Following Senior General Than Shwe’s resignation from office in March, Myanmar has moved from a military dictatorship to what the state media calls a “discipline flourishing democracy.” But this transition has not really changed anything in the country and the population continues to fight for its survival. The new government has made some progress towards openness, but Myanmar still struggles to address political, economic and social problems.
YANGON, Myanmar — Five months after a nominally civilian government took power in Myanmar, the country is awash in uncertainty about who is really in charge.
Workers have taken down the once-ubiquitous portraits of Senior Gen. Than Shwe, the dictator who ran the country for nearly two decades, from the walls of government offices. But rumors circulate here that General Than Shwe, who stepped down in March, still has the final word on important decisions.
An impoverished population, downtrodden by decades of military rule, is parsing a raft of initiatives by the new government and trying to understand whether the country’s transition from military dictatorship to what the state news media describe as “discipline flourishing democracy” is real.
Like the biblical Thomas, they seem to want more proof.
“As far as I can see, there has been no change,” said U San Shwe, a retired civil servant whose comments typify the skepticism heard frequently in Myanmar. “The new government consists of former generals who have habits that they can’t break. They are accustomed to taking bribes, mistreating people and making a lot of money from their positions. They confiscate things, and no one can complain.”
Trying to guess the direction of this country has, in the past, been a fool’s errand. Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, has zigzagged from paranoid isolation under military rule to flirtations with openness. It seems propelled by the competing impulses of conservatives and reformers within the military.
In recent weeks there have been signs that reformers, led by Thein Sein, a former general who was elected president in February, have the upper hand.
The government has proposed peace talks with armed rebel groups that are battling the military for control over resources and for more autonomy. Officials have met three times in the last month with Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the country’s leading dissident, who was released from house arrest in November.
Other changes have been more symbolic. The state-run newspapers are refraining from publishing slogans like “Riots beget riots, not democracy.” The government has also allowed publications that do not deal with politics or history to publish without prior censorship. (Any newspaper articles that touch on politics must still be submitted to a censorship board.)
The bar for freedom of expression is set so low here that journalists rejoiced when it was announced that they would be allowed into Parliament for its current session, which began Monday.
Amid the tumult of transition, some economic changes have been very substantive. But their benefits to ordinary citizens remain unclear. A major privatization program initiated last year is transforming an economy that was so heavily controlled by the state that it could have been designed by Lenin himself.
Scores of state-owned factories, government buildings and companies have been sold off. The local currency, the kyat, has soared in value against the dollar — in part, analysts believe, because money has poured in to pay for assets in the government’s fire sale. The transactions were done without public tender, and most assets were sold to a handful of government favorites.
“There are great opportunities — but only for the cronies. It’s like Russia,” said U Soe Than, the owner of a shop for cellphones and digital music players imported from China. Mr. Soe Than has firsthand experience dealing with the new government.
When the government sold a department store in Yangon, the wealthy Myanmar businessman who purchased the building ordered all of its tenants, including Mr. Soe Than, to leave within weeks. Mr. Soe Than helped write 18 letters to officials to petition for redress. All of them went unanswered. But when the story got into Myanmar’s exile media based in Thailand and India, it caught the ear of officials in Naypyidaw, Myanmar’s capital.
Mr. Soe Than says he is now slightly more hopeful that shop owners will be compensated. “Things have improved a little bit,” he said.
Whether an economy controlled by cronies is better than the state-run system is a point of debate among analysts of the country. Similarly tainted privatization campaigns in the Middle East created deep resentments that a decade or so later helped fuel revolts this year in Tunisia, Egypt and Syria. Yet poor economic prospects have been as debilitating for the Burmese as political repression — if not more.
There have been some signs of economic revival: the number of tourists was up 23 percent in the first half of 2011, and hotels in Yangon brim with business travelers, many of them from China, Japan and South Korea.
Last week, The New Light of Myanmar, a state-owned newspaper, highlighted a meeting between government officials and executives from Caterpillar, the giant producer of construction and mining equipment that is based in the United States.
United States and European sanctions have made it difficult for many multinational companies to operate in Myanmar, but the government appears to be working vigorously to get the measures lifted. Officials from the International Monetary Fund have been invited for meetings in October to discuss further economic liberalization.
And the government has started a charm offensive with Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi, who has great leverage on the issue of sanctions. Last week, the government invited her for the first time to the capital, where she met with Mr. Thein Sein, the president.
As an Oxford-educated 1991 Nobel Peace laureate and the daughter of Myanmar’s independence hero, Aung San, Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi is perhaps the premier interlocutor between Myanmar and the outside world.
She has not fully enunciated her goals since her release from house arrest, but those who have watched her closely believe that she has aspirations well beyond being a mere symbol of national unity. “I always thought that her ambitions were higher than a ‘mother’ figure,” said Josef Silverstein, a Myanmar specialist and professor emeritus at Rutgers University in New Jersey.
Whether reconciliation between Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi and the former generals is possible remains a question mark hanging over the future.
Yet the political situation is only one part of the enormous challenge facing Myanmar’s 55 million people.
The decades of military rule and the generals’ single-minded obsession with political survival have left the country’s health and education systems a shambles.
A generation of students has been forgotten, said U Thiha, who runs a computer programming school in Yangon. He has been frustrated in his search for the best young minds for courses.
“My students were not well trained at university,” he said. “They don’t have enough knowledge. They are not eager. And over the past 20 years, there have been no activities to test and challenge them.”
