Let's Not Visit Myanmar Year: 1994

[strider@xxxxxxxxxxx]

******************** Posted by BurmaNet ************************
  "Appropriate Information Technologies--Practical Strategies"
*****************************************************************

PUBLISHED BY BURMESE RELIEF CENTER--JAPAN
Burmese Relief Center--Japan
Ken and Visakha Kawasaki
266-27 Ozuku-cho
Kashihara-shi
Nara-ken  634
JAPAN  fax:  07442-4-6254
NBH03114@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 



LET'S NOT VISIT MYANMAR YEAR '94, Part 1

LIKE OUR HUMAN RIGHTS RECORD?  YOU'LL LOVE OUR HOTELS!

Lying on a pink floral Chinese bedspread in 106-degree heat watching the
ceiling bulb flicker while the walls rumble from the karaoke show upstairs in
wonderfully conducive to reflecting upon the future of Myanmar, this "New
Burma" of  quasi-marketdom.  The brand-new Hitachi refrigerator still sitting
in its packing crate base, motor off, is somehow symbolic.  There's a lovely
view of a dozen different construction sites outside, only the windows are
painted shut a nd the air conditioner isn't working either.  Even the shower
installed in a unventilated closet with exposed pipes is not the afterthought
it seems.  These  lodgings that cry out for refurbishment are scarcely two
months old, a new private venture of the Myanma Mineral Prospecting
Enterprise just unveiled this  February in Mandalay.  

A floormaid comes to verify that the air-con circuit is indeed dead.  By way
o f consolation, she switches on the Singapore-import Panasonic television
and the hotel's own satellite dish pulls in the ghost of Star TV, an
inaudible hiss beneath the karaoke din.  She apologies, b ut cannot say
whether the generator out put for the entire building is being syphoned off
to  the rooftop stage spectacle.  Apparently "up-country" entrepreneurs and
military officers' kids  with thousands of kyats to spend on coloured lights,
Tiger Beer and mini-skirted Shan girls perch higher on the scale than Western
tourists paying in Foreign Exchange Certificates.  But then, looking down on
the streets below, half the city of Mandalay is blacked out, each
neighbourhood sharing a rotating minimum ration of electricity maybe three
nights a week.  

For this illumination on power surges by class in post-socialist Burma, the
room charge is a not quite laughable $18 for foreigners, but an impossible
600 kyats for locals.  Just under $5 by black market rates, or an absurd $100
if anyone actually took the official K6-to-$1  rate seriously, in kyats,
however, one overnight costs almost three weeks wages for the typical public
servant.  Outrageous even with a second job, unless a son or daughter
overseas is sending home real money.  And this is the cheapest new hotel
around.  

Don't even ask who is supposed to stay at the New Popa Hotel.  The question
is  why twenty other high-rise hotels just like it have suddenly sprung up in
the old capital over  the last four years?  If "market forces" are
engineering this building boom, the pastel Shenzhen-deco styling of these
hotels leave little doubt that this is fast becoming a wholly "up-country"
market.  To Mandalay citizens, all the strange new signs in shiny gold
characters say the same thin g.  WE AIM TO PLEASE--OUR FRIENDS THE CHINESE 

"Opium money," whisper local residents.  Or more likely in the case of the
New  Popa's Mineral Prospecting Enterprise, jade and rubies.  For the Kokang,
Wa, and Han profiteers pouring across the border from Yunnan Province 300 km
away, Mandalay is prime commercial real  estate.  For Party cadres in
Kunming, who want to upgrade the old World War II Burma Road over the rugged
Shan Hills of Burma's northeast "Golden Triangle" with loans from the Asian
Development Bank, the Irrawaddy River will be an oil pipeline to China's
industrializing inner southwest.  And of course the Burmese authorities find
these developments personally rewarding.   The rest of the Mandalay populace
only figures in the deal as captive consumers of Double Happiness polyester
jogging suits.  Ah, the romance of free trade and infrastructure!

Although for now, four-wheel drive is still the thing to play on the
unimproved road to Mandalay.  The "new Chinese" are the ones riding around in
Mitsubishi Pajeros, often toting Burmese National identity cards and
handguns.  Anyone can point them out.  Just ask the old Fujian merchants who
shipped in via Rangoon in the '20s.  Despite differences of dialect and
recent simplified characters, they communicate well enough on common
ethnicity and kindred business practices to use and distrust each other. 
Clan rivalries have yet to explode,  but over the last few years mysterious
fires have claimed some nice property in Mandalay.  This March a blaze swept
through a minor residential section in the north of the city; last April's
hug e conflagration immediately south of the old Royal Palace has since been
re-zoned with tax surcharged fire lanes and rebuilt in charming pink and
green bunker condominiums.  

Wander out at night toward the blacked-out west side of town.  Stroll to the
darkened Zegyo market, recently rebuilt into a massive high-rise block with
funds that no one  cares to trace, head up the only beckoning street past
glowing mercantile mirages of a Valentino Boutique and Rainbow Ice Cream
Parlour and Restaurant Hua Hin, step into a music store where three teenagers
don't even blink an eye when a strange white face asks in Mandarin would they
have the latest album by Beijing rockstar Cui Jian?  No, but how about Sandy
Lam from Hong Kong or Singapore's Dick Lee or Taiwanese Teresa Teng--anything
but Burmese tapes.  

No one says the word "colonisation" here, least of all the Burmese military. 
Not when so much rhetoric was spent on "combatting imperialism" during the
socialist decades.   Not when "safeguarding national sovereignty" remains one
of the Three National Causes printed in every book and magazine.  If anyone
does know how far the Burma Road extends up beyond Kunming, no one is
telling.  It may be only hearsay that Beijing received requests from  Rangoon
for $1.  4 billion worth of arms and technical assistance for naval bases on
the Bay of Bengal, mere coincidence that not one week after Chinese Premier
Li Peng announced a quadruple-digit licensing fee for satellite dishes last
October, Burma's State Law and Order Restoration Council's Sec-1 Khin Nyunt
followed suit.  Let's just say they're very good friends.  
More immediately apparent is how China taught Burma to shake down tourists
for hard currency.  The Foreign Exchange Certificates issued in 1993 by the
Central Bank of Myanmar are virtual duplicates of the funny money that the
sightseer-friendly People's Republic insisted on for years.  But while
Beijing is just phasing out its dual tender, at Rangoon's Mingaladon  Airport
they don't even smile when the Foreign Independent Traveller now swaps a
non-refundable U S$300 for denominations of "equivalent to US$1," "equivalent
to US$5" and "equivalent to  US$10."  It could almost be bad conceptual art,
except when $70 for an approved room in on e of Rangoon's recent flush of
private homes-turned-motels "equivalates" to dirty sheets and  no hot water,
or a $15 breakfast to stale bread, cold fried egg and a limp pulpy banana in
Pagan.   Army hospitality you can afford--or else.  

COMPLIMENTS OF THE MINISTRY OF TAUTOLOGY

"Look on the bright side," my Burmese roommate says dryly, "at least the MI
stays busy making money."  A year ago, double occupancy with a Westerner
would never have been allowed.  But with the SLORC regime's inflating
confidence in privatisation, their Military  Intelligence no longer actively
discourages "fraternising with the natives."  Four years ago, an aside to a
"foreign agent" would have led strait to prison, torture or worse.  Now
entertaining overseas  clients and exchanging tips is legitimate business. 
Not such a radical shift for a country that boasts a combined Directorate of
Public Relations and Psychological Warfare.  

"The number of stars on a SLORC general's shoulders corresponds to the class
o f hotel he stays at in Singapore and Thailand," my companion quips.  Power
may be its own reward,  but privilege continues to reflect Empire days.  So
by some reverse logic, having seen what  deluxe "Western" accommodations
costs, these guardians of Burma's new "open door" have deemed i t won't do
for foreigners to come stay in Burma for anything less.  Perfectly arbitrary
enough.  "They're crazy.  They've gotten so used to not seeing the world
themselves, they think no one can see them."  Did I realize that SLORC
Minister of Hotels and Tourism, Maj-Gem Kyaw Ba decreed his VISIT MYANMAR
YEAR '96 will draw 500 thousand tourists--almost fourteen times the 35
thousand for this past year?  Or what his signatory take was for the two
Singaporean intercontinental hotels and one Macao-owned business plaza
currently going up  in Rangoon?

The millions quoted are no doubt mere rumour, but like anything else in
Burma,  who's to contradict?  What reliable news sources are there?  No
printed alternatives exist to The New Light of Myanmar and The Mirror, state
dailies inked thick with stain-repellent military jargon (and endlessly
itemized laundry lists of generals' names).  In-dept accounts of SLORC Sec-1
Khin Nyunt and Commander-in-Chief Than Shwe's travels throughout the country
to instruct and inspire (meanwhile scaring out what the other generals have
got going on the side).  Fascinating productivity reports and most ecstatic
tidings of another oil strike!  TV and  Radio Myanmar schedules with
programmes like "Slogans" and "Military Marches."  There's even  a
"Democracy" column somewhere toward the back pages where readers can finally
query why their applications for a telephone take two years to process or
suggest perhaps a new bus line to  the New Town where they've been (forcibly)
relocated.  Gripping stuff.  

Still more curious is the new face of "democratic" media that buzzes Rangoon
a t Thingyan, the mid-April Burmese New Year's water festival.  Traditionally
celebrated by sprinkling scented water on family and neighbours in ritual
purification at peak hot season.  Thingyan  was a time of music, singing and
dancing spiced with comic thanjat jingles satirising current trend s and
social conditions.  Now under SLORC, whose "Law and Order" translates in
Burmese as "suppress and  silence," Thingyan is a sanctioned and heavily
policed pressure-valve, the only time of  the year to make noise. 
Predictably, however, thanjat chanting has been banned by the Ministry  of
Religious Affairs as "irreverent."  Apparently the spirit of the occasion is
better serv ed by diverting so much water to hoses and cannons in central
Rangoon that surrounding towns get no water for a week.  Let the streets be
jammed with Toyota flatbed trucks, even if petrol prices so ar to K280 per
gallon, and for those with K2000 to spare for permits, let them construct
mandats, streetside stages that this year sport Lucky Strike and Pepsi
backdrops.  

At the Heinekken mandat out in front of the Pegasus Club, a ritzy new
Singaporean venture hostess-bar on Kaba Aye Road, the scene is carnival. 
Dripping wet rich kids in identical MTV- chic black jeans, logo T-shirts and
bandannas have been partying since 8:00 in  the morning to the latest sounds
in house and rap--the new thanjat.  Good authorized American fun.  Yes, I've
seen Myanmar future and it's a Rangoon homeboy in shades and max-waxed hair
who yells out over a Technotronic DC--"Hey man, wanna burger?"  Maybe next
life.