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Washington Post Foreign Service
August 17, 2008
For the crowds of young Burmese outside the Immigration and Customs Office here, the commodity of choice is a shiny, tomato-red, cardboard-stiff new passport.
One recent morning, hundreds of men and women flooded in and out of the office, located on a rickshaw-crammed boulevard, or camped under umbrellas along the sidewalk to wait for their passport applications to be processed. Some scoured billboards that listed openings in garment factories, shipyards and other workplaces in Singapore, Thailand and Malaysia.
A pair of 22-year-olds took turns using each other's backs to fill out forms. Both said they hoped to go to Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, to find jobs as hotel waiters for a year, maybe two.
"It's like the collapse of the Berlin Wall," said a passing 29-year-old man, meaning the pent-up outflow of people. Unemployed for three years, he has yet to hear back about a passport application he filed last year.
The run on the passport office reflects a social crisis at the heart of an economy in free fall.
Sixty years ago, Burma, also known as Myanmar, was among the wealthiest countries in Southeast Asia, outshining its neighbors with higher standards of living and greater social mobility. Its universities attracted students from across the region, and its rich stock of natural resources promised steady growth.
But decades of mismanagement by military rulers who have kept as tight a grip on the economy as on their political power have sent the country to the bottom of regional and global rankings -- among the worst for poverty, health care and corruption. The education system has been deliberately weakened in response to students' anti-government organizing, and virtually all avenues to prosperity are controlled by senior generals.
When the military seized power in 1962, it set the country on what it called the "Burmese Road to Socialism," confiscating private property and curtailing free enterprise. After a failed street uprising in 1988, there were limited moves toward liberalization. But today the government remains heavily involved in the economy, with military officers heading most state enterprises, often as a reward for political loyalty. A handful of enterprises known as "crony" companies for their closeness to the junta benefit from policies that promote monopoly.
"Our view is that Burma is an accident waiting to happen," said Mark Canning, Britain's ambassador to the country.
Diplomats and analysts say that economic grievances could at any moment trigger another street revolt akin to the two major ones of the past twenty years. Both began among disaffected youth.
A student-led response to the overnight demonetization of small bank notes in 1988 evolved into a massive pro-democracy protest. And last August, a sharp rise in fuel prices and bus fares prompted thousands to take to the streets, including a young generation of Buddhists monks, who often are keenly aware of lay folk's financial difficulties because daily donations in their alms bowls decrease.
Today, more than a third of children are malnourished, the average household spends up to 70 percent of its budget on food, and more than 30 percent of the population lives under the poverty line, according to United Nations estimates.
At tea shops or grocery stalls, people pull out bricks of local bills to pay for basics in an economy that the International Monetary Fund estimates suffered inflation of 40 percent in 2007.
Fuel rationing and price controls have insulated the country from much of the recent shocks to the world economy. Nonetheless, black market prices for gasoline and diesel fuel have continued to spiral upward in recent months, residents say. A cyclone three months ago that wrought havoc on the country's rice production areas has pushed the economy further toward desperation.
So far, the generals have been able to largely shrug off Western sanctions, by dealing instead with India, China and Thailand, to which they funnel vast stores of natural gas.
Revenue from energy sales is set to increase significantly once production begins at the offshore Shwe and Shwe Phyu fields, which are estimated to hold up to 10 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. South Korea's Daewoo International Corp. is partnering with Burma to develop the fields, and Chinese firms, including Sinopec and China National Petroleum Corp., have exploration projects underway in the country.
Even without the new fields, sales of oil and gas topped $3.3 billion last year, with $2 billion in sales of gas to Thailand alone, according to Sean Turnell, a professor at Macquarie University in Sydney.
Those funds largely disappeared into the military's parallel universe of separate schools and hospitals, subsidized housing and the multimillion-dollar construction of a remote new capital, Naypyitaw, whose name roughly translates as "abode of the kings." It reportedly includes an artificial beach resort, golf courses and an air-conditioned zoo.
But 250 miles south of the junta's fantasyland, in the former capital, Rangoon, electricity functions erratically and abandoned government offices and colonial-era edifices molder and blacken in a peculiar form of urban leprosy. Decades-old cars sputter along with wires poking out and monsoon waters sloshing around below the passenger seats.
The junta sharply restricts car imports, which means that a 1988 Toyota Camry can sell for upwards of $20,000, according to local residents. A memory card needed to make a cellphone function costs anywhere from $2,000 to $3,000.
Official statistics on employment, and most other economic indicators, are notoriously unreliable, but analysts and Burmese residents say unemployment -- and underemployment -- is on the rise. Salaries that were already inadequate have failed to keep pace with inflation.
To make up the shortfall, professionals such as government geologists double as taxi drivers, professors sell exam scores, civil servants demand bribes to process paperwork and prison guards run elaborate operations allowing the smuggling of money to inmates, in return for a 20 percent cut, local residents and former detainees said.
Teachers sometimes sell lunch to their students. "Can you imagine asking your students for money? I couldn't do it," said a 26-year-old former elementary school teacher who switched to being a tour guide.
So many people engage in corruption that the Berlin-based watchdog group Transparency International rated Burma in 2007 as tied with Somalia as the most corrupt country in the world.
For many people in the business community, the line between the licit and the illicit is a blur.
As he weighed a handful of knuckle-size green gems in his Rangoon shop, a jeweler said he regularly bribes a customs official so that he can smuggle rubies and jade to sellers in Hong Kong and Bangkok.
Sales of diamonds are less problematic. For those, he said with a grin, there is no need to travel because diamonds are the gems of choice of senior generals. A broker coming directly from Naypyitaw visits regularly, he said.
The junta's penchant for diamonds hasn't gone unnoticed. In 2006, outraged Rangoon residents circulated a bootleg DVD of Senior Gen. Than Shwe's daughter at her wedding, showing her covered with diamond-encrusted jewelry.
Meanwhile, the climate of nepotism and capricious junta policies means that uncertainty pervades even among the most seemingly successful.
In his sparsely furnished living room, an avowed former "crony" of senior generals recounted how he grew a small logging firm that traded rosewood and teak to China into a sprawling foreign investment firm that eventually bankrolled three ministers and a mayor, all of them senior military officers. In return for supplying licenses and contracts, the four received large deposits in private Singapore bank accounts, he said.
Profits, however, one day started to slip, the deposits to those bank accounts slimmed, and the businessman was thrown in jail, charged with the very thing that swelled the officers' accounts, he said -- using a local company as a front for illicit foreign dealings.
But nearly eight years behind bars hasn't dissuaded him from attempting another trek down Burma's twisted path to prosperity. Only six months since he was released, gray-haired and frail, from Insein prison, he says he searches the Internet daily for information on how to tap the booming emigrant industry -- funneling unskilled Burmese workers to jobs outside the country. "This is not a legal way. It is a form of trafficking," he said.
For help, he said, he would be turning to old friends in the Home Ministry. As for his clients, he added, they don't really know what they're getting into. But "if they have a chance to go abroad, they can make money."
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