Some Second Thoughts

Thousands of gaily costumed tribal folk, dressed in bright robes shimmering with beads and bangles, poured through the streets of Rangoon as Burma celebrated its 20th annual Union Day, marking the joining of Burma proper with four tribal states. Unfortunately, there is not a great deal to celebrate. Communist-led tribal bands in the interior are stepping up an ugly guerrilla war. Burma is nervous about the erratic course of Red China, with which it shares a wide-open 1,200-mile border. Even worse, the country's pell-mell plunge into socialism has pell-melled right into chaos. "This is not our kind of socialism," brooded a Polish diplomat in Rangoon last week. "It's not anybody's kind of socialism. It is very embarrassing."

Even Burma's own leaders are some what embarrassed about it, and are having a few second thoughts. General Ne Win, the tough, ascetic strongman who nationalized everything in sight after he took power in a 1962 coup, has put the production and distribution of 34 basic food items back into private hands, and last week had an agent in Eastern Europe to seek advice about how to run a socialist country without going broke. Last week the government also released 182 political prisoners from its jails and hinted that some of the 2,000 others still locked up may go free. "People should do things on their own," says Ne Win. "But they should also learn from their mistakes and failures."

Rot & Rust. Despite these shifts in direction, Burma still remains one of the most determinedly socialist and neutralist nations in Southeast Asia. Ne Win has nationalized more than 90% of Burma's industry and created a socialist bureaucracy that would give even Moscow the shivers. The distribution system, handled by military men with no economic experience, distributes almost nothing. While warehouses bulge with goods that often rot or rust away, store managers are faced with too many customers and too little merchandise. They stage lotteries, giving successive winners the privilege of buying whatever is left on the shelves, which is not always what they started out to buy. In Mandalay, some Catholic priests entered one of the local lotteries, only to win the opportunity to buy some women's sheer blouses.

Last week Time Correspondent Louis Kraar wound up a tour of the capital and countryside, and found Burma a nation that has effectively buried its old colonial past but lost something of itself in the process. "Rangoon, once a great British-style city of banks and trading companies, now moves at a languid 'people's pace,' " reported Kraar. "The grand old Victorian buildings, now grubby and ghostlike, hover over wide, almost empty streets. Identical green and white signboards over nearly every shop proclaim 'People's Store'--though the Burmese people find very little indeed to buy there. Instead, they turn to the streets, where peddlers spread out on dingy cloths a weird assortment of wares, ranging from fountain pens and door hinges to toothpaste and flashlight batteries. They are much like the farmers in this rice-rich country who withhold paddy from their only legal purchaser--the government--because there is so little incentive.

"Newspaper boys offer the Working People's Daily in a characteristic Burmese socialist way--by simply sitting and waiting for someone to approach them. Burma today may well be personified by the old women who stand on street corners, puffing indifferently on stubby cheroots and selling cigarettes that no one seems to buy. Men and women alike amble slowly and unsmilingly down the streets in their longyis [sarongs], which have become one of the hardest basic items to buy under the Burmese socialism."

Hit & Run. The Burmese maintain the same restraint in their foreign affairs. Although since his Washington visit last September, Ne Win has been friendlier toward the U.S. and is impressed by America's firm stand in Viet Nam, he maintains a strict neutrality. That is about the best that the U.S. can hope for, considering China's proximity. At any rate, Burma practices neutrality as an art. No sooner had an official five-man team returned to Rangoon from the U.S. recently than another took off on a balancing tour of Red China and North Korea. Rangoon's two English-speaking newspapers subscribe to 17 different news agencies, including Tass, New China News Agency and Associated Press, and think nothing of running contradictory stories side by side. Few foreigners are even permitted into the country; those who do get in often find their telephones tapped and their mail opened by Ne Win's military intelligence. "You don't invite company," says Ne Win, "when you're cleaning house."

Nowhere is Ne Win trying to clean house more than in the countryside, where rebel terrorists are at work. From the mountainous northeast to the rich, rice-growing Delta in the south, five different bands, averaging 3,500 men each, are waging hit-and-run war with the government; some are bent only on banditry, others on setting up autonomous tribal states within Burma. The most dangerous of the groups are the Peking-lining "White Flag Communists" and the leftist Karen tribesmen, who have combined their 6,000 members and are tripling the number of their attacks in the Delta. In November alone, they destroyed scores of rice mills and burned 224 cooperative stores. Though none of the groups threaten to topple Ne Win's government, they do keep his 100,000-man army and police force on the jump, hold down the country's rice crop and put a serious crimp in Burmese morale. Like every other problem in their country, of course, the Burmese are simply learning to live with it.

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