has happened to Myanmar's revolution?

The hopes kindled by the saffron revolution have faded fast

AS DUSK shrouds the Sule pagoda in central Yangon, the dazzling neon
haloes behind many of the Buddhas' heads flash brighter. Before them
the devout, kneeling in their sarongs, murmur prayers, light
joss-sticks and touch their foreheads to the marble floor. Outside,
traffic roars on the city's busiest roundabout. The shrine, housing a
hair from the Buddha's head, is one of Myanmar's holiest and some
2,000 years old. But Burmese temples are all works in progress. This
one gleams with fresh white paint and gold leaf. In contrast, over the
road, the dirty-yellow façade of City Hall is a study in crumbling
neglect.

Even in the commercial heart of its largest city, religion remains
central to life in Myanmar. Many Burmese felt the country's thuggish
junta crossed a line last September, when its soldiers opened fire on
monks leading protests against its rule—including some beside the Sule
pagoda. It seemed proof that a regime fond of numerology and
superstition ruled neither by divine right nor by popular
acquiescence, but by force. Nobody knows how many were killed as the
protests were quashed; much of Myanmar remains an information chasm. A
United Nations rapporteur has said at least 31 died. In Yangon many
believe, probably wrongly, that hundreds or thousands did. Suppressing
the truth lets all sorts of rumours flourish.

As in 1988, when thousands did die as an anti-government uprising was
put down, there was international outrage, followed by fresh sanctions
last autumn. A United Nations envoy, Ibrahim Gambari of Nigeria, was
sent to Myanmar to convey concern, and thousands joined protest
marches round the world. But a few months on, the generals appear as
immovable as ever. Indeed, diplomats who have visited them in the
remote mountain fastness of their new capital, Naypyidaw, say they are
even more confident. A squall has been weathered, and they can return
to what they do best: wrecking their country and making a good living
out of it.

Over a pricey cappuccino in Mr Brown's, a café just behind City Hall,
in a dingy first-floor lounge favoured by courting couples, a young
man discusses the protests. He took part in the previous round with a
scarf covering his face. But the time, he says, is not right to take
to the streets again. He cannot afford to. Many others say the same.
He works as a house-painter, earning about $30 a month, and lives in a
Yangon suburb with his parents, landless farmers who make about $20 a
month each. During the protests he went five days without work or pay.
Like almost all his contemporaries, his ambition is to find a job
abroad. He could get one in Singapore but would need to pay $3,000 for
the privilege, an unimaginable fortune.

Yet, quietly, low-level protests continue. In late March many monks
boycotted annual state-run examinations in Buddhist literature.
Soldiers have been, in effect, excommunicated. Monks refuse to accept
alms from them, denying them karma-enhancing "merit". And such is the
thirst for revenge of many in Yangon that renewed protests are
possible at any time. Cloistered in Naypyidaw, the junta may be caught
unawares again. "They live in a bubble when they're out," says one
diplomat, "and a bunker when they're not."

Repression continues, too. Many monks are still in their villages,
where they were sent after the unrest. At a monastery in Pakokku,
where the beating of monks last September played a big part in fanning
the flames of protest, more than a third have yet to return. Some of
those locked up during the protests are still detained—perhaps 1,000,
alongside 1,100 long-term political prisoners. Others are still being
arrested. On March 29th six young people were detained for staging a
peaceful rally against the draft constitution the junta wants to foist
on Myanmar. Another protester, Ohn Than, who was arrested last August
while staging a silent sit-in to protest against fuel-price rises, was
sentenced this month to life imprisonment. Some protest leaders are
still in hiding, planning the next round. Others have fled to
Thailand.

The official press remains laughably propagandist. ("Commander,
Minister view thriving mung, sunflower plantations" was one recent
front-page story in the New Light of Myanmar, the junta's
English-language daily.) Access to foreign news is limited. But a
threat this year to ban satellite dishes by imposing extortionate
licence fees was not carried out. Perhaps the generals feared that
losing the right to watch English football—a tea-shop passion—would
have been the final straw.

Internet connections are at best patchy, and almost non-existent at
times of tension, such as during last month's visit to Yangon by Mr
Gambari. Foreign journalists are not allowed into the country, unless
they pretend to be tourists. A number do. After a purge of the
intelligence services in 2004, the immigration authorities appear to
have mislaid their files.

Tension will mount again next month. In its one gesture to political
reform, the junta has said it will hold a referendum on the new
constitution. This week it announced the date—May 10th—and published
the draft, putting copies of the 194-page document on sale. If the
vote goes ahead, and the draft is approved by 50% of voters, the junta
says multiparty elections would follow in 2010. On "Armed Forces Day",
March 27th, Than Shwe, the senior general in the junta, promised he
would then hand over power to a civilian government. The regime is
waging a propaganda campaign to promote a "yes" vote. In big letters,
as if speaking slowly to a classroom of dim children, the New Light
pointed out that, if the draft is not approved by 2010, elections will
be delayed. "If so, it will take longer for the nation to exercise
democracy."

Not, of course, that democracy is really on offer. "Guidelines" agreed
after 14 years of aimless rumination by a committee appointed to take
the generals' dictation appeared last September. They made clear that
some of the main features of military dictatorship would persist. The
army chief would have the power to intervene in politics at will and
several ministries would be reserved for army officers, as would 25%
of seats in both houses of parliament. Aung San Suu Kyi, the detained
opposition leader, would be excluded from politics, as the widow of a
foreigner. The generals seem to have retreated, however, from a
provision in an earlier version of the draft in which any amendment of
the constitution would need 75% of the votes in parliament. Instead,
it would have to be approved by 50% of the popular vote.

"The issue", says Mark Canning, Britain's ambassador in Yangon, "is
not Clause A, B or C. It's the whole superstructure of intimidation
that hangs over it." There is no dialogue with the opposition, whose
most important members are locked up. And, under the law, criticising
the convention that drafted the constitution is punishable by up to 20
years in jail.

Miss Suu Kyi's party, the National League for Democracy, has called
for a "no" vote. Exiled activists and monks advocate a boycott. Many
critics of the regime who used to think any change was better than
none have changed their minds since last September's violence.
However, a resounding "yes" vote seems inevitable. The junta surely
will not repeat the mistake it made in 1990, when it held an election
and was astonished to be routed. Miss Suu Kyi was already in
detention. Yet the League won more than 60% of the votes and 80% of
the seats, even doing well in areas dominated by soldiers.

The League fears that, before or after the referendum, it might be
banned. Already its organisation has been whittled down to little more
than a head office in Yangon. The parliament that emerges in 2010 may
include a handful of token opposition politicians. But it will
probably be dominated by soldiers, by the junta's cronies—urban
businessmen and rural landowners—and by members of a new political
party the junta is planning to form. Its nucleus would be the "Union
Solidarity and Development Association" (USDA), a pro-junta group
formed in 1993. USDA is one of a number of ill-defined "mass social
organisations" that claim over 20m members—presumably by pressganging
students, civil servants and others to join up. It is best known for a
hard core of white-shirted thugs, used for pro-junta rallies.

The parliament would also include representatives of the "ceasefire
groups", the dozen or so ethnic insurgencies on Myanmar's borders with
which the junta has reached truces. Some groups, such as the Karen
National Union, fight on. These wars have dragged on since
independence in 1948. In his book on Myanmar, "The River of Lost
Footsteps", Thant Myint-u argues that the West tends to see the
country as the seat of a thwarted Eastern European-style people-power
revolution. But it is in fact a war-torn disaster area, like
Afghanistan or Cambodia. The constitution, he says, would at least
formalise a sort of peace with some of its insurgents.

It would be wildly optimistic to hope that creating a parliamentary
system of the sort the junta seems to envisage might, over time, bring
pluralism. But the process does at least imply some change in
Myanmar's predicament. And, as Miss Suu Kyi used to say, Myanmar is
like a frozen river: it looks still, but who knows what turbulence is
roiling the waters under the ice?

For most Burmese, the predicament is economic as well as political.
Freedoms have been trampled on for decades. And making a living is
actually getting harder. Last year, as in 1988, it was an economic
grievance—an increase in the fuel price as subsidies were slashed—that
sparked political unrest. It is not that the economy is on the point
of collapse. It collapsed long ago. Those eking out a living in the
rubble are still vulnerable to aftershocks.

Collapse is not immediately evident in Yangon. There are ugly shanty
towns and slums. But busy streets, a few swanky hotels and shops,
advertisement-filled business journals and some palatial mansions in
the leafy hills testify to a thin but not insignificant layer of
middle-class comfort—and a rare splash of grotesque wealth. Until the
1990s, Yangon seemed frozen in its colonial past. Almost the only cars
on its broad avenues were ancient, patched-up sedans. Ne Win, the
dictator who led the army into power in 1962, pursued a "Burmese Road
to Socialism" of autarky, isolation and utter stagnation. After the
1988 uprising the generals allowed a partial opening up, and a
minority has prospered.

Unbidden, a taxi-driver takes a detour to drive past the high gates of
a palace he says belongs to Tay Za, the regime's most prominent
business crony. Beyond the reinforced grille half-a-dozen shiny new
sports cars can be glimpsed. "Dirty money," snarls the driver,
alleging it comes from Myanmar's big drugs trade (mainly, these days,
methamphetamines rather than heroin). But when it tightened sanctions
on Mr Za in February, America's Treasury called him just an "arms
dealer and financial henchman" of the junta.

Underpinning the wealth of the elite is more than drugs and guns. Its
biggest legal export is of natural gas to Thailand. India and China
are also hungrily eyeing other oil and gas reserves, and already the
generals can relish the prospect of a windfall from a planned pipeline
to China. The Thai sales earned an estimated $2.7 billion last year,
45% of total exports. But this neither trickles down nor creates many
jobs. The junta spends the money on itself, its arsenal and its absurd
new capital. By contrast, a small garment-export industry has been
destroyed by Western government sanctions and consumer boycotts,
putting an estimated 100,000 people out of work.

So, beyond agriculture, there are few jobs. And in the countryside
life is ever grimmer. A survey late last year by the government and
the United Nations Development Programme found that of a population of
about 53m, 30% lived below the poverty line. Infant mortality rates
were high, at 76 per 1,000 live births. The UN's World Food Programme
(WFP) says that 32% of children under five are malnourished. Of
children enrolled in primary school, 57% drop out.

Feeding itself should be the least of Myanmar's problems. Burma, as it
was until the junta renamed it in 1989, was once the ricebowl of Asia.
Even today, and with rice in shorter supply across the continent, it
produces a national rice surplus. Yet many of its 14 states or
divisions have deficits. In northern Rakhine food shortages are
perennial and malnutrition rife. There are also deficits in the
"Central Dry Zone" and in Shan state, where the eradication of
opium-poppy fields has impoverished farmers. Rice distribution is
disrupted by pigheaded divisional commanders clinging on to their
surpluses, and by army restrictions on internal traffic. So, in what
one development worker calls a "heresy", the WFP is helping feed
Myanmar.

Alarmingly, despite agricultural plenty, Myanmar has the classic
conditions for a famine: acute poverty, poor or non-existent flows of
information and crazy policies. In one cackhanded intervention in
agriculture, the junta in 2006 ordered every farmer with an acre (0.4
hectares) of land to plant "physic nuts" (jatropha) around the edge of
his plot. It was so keen on the crop that it also set up special
plantations. The idea was to make biofuels to meet Myanmar's energy
shortage—even much of Yangon spends most evenings in darkness. But
Myanmar lacks the refineries to turn the plants into fuel. The policy
has been cited by many refugees pitching up at the Thai border as one
reason for their flight: typically, the junta has been dragooning
farmers into working for no pay in its jatropha plantations, so it
becomes even harder to make a living.

Burma was a crossroads of Asia. Myanmar's isolation is a new
phenomenon, and its borders still provide a safety valve of sorts.
That is especially true of Thailand, which has absorbed perhaps as
many as 2m Burmese immigrants. Some analysts suggest that a sharp
downturn in the Thai economy, closing that valve, might cause an
explosion in Myanmar.

Even if economic hardship provokes another outburst of popular unrest,
however, there is little reason to think the junta cannot handle it.
It has about 500,000 soldiers, twice the number in 1988, despite the
subsequent ceasefires in many of the insurgencies it was fighting. And
the army has so far proved willing to shoot civilians—even monks—if
ordered to.

Before the purge in 2004 of Khin Nyunt, the intelligence chief who was
then prime minister, it was possible to perceive policy rifts in the
junta's ranks. Some seemed to favour a cautious opening to the West,
even if it meant talking to Miss Suu Kyi. Some analysts believe the
junta is still divided: over the succession to Than Shwe, said to be
ill, though he looked hale in March; over the alleged rivalry with his
number two, Maung Aye; and over the transition to "civilian rule".
This seems plausible. But to hope for a mutiny, or self-destruction by
the army, is wishful thinking. Its generals are probably too afraid of
hanging separately not to hang together.

Some of the students who fled to the Thai border in 1988 expected to
return, like Aung San, Miss Suu Kyi's father and Burma's liberation
hero, as part of a conquering foreign army. One theory to explain the
junta's bizarre move to Naypyidaw in 2005 is that, after the war in
Iraq, it too feared invasion.

Now, veterans of the exile movement have almost given up hope of
concerted diplomatic pressure, let alone military action, against the
regime. People power, says one, is the only hope. At present that
suggests only failure and bloodshed. And the outside world is
certainly in disarray. The West favours sanctions and punishment; but
Myanmar's fellow members of the Association of South-East Asian
Nations (ASEAN), as well as India and, above all, China, hope their
continued engagement with the junta will win them influence. China did
indeed seem to persuade the generals to receive Mr Gambari and
institute a dialogue with Miss Suu Kyi.

Than Shwe, however, would not even meet Mr Gambari on his most recent
visit, last month. The West, meanwhile, has few levers of influence
left. In part this is a result of having followed Miss Suu Kyi's own
wishes. In the late 1990s, when the conditions of her detention were
briefly eased and she could talk to the world, she favoured using
sanctions and boycotts, including even of tourism, to put pressure on
the junta. It is assumed she still does.

The Nobel peace-prize-winner's undoubted moral authority and
courageous perseverance give her stance considerable weight. So does
her huge electoral mandate. It may be old, but no one has a better
one. Some Western policymakers now see Miss Suu Kyi as part of the
problem. But that is daft. Without her, the opposition would lose not
just a figurehead, but perhaps the last flicker of hope in Myanmar's
political darkness.

The Economist

April 12, 2008
U.S. Edition