Locking Out the 20th Century

For more than a generation, the country has existed in a time warp--and in a state of solitary confinement. Since 1962, when General Ne Win seized power in Burma, foreigners have been unwelcome, borders have been tight, private business has been discouraged, and development has all but halted. Staff Writer Pico Iyer recently made his second visit to the largely closed society. His report:

Jeeps left over from the war, 1955 Chevrolets, 1953 Czech-made Skodas and armies of dilapidated jalopies jounce and judder through the broad avenues of Rangoon, Burma's capital. In the distance, red-brick Victorian steeples poke up among the golden domes of the pagodas, and along the road, great white-columned English mansions stand empty like haunted houses, their walls mildewed, their gardens overrun with weeds, moisture dripping from their eaves. In the Strand Hotel, a grand monument to colonial decay, ceiling fans turn lazily above a lost-and-found case still stuffed with pince-nez, ladies' compacts and rusting cuff links misplaced during an age of vanished elegance. Around the lobby, black-tied men in curry-stained white coats serve up tea and porridge on tarnished silver trays. "Here, you must always remember," says an official, in the lovely English she learned under British rule, "that you are living in the 18th century."

Or, at best, the early days of the 20th. Today, after almost a quarter-century of secession from the world at large, Burma resembles nothing so much as a cob-webbed attic cluttered with sepia-toned relics, moth-eaten keepsakes and old curiosities. Along the capital's streets, there are no high-rises, no nightclubs, no neon signs; even Coca-Cola is unknown here. At the offices of Burma Airways, as in every other office, there are no typewriters, let alone computer terminals, just bulky Dickensian ledgers thick with dust. The country boasts two TV stations, but neither of them broadcasts for more than two hours a day. If Burma did not exist, Evelyn Waugh would have had to invent it.

The virtues of this singular insulation are acknowledged by even the government's critics: while superpower tensions have torn Indochina asunder, civil and incivil wars have haunted even such tiny neighbors as Sri Lanka, and booming Asian powers like Singapore and Japan have had to bear the costs of sudden prosperity, Burma has remained serenely on the geopolitical sidelines, at peace. Only once in recent years has it hit the head-lines: in October 1983, when North Korean terrorists planted a bomb in Rangoon that left four members of the visiting South Korean Cabinet dead. Of late, Burma has stepped up its dealings with China, just a shade, and edged away from the Soviet Union a little. Generally, however, it remains equally indifferent to both East and West: a founding member of the non-aligned movement, Burma was the first to quit it, in 1979, on the ground that it was no longer innocent of superpower politicking.

The great cost of Burma's long sleep, however, has been economic. The country is uncommonly fertile, blessed with large resources of teak, rubies, even oil; before Ne Win, now 74, embarked upon his monarchical rule, Burma was the world's leading exporter of rice. Over the past 20 years, however, the economy has slipped steadily backward. Though the Golden Land, as it is known, can still feed itself, it is now one of the 15 poorest nations in the world. "Foreign exchange reserves are at an all-time low, and dropping rapidly," observes a foreign diplomat. "They can't build railroads--or anything else. And the prognosis has to be very, very bad."

Indeed, it is typical of the topsy-turvy land that its most flourishing, and perhaps most efficient, industry is the black market, which is kept abundantly well stocked with goods smuggled over the border from Thailand. In November the authorities challenged the shadow economy by exchanging all 20-, 50- and 100-kyat notes for new 75-kyat bills. The measure was meant to ruin smugglers who were hoarding illegally earned cash. But because the government failed to compensate people fully for the notes that were withdrawn, it ended up reducing the legitimate savings of many members of the middle class. Yet, for the most part, as one shadow economist puts it, "the government keeps one eye open and one eye closed. It recognizes that the black market is a necessary evil and an evil necessity." Also an exorbitant one. A can of Fanta orange drink currently fetches more than $3 in Rangoon, a paperback copy of Robert Ludlum's latest thriller $30. Technology is even dearer: more than $4,000 for a TV set, and, for the greatest luxury of all--a brand new Nissan--$40,000. One local points proudly to his newly acquired 1957 Chevrolet Bel-Air. "This," he beams, "I bought for only $7,000."

But while keeping its eyes conveniently shut, the government keeps its ears very open. Even the garrulous black marketeers who deal openly on the streets refuse to talk about politics. When some students expressed dissatisfaction a decade ago with what Ne Win has defined as "the Burmese Way to Socialism," they were put down so forcibly that scarcely a murmur of dissent has been heard since. "The students still seethe," says a Western diplomat in Rangoon. "But the lid is down awfully tight. There aren't many things the government does well, but putting down dissent is one of them."

In the more remote areas of the country, especially the Shan States of eastern Burma, the government has been somewhat less successful. For more than 30 years, the army has been embroiled in a standoff battle against a hornet's nest of factious groups, including opium warlords with armies 20,000 strong, the separatist Karen Christians, remnants of the Chinese Nationalist forces of Chiang Kai-shek, and the Burma Communist Party. By some counts, at least twelve different groups have set up their own shadow governments. Ne Win has managed to make some gains against the insurgents, but the turmoil continues on the distant margins of Burmese life. Two weeks ago, Karen rebels attacked a ferry in southeastern Burma, killing 46 passengers and wounding 136 others.

Toward the world at large, the country has creaked open as slowly as an ill-oiled attic door. More than a decade passed after the government announced its willingness to enter into joint-venture enterprises before the first such project was undertaken. In 1984 Burma signed a deal with Fritz Werner, a German munitions firm long associated with Ne Win. The intention: to manufacture obsolete German G-3 automatic rifles for the Burmese army. During the first decade of Ne Win's rule, foreigners were allowed to enter Burma for all of 24 hours; these days the government issues seven-day tourist visas, though it manages to keep the influx down to a steady trickle of around 100 visitors a day. With a population of 36 million, Burma has more than twice as many citizens as Australia; yet the entire country has only a third as many hotel rooms as the Las Vegas Hilton. Along the road to Mandalay, the nation's second city, locals pedal away furiously in trishaws, and in Pagan, the nation's great temple-filled tourist site and one of the architectural wonders of Asia, the principal method of transportation is horse-drawn carts.

By locking out the modern world, the country has also, in effect, locked in the legacy of its British past, and with it an air of sweet nostalgia. In the pine-scented hill station of Maymyo (named after one Colonel May), tidy rose gardens still grace half-timbered houses with names like All in All and Fernside, and horse-drawn victorias recall a gaslighted London. The town's central clock tolls with the exact chime of Big Ben, and the local rest house, formerly the chummery, or bachelor's quarters, of the Bombay-Burma Trading Co., still serves roast beef each night at 7 sharp. An old porter asks a visitor where he lives. England, comes the answer. "Rule Britannia," intones the man without a trace of irony. "Britannia rules the waves."

Will that musty and elegiac sense of innocence pass away when Ne Win does? Probably not. In 1981 the general handed over the presidency, and nominal leadership of the country, to a like-minded sexagenarian, General San Yu; last August, at the Fifth Party Congress, the 18-man Central Executive Committee all but enshrined San Yu as Ne Win's heir apparent by creating the new position of deputy party chairman for him. That suggests much of the same. Moreover, adds a foreign diplomat, "Nobody has made a decision in this country for so long except Ne Win that nobody has any experience in doing so." Nor is it likely that those in power will dismantle the foundations on which they sit. "If they try a sudden leap forward," says a Western diplomat, "a lot of people are going to fall between the cracks."

The man in the Rangoon street hopes, a little wistfully, that his government may in time choose to emulate China's new liberalism and throw open its doors to the West. But that, most foreign observers agree, represents the triumph of optimism over realism. For the moment, it seems, Burma will continue to remain a never-never land where history is held under house arrest, and all the clocks have stopped.