Beneath Burma's Jurassic shell

Burma remains the odd-fashioned dictatorship I remember from a few years ago.

Upon arrival every foreigner is forced to buy $200 worth of Monopoly-money coupons, which is a Burmese way of ducking the dollarization in the tourist sector.

Then come the ubiquitous red government billboards - some in English, some in Burmese - listing so-called "People's Desire," such as, "Oppose those relying on external elements acting as stooges, holding negative views."

To help visitors hold only positive views of Burma (renamed Myanmar), hotels supply them with the daily "New Light of Myanmar," which makes good old "Pravda" read like "Cosmopolitan." Few alternative sources of information exist: no Internet access, foreign papers only in a few hotels, satellite dishes banned until last year.

But beneath the Jurassic shell, the situation here has changed subtly in the past few years. So it may be time for the West to reexamine its approach to this endearing country and its distasteful generals. Little data are available, but the few known facts are staggering: In 2000 the World Health Organization ranked Burma 190th of 191 countries on health-care delivery; the agency UNAIDS says that 1 million Burmese out of 40 million are infected with the HIV/AIDS virus.

The reasons for Burma's humanitarian challenges are incompetence and mismanagement by a military junta, but it does not help that Burma is receiving very little overseas development aid - in 1997, $1 per capita as compared with $35 per capita in Cambodia or $68 in Laos.

Indeed, ever since the protests that culminated on 8/8/88, when the Burmese people under the leadership of Aung San Suu Kyi rejected the 26-year-old military regime, the West's approach to Burma has been simple: minimal aid and a trade boycott aimed at forcing the regime to relinquish power and discouraging tourism.

Two years later, this policy was reinforced when the democratic opposition took 82 percent of the seats in an election that the junta called for, deluded about its own popularity.

This was more than 10 years ago. Since then, the generals have not given up one inch of power. Their human rights record is still abysmal; Aung San Suu Kyi remains under house arrest.

So why should the West reexamine its approach? One reason is that the current tack does not seem effective enough. Nobody is calling for a softening of the trade boycott: It should and will be maintained, perhaps even made tougher, but it alone cannot bring democracy to Burma. The junta still managed to find enough cash last year to buy 10 Mig-29 fighters from Russia for $130 million, and this year added a nuclear reactor to the shopping cart.

However, the boycott and the West's ostracism may have prompted the junta to open talks with Aung San Suu Kyi. These talks, which started in October 2000, are another reason for the West to reexamine its policy toward Burma, because the opposition, too, is reassessing its tactics. (My Burmese friends point to the overthrow of two dictators - Serbia's Slobodan Milosevic and Indonesia's Suharto - to explain why the junta is now willing to speak with its arch-enemy.)

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