Yes, Big Brother Is Watching

The regime insists the poverty that "saboteurs" and "neo-colonialists" keep carping about is exaggerated. "In Myanmar, perhaps, they cannot sometimes afford expensive foods, but they will never go hungry," a writer named only "Shwe" thunders in a rambling, rather baroque editorial in The Myanmar Times. The writer evidently has never visited Mandalay's Mingun Jetty Place, where scores of families live in shacks, scratching out a living and endangering their lungs by using raw coal as fuel. And Shwe surely could not be aware of a stretch of road between Amarapura and Sagaing that is postcard-idyllic—except that many Burmese live in haphazard lean-tos, using nearby woods and streams as their toilets.

The generals prefer to blame the misery on sanctions imposed by the United States, European Union and others, ignoring the incompetence and kleptomania that have hobbled the economy and left the country owing the World Bank and International Monetary Fund some $3.5 billion.  And never mind the fortunes the generals spend on vanity projects and the military apparatus. The standing army alone is said to number a half-million, even more than Burma's 400,000 monks. "There is no pretense that [the junta] is doing anything for the people," says a Western diplomat. "They talk about what people can do for them." The government and its proxies have taken to referring to Burma, which they call the Union of Myanmar, as "the motherland" and exhorting citizens to have "Union spirit" in the face of foreigners trying to "destabilize" the nation. The rulers also talk about uplifting the nation's education standards. But most people say they instead have steadily eroded Burma's once-admired school system. Relatively few people still speak English in this former British colony, and residents say there is little effort to teach it in schools. "The teacher writes an English word on the board and then repeats, several times, the same word in Burmese," says a university graduate. "What sense does that make? Of course, they don't want people to know English." The University of Rangoon was a regional powerhouse in the 1950s, but the generals shuttered it after crushing the 1988 uprising, which was led by university students. The main campus on University Avenue, not far from the brand-new U.S. Embassy, is now rundown, used only for some postgraduate programs; satellite campuses operate in other parts of the city.

Even those lucky enough to go to university have few prospects after graduating, unless they boast government connections. A doorman at a top Rangoon hotel tells me he has a degree in history. The young man delivering room service at my Mandalay hotel recently graduated with a degree in physics. Physics! And on his business card my Mandalay taxi driver has printed in parentheses, "B.Sc. Chemistry." "Not much you can do with a degree except hang it on the wall," the 42-year-old says, not without humor.

© 2007