Everything Is Broken (12 page)

T
he Burmese regime has always been inscrutable. Outsiders are not welcomed within its ranks. Its archives are closed to the public, and few bona fide biographical details about its members have ever been released. Years of isolation have kept the generals obscured behind a smoke screen of propaganda, artifice, and rumor.

Ever since I first began traveling to Burma in the mid-1990s, I had been intrigued by the elusive military junta. The confused attempts to negotiate with the generals in the wake of Cyclone Nargis were proof that few people in the international community had any real understanding of Burma’s rulers or indeed any idea as to how best to communicate with them. Some years before the cyclone I met a Burmese man whose family was closely connected with the military and asked him how best to learn more about the country’s ruling generals. He quickly corrected me. “First of all, it’s not generals,” he said, turning the final S into a remonstrative hiss. “It’s just one general. To understand the regime, you need only to understand one man—Senior General Than Shwe. What we have here in Burma is a classic textbook case of totalitarian dictatorship.”

It was an opinion I had heard repeated in many of the conversations I had had with Burmese people about the regime—that the man who has ruled Burma for almost two decades has become the sole source of power within the military’s increasingly centralized command structure, in the same way as his predecessor, the late dictator general Ne Win, had done. Unlike dictators such as Mao, Stalin, or Kim Il Sung, who headed personality cults that projected their godlike status, Than Shwe has stayed mostly behind the scenes and prefers to manipulate events in the style of a Machiavellian puppet master who remains—for the duration of the show—hidden from view.

As nothing about Than Shwe can be published independently in Burma, his life story exists there only in spoken form and can only be chronicled by media outside the country. In these forums, Than Shwe is mostly portrayed as the quintessential mad dictator—secretive, superstitious, temperamental, vehemently xenophobic, and possibly mentally unhinged. He flies into a rage at the mere mention of Aung San Suu Kyi’s name and is dependent on fortune-tellers and black magic practitioners for advice on matters of state. A football fan and Manchester United supporter, he stays up late into the night watching matches broadcast live from England. It is also said that he fosters a fanatical obsession for Chinese martial-arts dramas—the kind set in ancient dynastic kingdoms that feature valiant heroes and fiendish villains able to fly through the air and knock down their foes with a well-aimed k ung-fu chop.

But these details are all hearsay, and may be overblown. A foreign politician who met Than Shwe during a regional meeting of Asian leaders told me that Burma’s feared and tenacious strongman was distinctly
un
charismatic in person. At the meeting, Than Shwe came across as an insipid man who spoke in a monotone voice, showed no emotion, and made no eye contact with other participants.

With only a handful of unsubstantiated facts available in the public realm, it is almost impossible to say anything for certain about Than Shwe. The senior general is a myth partly of his own making; by revealing only carefully chosen aspects of his life and character, he leaves the rest to guesswork and repeatedly confounds analysis.

In 2005, Than Shwe surprised the entire population of Burma, as well as Burma watchers abroad, when he suddenly moved the country’s capital city from Rangoon to an undeveloped plot some two hundred miles to the north. The relocation, which began at 6:37 A.M. on November 6 (a time probably deemed auspicious by regime astrologers), was alarmingly unanticipated. Plans to relocate the capital had been kept well under wraps, and it was not until the day
after
the move had begun that the regime held one of its rare press conferences to explain what had happened. Even then, government representatives were tight-lipped. The minister of information, Brigadier General Kyaw Hsan, had little information to offer other than the fact that certain government ministries were moving to a new administrative center. The only reason given for the seemingly sudden decision was that government operations would run more smoothly if some ministries were moved to a more strategic location.

News of the move came as a shock even to the civil servants involved. The moving date was set for a Sunday, and government employees from the first group of ministries scheduled for relocation were informed about their imminent departure on the Friday, just two days before it happened. They were ordered to leave their families behind in Rangoon, as the new administrative center was still poorly equipped for habitation. Basic amenities such as electricity and running water were not yet functioning properly. And, upon arrival, most government staff had to sleep in their ministry offices as the residential quarters were still being built; senior staff slept on top of desks while their subordinates camped out on the floor.

Some months later, when civil servants were given permission to bring their families to join them, few leaped at the chance. Schools had yet to be built and there were no fully operational hospitals or clinics. There were also no opportunities to make the extra money they needed to support their families. Salaries in the civil service are so low that many take on extra work: running a video rental library from home; managing a food stall or a tea shop; or selling their government employee gasoline rations on the black market. In the bleak and unfinished city they had moved to there was little hope of earning the necessary funds, as there was not yet any streetside commerce, and there were no shops, markets, or restaurants.

Than Shwe named his new capital “Naypyidaw,” or the Royal City (sometimes more poetically translated as the “Abode of Kings”). For the few years after its founding, it remained enshrouded in mystery, and the authorities made it clear that the capital was off-limits. In December 2005, two Burmese journalists were arrested for taking photographs of Naypyidaw while riding a bus in the city. They were charged with violating Article 32 (a) of the Television and Video Act, which prohibits filming communication footage without an official license, and sentenced to three years in prison.

I visited Burma around that time and tried to gather impressions of Naypyidaw. The new city was described as a military bunker built on a grand scale. The capital was said to have been constructed for maximum protection, with an extensive system of tunnels driven through the surrounding mountains that could house entire regiments of soldiers. No one was able to say what was hidden behind the walled compounds being constructed around the city; they could have been mansions for the generals or the sites of nuclear reactors.

Though photographing the capital was forbidden, pictures did occasionally circulate. They were mostly blurred images taken surreptitiously from the windows of moving cars. There was an air of unreality about them, as they often included reflections captured by the car window—a camera lens, a bottle of water, a human arm. I saw photographs of construction sites above which human fingers grasped at clouds in the sky and uninhabited buildings bore the ghostly imprint of a wristwatch.

While friends in Rangoon told their usual dark jokes, laughing at the irrational and inexplicable relocation of the capital city, there was a nervous edge to their good humor:
Has the government abandoned Rangoon for good? Who can know for sure what they will do when there are no more civil servants or military personnel resident in the former capital? They could cut off all the electricity, sever the phone lines, or maybe they are planning to poison the water supply . . .

Most people saw the founding of Naypyidaw as a worrying sign that an already isolated regime was choosing to quarantine itself even further. Government staff working and living at least a day’s journey away from Rangoon, where embassies and UN missions were based, would have even less contact with representatives of the international community. During the first few days after the move, bewildered foreign diplomats expressed their concern about maintaining contact with members of the Burmese government. The regime’s response was to provide them with a single fax number. Sequestered in their newly constructed fortress, Than Shwe and his government were obviously not in the slightest bit concerned about staying in touch.

 

 

 

DURING A TRIP
to Rangoon not long after the government relocated to Naypyidaw, I visited the one place in Burma where the regime puts itself on display. Located in central Rangoon, the Defense Services Museum is a hulking four-story structure designed to glorify the might and absolute power of Burma’s rulers, or the
Tatmadaw
, as the armed forces are known in Burmese. Anyone can go there, even foreigners, provided they write down their name and passport number in a ledger, relinquish their camera, and pay the three-dollar entrance fee.

Though I went to the museum on a Saturday afternoon, I had the dubious privilege of being the only visitor. No one had bothered to turn on the lights in many of the cavernous rooms, and the museum felt half closed. The soldiers in charge of the exhibitions were dressed casually, with most wearing just a green army singlet and a well-worn
longyi
, the Burmese sarong worn by men. It was a hot and muggy day, and they lazed around in the gloom of their unvisited exhibits, dozing or gazing listlessly at the ceiling. The empty hallways were so quiet that whenever one of them coughed, the sound seemed to echo through the entire complex.

The museum boasted separate wings for the army, navy, and air force, with exhibition rooms for individual units such as the signal corps or the armory. Each government ministry was represented, as were many municipal divisions and cultural assets. But, for all its efforts to impress with size and scope, the museum’s displays had the show-and-tell feel of a school classroom. Store mannequins were lined up in a static fashion show of army uniforms. Miniature battlefields had been clumsily replicated from sheets of felt and plastic toy trees. The progress of the mighty
Tatmadaw
was detailed with pie charts and graphs made from colored sticky tape and painted cardboard cutouts.

Amid all the bric-a-brac there was, however, one unifying image: that of the commander in chief of the
Tatmadaw
and the country’s leader, Senior General Than Shwe. The general’s face is not usually so ubiquitous elsewhere in Burma; he does not appear on billboards or banknotes and his portrait generally hangs only in schools and other government buildings. Yet, inside the military’s museum, his surly mug shot was everywhere.

High on the wall of the lofty entranceway, Than Shwe’s photograph crowned the pyramid of ruling generals. Throughout the museum there were posters depicting his larger-than-life form superimposed onto collages of newly constructed dams, airports, and schools. There was even a formal painted portrait of the senior general rendered in full ceremonial dress. The artist had been kind to the aging general; his face was not quite so jowly as it is in photographs and his stocky frame seemed a tad leaner. The pale uniform he wore was studded with medals and topped off by a set of five golden stars on each shoulder, identifying him as the commander in chief of the army and the country’s absolute ruler.

According to official sources, Than Shwe was born in 1933, when Burma was still under British colonial rule. His family lived in the village of Myinzu near Kyaukse town on the arid central plains just south of the old royal capital of Mandalay. He was not yet ten years old when Burma became a bloody battleground during World War II. The young Than Shwe would have witnessed the ungainly British retreat from invading Japanese forces. As the remnants of the colonial government fled overland to India, they practiced a “scorched earth” policy aimed at burning and destroying anything that might be useful to Japanese troops. The fleeing British Raj left in its wake a smoldering trail of burned bridges, buildings, and oil refineries.