Retreat to the Jungle

 

A young Burma Army officer and his platoon were told, on being transferred to Rangoon from an ethnic region in upper Burma: “We are sending you to the front line.” It happened a few years ago, but what appeared at the time to be a joke still has serious validity today.

 

This is really how some army leaders now see Rangoon. It is not that Rangoon is about to be attacked by insurgents or terrorists—the threat posed by urban dissidents is what is making the junta paranoid.

 

 

Rangoon is indeed a cauldron of tension and political confrontation, with a history of student protests and uprisings. It is a city of activists, student leaders, politicians, opposition parties, diplomats, UN agencies, local and foreign NGOs and—according to the regime view—the unofficial headquarters of “internal destructive elements.”

 

Clearly, it’s not a comfortable place for the generals, reluctant to hand over power and bent on staying in control for as long as possible. For some time now, they have been planning to withdraw from Rangoon and set up a new administrative city in central Burma.

 

The move began in early November with the departure of many ministries and government officials to Pyinmana, nearly 400 km north of Rangoon. It was the latest stage of the master plan for dealing with internal dissent and sealing the regime’s iron hold on power.

 

The plan actually began to take shape several years ago, when massive building projects—an airstrip, hospital, five-star hotel, military mansions, bunkers and offices—were begun in the Pyinmana area. The project was kept strictly under wraps, although The Irrawaddy broke the first news of the project on its Intelligence page around the time it began.

 

Diplomats, UN agencies and observers in Rangoon were dumbfounded in November to see hundreds of Chinese-made military trucks carrying officials, civilians and office supplies head north out of the capital. Neighboring countries, Rangoon’s diplomatic community and UN offices wanted to know how they were to keep in touch with Burma’s new center of government. “Don’t worry,” they were told. “You can reach us by fax.”

 

It was initially thought that the generals had chosen to relocate their War Office in order to better guard against a foreign invasion—independence hero General Aung San himself had chosen Pyinmana as his headquarters during World War II to ward off Japanese and British invaders.

 

Indeed, surrounded by dense forests and mountains and far from the coast, remote Pyinmana is in many ways an ideal location from which both to defend against and attack invaders.

 

Some Western observers and diplomats in Rangoon presumed the source of the generals’ paranoia to be that most vocal of critics, the United States. But in reality, the potential of an American invasion is unlikely to have had much bearing on the plan—with the Middle East and Afghanistan, surely the US has enough on its plate without having to worry about little old Burma.

 

Burma’s military leaders may not be the brightest bunch, but they are at least smart enough to figure out what’s going on in Washington.

 

Retired Brig-Gen Kyaw Zaw, a former colleague of Gen Aung San, commented that the junta is far less worried about an American seaborne invasion than it is of its own people, who are increasingly impatient with the regime. The possibility of a public uprising still haunts the army leaders.

 

If people were to take to the streets in Rangoon, the junta could continue to run the country’s administrative affairs from Pyinmana while sending troops to quell protests, said the exiled general from his home in China. To some extent, his assessment makes sense.

 

During the student-led nationwide uprising in 1988, government administration broke down and the government almost collapsed. As millions took to the street, army leaders kept their family members in hideouts or in heavily guarded houses.

 

In September 1988, a huge rally near Rangoon’s War Office brought home to the generals the reality of a mass public uprising. Shortly after the rally, the army staged a coup and retook power.

 

Over the following months, hundreds of thousands of people were moved out of the city and relocated to the periphery.