The Socialist Union of Myanmar, as it is officially called by its illegal government, is among the worst countries of the world. "Incompetent as well as callous" was the recent epithet of choice of the Economist magazine (Aug. 31, 2006). The results of the 1990 election have been set aside by the ruling military junta that has kept the figurehead of the party that won the election (with somewhere around 80-90% of the vote) mostly under house arrest. This is Aung San Suu Kyi, who was awarded, among other prizes, the Nobel Peace Price in 1991. She has asked that foreigners do not visit the country, a form of boycott to keep tourist dollars from enriching the junta. The EU and the United States have for several years imposed broad economic sanctions against Myanmar, which uses forced labor and supresses and destroys critical voices.

Economically, Burma is a disaster--despite potential riches in oil, gas, gems and timber, and a generally high literacy rate (which was artificially lowered to below 20%, from around 90%, for the country to qualify as a "least developed nation" by UNESCO standards). Traveling down the Ayeyarwaddy River, I saw only two large commercial vessels in nine hours, both carrying timber and presumably dating from the colonial era. Most people work in agriculture, which is almost completely unmechanized. That agriculture should form the economic base of the country is a cornerstone of the junta's ideology. It is also a recipe for poverty.

When it became independent in 1948, Burma was the world's biggest rice exporter. Now, malnutrition among children is widespread. The country proclaims autarky, but imports cars, cell phones and just about everything else, it seemed, that needs manufacturing. A 15-year-old model Mazda goes for $15,000, an old-model cell phone for $1,000 to $1,500. The import license for such goods is granted to cronies of the generals by "the government", and the incredible mark-up goes into their combined pockets.

There are frequent power outages, and Mandalay goes dark at 20:00, but there are generators everywhere to keep things running, costly and inefficiently. The infrastrucutre is a mess: the railroad from Yangon to Mandalay has probably not undergone competent repair since independence, there are few roads and even in the richer areas where I travelled, main roads were not always paved. There are frequent checkpoints along the roads, and when entering towns, a driver has to pay a road toll to a rabble of non-uniformed quasi-thugs who control tunrpikes.

The country is sprinkled with prestige projects that seem to go nowhere. A bridge over the Ayeyarwaddy, next to the old British Ava-Bridge, is a skeleton with no visible activity (this could be a true infrastructure project, if it were carried out reasonably). The new airport in Yangon is an oversized showpiece whose opening has been repeatedly pushed back and whose travelers will in any case not come for a long time. The capital itself is sprinkled with pretentious, almost empty tall or large buildings, while the sidewalks are crumbling (you may fall into the sewer) and its residential dwellings are rotting.

In fact, the capital is being removed from Yangon, as one slick government type proudly explained to us on some rickety boat while leaning on his brand new Suzuki motorcycle (we had heard about this idiocy long ago). Somewhere in the countryside, a kind of Burmese Brasilia is to be built for reasons that even experts cannot fathom, except that paranoia and astrology are most often mentioned, neither of which is a good guide to good policy. Foreign embassies are meanwhile not invited to relocate to the new capital. The distance between the "government" and the people will soon express itself even as a matter of geography.

We traveled to Burma despite Aung San Suu Kyi's advice. We had talked to refugees here who encouraged us to go, by ourselves, to small local hotels, to local restaurants and to meet with some contacts. We encountered tour groups, all from Italy, France or Korea. Do not go on these tours, all of which are overpriced for the benefit of the ruling junta and their running dogs. Your hotel may always have running hot water, but you will not see Burma or the Burmese. You may altogether miss that this is a military dictatorship. Do travel, and leave time for chance encounters that are the window to the world for a people that its rulers want to jail. (See Pascal Khoo Thwe, "From the Land of the Green Ghosts", reviewed here: http://hrw.org/english/docs/2005/03/25/burma10372.htm)

We got CNN and BBC in many hotels, but at critical points they became garbled. One such critical point is apparently any reporting on China. China is one of the countries to which the junta has cozied up over the last few years, which has rendered the sanctions useless, as China in any case can export everything useful to Burma.

I asked about these two issues, tourism and sanctions, in every serious discussion I had with Burmese. They enjoyed and were grateful for the conversations, for the smuggled magazines, for the news and for the knowledge that they are not forgotten. The vast majority, moreover, unequivocally were against the economic sanctions currently imposed by the US and the EU. They are useless, as long as China and India, Burma's neighbors, do not join, and it is naive to believe that China would ever join or, if it did, would honor its commitment.

These conversations also revealed a strong disagreement of the Burmese with refugee organizations that push for sanctions: "They will not help us, and they will not hurt the generals." The history of sanctions is at best mixed. I heard the same refrain in Yangon and in Mandalay: "South Africa was different because some people in power were ready for change, but the military here is not ready for change." We deplore that the people of Burma are forcibly undereducated, silenced, systematically robbed and effectively jailed. We should therefore give them their voice and accept their vote on this matter.

Shortly after we left, ASEAN finally appeared to step up some pressure on the junta. It is anybody's guess where this might lead, how much longer Burma must suffer and how much Burma will suffer when in the end it will open and begin he inevitably painful process of modernizing.

For a quick starter, try http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myanmar. The article in the Economist is at http://www.economist.com/world/asia/displaystory.cfm?story_id=E1_SRVVPPN) (subscription required). Several books by (or on) Aung San Suu Kyi are available in English.