Burma: Locking Out the 20th Century

• Share

For more than a generation, the country has existed in a time warp--and in a state of solitary confinement. Since 1962, when General Ne Win seized power in Burma, foreigners have been unwelcome, borders have been tight, private business has been discouraged, and development has all but halted. Staff Writer Pico Iyer recently made his second visit to the largely closed society. His report:

Jeeps left over from the war, 1955 Chevrolets, 1953 Czech-made Skodas and armies of dilapidated jalopies jounce and judder through the broad avenues of Rangoon, Burma's capital. In the distance, red-brick Victorian steeples poke up among the golden domes of the pagodas, and along the road, great white-columned English mansions stand empty like haunted houses, their walls mildewed, their gardens overrun with weeds, moisture dripping from their eaves. In the Strand Hotel, a grand monument to colonial decay, ceiling fans turn lazily above a lost-and-found case still stuffed with pince-nez, ladies' compacts and rusting cuff links misplaced during an age of vanished elegance. Around the lobby, black-tied men in curry-stained white coats serve up tea and porridge on tarnished silver trays. "Here, you must always remember," says an official, in the lovely English she learned under British rule, "that you are living in the 18th century."

Or, at best, the early days of the 20th. Today, after almost a quarter-century of secession from the world at large, Burma resembles nothing so much as a cob-webbed attic cluttered with sepia-toned relics, moth-eaten keepsakes and old curiosities. Along the capital's streets, there are no high-rises, no nightclubs, no neon signs; even Coca-Cola is unknown here. At the offices of Burma Airways, as in every other office, there are no typewriters, let alone computer terminals, just bulky Dickensian ledgers thick with dust. The country boasts two TV stations, but neither of them broadcasts for more than two hours a day. If Burma did not exist, Evelyn Waugh would have had to invent it.

The virtues of this singular insulation are acknowledged by even the government's critics: while superpower tensions have torn Indochina asunder, civil and incivil wars have haunted even such tiny neighbors as Sri Lanka, and booming Asian powers like Singapore and Japan have had to bear the costs of sudden prosperity, Burma has remained serenely on the geopolitical sidelines, at peace. Only once in recent years has it hit the head-lines: in October 1983, when North Korean terrorists planted a bomb in Rangoon that left four members of the visiting South Korean Cabinet dead. Of late, Burma has stepped up its dealings with China, just a shade, and edged away from the Soviet Union a little. Generally, however, it remains equally indifferent to both East and West: a founding member of the non-aligned movement, Burma was the first to quit it, in 1979, on the ground that it was no longer innocent of superpower politicking.