Myanmar/Burma

Joe and I are walking down a dusty side street in Mandalay. Although it's 110 in the shade, the Burmese all around us are toiling away, earning their average dollar a day. One of three sweating young men repairing car engines looks up, waves and asks, "Where you from?" "USA," we say. "Ah, America!" This is good, the land of George W. Bush. He overthrew the tyrant Saddam Hussein and maybe, other Burmese have told us hopefully, Bush will invade Myanmar and overthrow its dictators, too.

The engine repairman indicates an older man squatting nearby and says, "He police." The three repairmen laugh. The older guys says, "No police, he crazy." "No, he police," the first guy says, and all four of them laugh.

Later, in another town, we are telling two Burmese men who are interested in our travels around Myanmar that we had observed long sections of the natural gas pipeline to China running above ground. This vital provider of revenues for the military regime looked dangerously exposed as it cut through villages and across rice paddies. It also appeared vulnerable to sabotage. When I say, "Somebody could bomb it," the two Burmese look at each other. Then they laugh, too.

This place is about as schizoid as a country can get. It is deeply Buddhist and fatalistic and accepting and serene, and its people are among the sweetest-natured on earth. It is also a police state, where spies are busy in every neighborhood and temple (fake monks paid by the government worked as agents provocateurs during last September's uprising), and the elected prime minister, Aung San Soo Kyi, has been under house arrest for most of the last 20 years. The economy has been so devastated by the greedy and blundering generals that most men have only two ways of surviving, as monks or soldiers. Women are even worse off. If they aren't in a position to sell produce in a market (or run a hotel or a silk mill, as was the case with two we met), they do heavy labor on the waterfront or repairing roads.

Of nearly 60 million Burmese, 600,000 are monks. Four hundred twenty thousand are in the military, the second largest army in Asia. Wandering around Yangon our first day there, we stopped by a pagoda and noted that the couple of dozen figures snoozing in the midday heat were not monks but soldiers.

Nobody who's talking knows for sure how many monks and other peaceful demonstrators were killed or hurt last September and October. The number killed was between a few and a few hundred. The two thousand or so political prisoners who are still locked up include the man who pasted up posters around Yangon showing General Than Shwe's head on the body of a dog.

A widespread hope last fall was that the military rank and file would desert the leadership. Except in isolated cases, they did not. The soldiers' livelihoods depend on their staying loyal. (Also, to go against duty and authority in Buddhism is to risk a decent fate in the next life.) While many soldiers behaved cruelly during the demonstrations, many of them suffered, too. On a Yangon street lined with high-rise apartment blocks, residents who were forbidden to feed the monks threw food down from their balconies. When they moved in to drive away the monks, the soldiers were pelted with household objects.

Burmese hold out some hope that this May's referendum will at least further expose the regime as bankrupt. People plan to go out in droves and vote no to the generals' sham constitution. The integrity of the balloting, though, is in doubt. We have been unable to confirm this, but three people told us independently that there will be no secret ballot. Government agents will go door to door and record family members' votes. (A fourth man says this is just a rumor started by the government to intimidate people into voting yes or not at all.)

China could make a real difference in Myanmar. But its morality of fossil fuels at any cost is likely to keep the regime in power for the forseeable future. China dominates the Burmese economy---and even the country's changing appearance. Its oil, gas, gem and (it is said) heroin money have led to a building boom in cities like Mandalay and Taunggyi. Joe says these new Chinese buildings look like overstuffed sofas made out of tile.

There has, however, been no trickle-down effect from this mini-boom. With the labor glut, wages are as depressed as ever. You see people all over hauling sand on their heads or tarring roads for 50 cents a day. Do these people complain? When Joe takes their picture, they look at him and smile. These generals have a good thing going for themselves in Burma; they know it and plan to hang onto it.

Another way to get a Burmese to laugh is to say you are going to visit Napyidow. This is the country's new "capital" (it has no foreign embassies) built over the last three years in a hazy broad valley a couple of hundred miles north of Yangon off the Mandalay Road. Some Burmese say this ghastly zillion-dollar folly built with Chinese money and forced labor was kept isolated by the regime to protect it against the U.S. invasion the generals are said to antcipate. Others say the generals' astrologers told them to do it. (When the late dictator Ne Win's astrologers declared in the 1970s that he must change the country's currency to notes that add up to the lucky number 9---45, 90, etc.---he immediately did so. This system was later abandoned.)

Joe and I spent a night in Napyidow, and we can confirm that it is madness on a monumental scale: eight-lane concrete expressways with barely a car in sight (other Burmese roads are rutted, colonial-era two-lane blacktop); treeless mile after treeless mile of identical concrete apartment blocks for the government employees forced to relocate from Yangon; a locked-up "ceremonial hall" that looks like a Las Vegas dreamed up not by Trump but by Orwell; office blocks even uglier than the dwellings; Florida-style shopping centers with no shoppers (Yangon shop owners were forced to rent space whether they opened a Napyidow shop or not); a "zoological park" (Are there animals in it? "Not so much," someone told us); and two "hotel zones."

We stayed at the Thingaha. The brochure at this "The Eden Group" property described it as a pinnacle of "business chic." It was. Our immense air-conditioned room, done in wood and fabric in muted old Asia colors (no Chinese acryllics here) had two beds about 15 feet apart; a flat-screen TV on an island in the middle of the room; a tile bathroom in three sections, discrete according to function; recessed lighting, including under the couch; terry-cloth robes; an ironing board. The shower handle stuck, and the power went off from time to time, but we bathed nonetheless and had brought along our own flashlights to augment those provided by The Eden Group. There were 12 other guests, we learned, all government officials. Our room rate was $140, four times what we usually pay in Southeast Asia and a third of the annual income for the average Burmese.

In a bare valley below the Thingaha were the tin-roofed mud houses of the construction workers still laboring night and day to finish the several hotels in our zone. With their nightime candles burning for illumination and their smoky cooking fires, these settlements looked like Civil War encampments in 1863. Matthew Bradey was not there to photograph them however, and Joe was not able to do it either. He had been warned by several people to keep his camera in his bag while in Napyidow.