Burma A People Under Siege

By SANDRA BURTON RANGOON

Just beyond the gaze of the golden Buddha in the Eindawya pagoda in Mandalay, the spiritual heart of Burma, dozens of soldiers slouched around the courtyard, propping their rifles against the stone balustrades. Outside the temple gates, more troops manned barbed-wire barricades. "Please leave," an army captain shouted last week to a group of tourists trying to photograph the Buddha. "You may come back when our security situation is right."

Burma's brief experiment with multiparty politics is over, and the country is reverting to the xenophobia and isolation of its past. In a nationwide crackdown on its opposition, the military junta led by Senior General Saw Maung has arrested at least 40 officials of the National League for Democracy, including 16 members of parliament, and some 200 rebel monks, many of them activists of the Young Monks Association. Hundreds more monks have slipped out of their monasteries and returned to their homes in the countryside. Six months after the League won a surprise electoral victory, the army has effectively canceled the results at gunpoint.

As the glimmer of democracy is snuffed out, tentative moves toward a more open economy that Burma began in 1989 are likely to go with it. Sometimes called the world's richest basket case because of its wealth of such natural resources as teak and minerals, Burma needs foreign aid and investment to modernize. In the wake of the elections last May, international lending agencies were lining up to welcome Burma, and foreign businessmen were studying the country's new, liberal economic policies, but many investors are pulling back. "No one will lend money to Burma until it sorts out its political situation," says a visiting World Bank official.

Just as the crackdown was reaching its peak last week, Amnesty International made public another indictment of the army's brutal rule. In a 72-page special report, the London-based human-rights organization accused Burma's junta of "silencing the democratic movement" with systematic terror and torture.

To dramatize their plight, four Burmese hijacked a Thai Airways jetliner on Saturday and demanded the release of imprisoned dissidents. After diverting the Bangkok-to-Rangoon flight to Calcutta, the hijackers said they wanted to make the world "hear our pleas for justice and human rights." They surrendered peaceably to Indian authorities.

Silencing democracy describes Burma's standard operating procedure since 1962, when General Ne Win seized power from an ineffectual civilian government. His iron hand at home and suspicion of foreigners turned Burma into a hermit state. At the same time, his bizarre form of socialism reduced the once prosperous former British colony to penury while more backward neighbors were performing miracles of economic growth.

After 26 years of decline, pressures for change finally pushed Ne Win into retirement in July 1988. Decades of anger erupted in bloody riots in the streets of Rangoon a month later and continued on and off for six weeks, leaving more than 3,000 dead. General Saw Maung, the armed forces chief of staff, seized power as chairman of the authoritarian State Law and Order Restoration Council, which was to govern until elections.

To worldwide amazement, the May 1990 elections in Burma, renamed Myanmar last year, were generally free and fair. The League, under the leadership of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the daughter of Burma's national hero, won a huge majority in parliament. The military showed its true colors by keeping her under house arrest and calling for a convention to draw up a new constitution, a process that could take years.

The inevitable clash occurred Aug. 8, the second anniversary of the 1988 massacre. Students and monks demonstrated in Mandalay. When riot police leveled their rifles at rock throwers, a monk tried to intercede. He was hit by a bullet, and 14 other protesters were injured, though the army denies that anyone was killed.

In protest, activist monks declared a boycott against military men and their families, refusing to accept the alms from them that earn the donor merit in a future life, or to participate in weddings and funerals. The boycott stirred anxiety among the troops. "Most of the young soldiers come from villages where monks are held in high respect," says Omar Farouk, a Burmese Muslim living in Bangkok.

The high command retaliated by ringing rebellious monasteries with troops and buzzing them with helicopters. This led to a very Burmese conflict: a slingshot war. Monks pelted the army patrols with stones fired from slingshots. The soldiers asked for permission to shoot back, but their commander refused, ordering them to return fire only with slingshots of their own.

Meanwhile, Saw Maung was preparing his counterattack. After a pious prayer to the Buddha, he outlawed then abolished some Buddhist sects. Saw Maung then sent his troops into Mandalay's monasteries "to clean out unlawful organizations."

"The political movement that began in 1988 is effectively over now," says an Asian diplomat. Says a Western official: "One by one they have knocked off the challenges to the regime, from the League to the monks." The consensus in Rangoon is that the junta can survive any sanctions its Western critics may impose for as long as the military leaders are determined to do so.

When Japanese professor Sadako Ogata arrived in Burma last week as a special envoy of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, Saw Maung expressed his contempt for the very notion. "I will not give the kind of rights demanded by the Voice of America," he said in a speech. "I will not give the students the right to stage demonstrations. I won't let the people emulate the incidents in Eastern Europe."

Until he does so, he can expect little or no help for his free-falling economy, with an inflation rate of more than 75%, a gaping balance of payments deficit and a budget that devotes 40% of its resources to the military. The cutoff of U.S. aid after the 1988 riots has had no discernible effect, leading some American policymakers to ponder whether to try some limited involvement with the Burmese government once again. Burton Levin, the former U.S. ambassador to Burma, says no. "To think you can sit down and talk to these people would be to ignore the history of the last 28 years," he says. "If these people remain in power, there will be no change."

Many Burmese who hate the regime also lament their inability to change it. "We are rubbish," says a student in Mandalay. "Our tradition and our religion prevent us from getting things done," says a Rangoon intellectual. The pacific teachings of Theravada Buddhism do not, for example, allow self- immolation of the sort practiced by protesting Vietnamese monks in the 1960s.

Unable to remake their nation or count on rescue from abroad, large numbers of Burmese seek solace in the ghostly world of nats, the pantheon of spirits whose influence predates Buddhism. Despite the military siege, thousands of pilgrims entered monasteries all over the country last week. They prayed, tucking money into the clothing on figures of the nats. Then they sought out the astrologers who line the covered walkways around the temples. Questioned about Burma's future, one astrologer in Mandalay cast a wary glance over his shoulder to see if anyone might be listening. Then he whispered, "Burma is waiting."