Land of cruelty and caprice

UNDER THE DRAGON: Travels in a Betrayed Land by Rory Maclean (HarperCollins, GBP 16,99)

IT has taken a long time for Burma to become a popular cause. For 25 years the military-socialist dictator of Burma, General U Ne Win, cannily kept the country closed to the outside world. The economy collapsed; a country which had once exported food throughout South- East Asia became a net importer of rice and the ninth poorest nation in the world.

In the last years of the Raj and the first years of independence Burma had a flourishing free press and, since 1948, was a functioning democracy under the benignly bumbling leadership of the Buddhist sage U Nu. Under Ne Win silence was imposed in the name of a dotty ideology which mixed socialism, chauvinism, religion and the rejection of the outside world. After the brief euphoria of the national uprising of 1988 the military reasserted its divine right to rule in a coup in which several thousand died.

The sheer weirdness of the Burmese dictatorship is hard for foreigners to grasp.

Ne Win demonetarised the currency in 1987, ruining thousands, and replaced the old 75, 35 and 25 kyat notes by ones of 45 and 90 kyats.

Why? They were divisible by nine and his astrologers had assured him that nine was his lucky number.

When an American woman of whom Ne Win was enamoured turned up in Rangoon with her own male company, the dictator saw fit to summon an official from the American State Department: "Mrs ... has gone home. The visit was not a success. However, let that not cloud relations between the United States and Burma."

Cruelty and extravagant caprice have been features of Burmese history.

When a new king came to the throne it was a custom for him to murder most of his royal relatives. The last king, Thibaw, killed a record number of family members, and used elephants to stamp down the gaseous earth over their graves. Rationality was not always the strong point of Burmese kings. In 1823 King Bagyidaw, lord of a few thousand poorly armed and ill-disciplined levies, proposed to invade India, capture Calcutta, seize the Viceroy and then "march on England".

Rory Maclean's book describes a country in which this mix of cruelty and fantasy continues. But instead of producing yet another account of the iniquities of the SLORC ("State Law and Order Restoration Council", as the generals named their junta , deaf to the Orwellian/Lewis Carroll sound of the acronym) he gives a portrait of the unhappy land through the stories of a few individuals he met and questioned.

These are all people who came into conflict with the iron caprices of the regime by mere chance, and whose lives are permanently blighted. We hear from a woman who worked for the state censorship organisation, married a freelance publisher who dared start an independent magazine during the few months of freedom in 1988, who is imprisoned, returns to her home in Pagan only to find her whole village demolished so as not to incommode tourists, and ends her days listening each night to the voice on the radio of her husband, an exile whom she will never see again.

A man whose bicycle is his prized possession has it stolen by a soldier.

Soon after, he is shot in the Rangoon massacres of 1988. His daughter has to become a building labourer, is taken up and then dropped by a British engineer, and forced into prostitution.

We meet a thuggish, ambiguous warlord called Phahte. He is the son of a Karen nationalist, killed fighting the Japanese, whose story Maclean movingly tells.

Phahte forces his hospitality on Maclean and his wife as a way of protecting himself against his own neighbours who will be less likely to kill him in the company of foreign guests. The childish megalomania mixed with paranoia of this man is a small-scale version of the mentality of the rulers.

None of these stories is remarkable in itself. But Maclean gives an extraordinary sense of individual hopelessness and - more to the point - radical disorientation under a system of organised absurdity mixed with terror that is contemporary Burma.

I have myself spoken to officials of the regime, including two Cabinet ministers. The abiding impression was Alice in Wonderland, except that the Red Queen really can chop people's heads off. (An acquaintance of mine died in police custody for the heinous offence of "possessing an illegal fax machine".) It was also a place - as Maclean shows - where the inhabitants have to run very fast to stay in one place. The stories Maclean recounts capture all this more vividly than the usual anti-regime polemics.

Copyright 1998
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