Burmese days

Over the years, working in Asia/Pacific I was fortunate to visit Burma (Myanmar) a couple of times. Apart from being an absolutely beautiful country, my experiences were often with people so friendly that they went out of their way to help travelers such as myself.

Some things in Burma are unnecessarily unusual. Take the currency, the kyat. When I first went there, the denominations still included 45 and 90 kyat bills. Those denominations were introduced by Ne Win, who believed that he would live to the age of 90 if the country had currency in multiples of nine. It worked.

So in other words, for the sake of one person, the entire country had to sacrifice simple efficiency in daily commerce.

Now we have a situation where the recent cyclone has killed tens of thousands of people and the Burmese junta prevented or limited foreign aid from entering the country, ostensibly because of a fear of looking weak or of losing power. Add to that the lack of investment in Burmese infrastructure, education and a slow openness to communication from outside (you need a permit to have a fax machine and the Internet was only selectively legalized in 2003).

So perhaps given their past experience and current realities it should not be surprising that the military junta decides to retreat and fortify its position in the new capital of Naypyidaw. There is just no benefit for the junta to try to improve the situation in the country if there is no possible way for them to remain in power afterwards. It therefore has to pull back and fortify itself in the new capital and try to postpone the inevitable.