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Built to Order: Myanmar?s New Capital Isolates and Insulates Junta By THE NEW YORK TIMES 24 June 08 NAYPYIDAW, Myanmar ? The bamboo forests and sugar cane fields that once covered the gently sloping hills here have been replaced by hulking government buildings, roads so long and straight they resemble runways and a vast construction site marked by a sign: ?Parliament zone. Do not enter.? Naypyidaw is Myanmar?s new capital, built in secret by the ruling generals and announced to the public two and a half years ago, when it was a fait accompli. A nine-hour drive north from the former capital, Yangon, it looks like nothing else in this impoverished country, where one out of three children is malnourished and many roads are nothing more than dirt tracks. Workers in Naypyidaw (pronounced nay-pee-DAW) are building multilevel, flower-covered traffic circles. In a country of persistent power shortages and blackouts, street lamps brightly illuminate the night, like strings of pearls running up and down scrub-covered hills. On the city?s outskirts there is a modern and tidy zoo complete with an air-conditioned penguin house. Foreigners rarely travel here, and the police tried to stop a reporter from taking pictures in the city, but the zoo is ready to receive them: admission is $10 for foreigners and the equivalent of $1 for Myanmar citizens. It would be easy to write off the move to Naypyidaw as an inconsequential caprice of the secretive generals who have been in power for 46 years. But the transfer of the entire bureaucracy to this relatively remote location, where malaria is still endemic and cellphones do not work, has drained the country?s finances and widened the gulf between the rulers and the ruled. Even the most charitable observers of Myanmar?s junta portray its members as out of touch. Now they are literally out of sight: the generals live and work in a guarded zone of Naypyidaw that is off limits to all but senior officers. When Cyclone Nargis swept through the Irrawaddy Delta last month with winds up to 155 miles per hour, it killed about 130,000 people and damaged many buildings in Yangon. But the generals and civil servants ensconced in Naypyidaw felt only a zephyr, residents say. The leader of the junta, Senior Gen. Than Shwe, did not visit the area devastated by the cyclone until May 18, more than two weeks after the storm. Isolation appears to be what the generals want. The main reason for the move may have been that the junta felt unsafe in Yangon, formerly Rangoon, which is near the sea. Internal stability has been a constant worry for the junta, which took power in a coup four and a half decades ago. It suppressed mass demonstrations calling for democracy in 1988, leaving hundreds dead, and put down popular protests against the regime again last fall. The leadership has faced diplomatic pressure over its human rights record for years, but has clung to power tenaciously. The real threat, the generals often tell the people, comes from abroad. ?They really believe, and they have believed for a long time, that we are planning an invasion, which is nuts,? said Shari Villarosa, the highest-ranking United States diplomat in Yangon. ?We are not,? she added. People in Myanmar, formerly Burma, regularly ask foreign visitors whether the United States has plans to topple the leadership. When British, French and American warships sailed to waters off the Myanmar coast in May to offer assistance to the victims of the cyclone, at least one Western embassy in Yangon received phone calls from excited residents. The callers said, ?You?re coming to save us, aren?t you?? a diplomat remembered. Steve Marshall, the representative in Myanmar for the International Labor Organization, a United Nations agency, said the Burmese Army regarded the ships, which have since left the coast, as a hostile force. Mr. Marshall said a colonel who is a senior government official had told him that the military had sent extra personnel to fend off a possible landing. ?He said, ?We?ve had to withdraw army boys from humanitarian activities to protect the coast in case the French, British and the Americans land,? ? Mr. Marshall said. The generals have organized Naypyidaw like the Yellow Pages. There is an avenue for hotels and an area dedicated to restaurants. The government offices, built with traditional Burmese influences and Soviet-style bulkiness, are in one section. Housing for bureaucrats, partitioned and color-coded according to ministry, is nearby. The city?s size is hard to judge, but it feels smaller than the government?s claim of one million inhabitants and 2,700 square miles ? roughly twice the size of Rhode Island. A huge Buddhist pagoda is being built atop a hill, matched in size only by the parliament complex. Myanmar has no sitting parliament, so the building, once completed, may sit empty for a while. The generals have vowed to hold ?multiparty, democratic elections? by 2010, but opposition groups are skeptical that the elections, if they occur at all, will be free and fair. The junta ignored the results of the last election, held in 1990, in which its proxy party was badly defeated by the party of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the pro-democracy leader. That is not to say Myanmar?s masses are unrepresented in Naypyidaw. Thousands of workers, including many who look like teenagers, are helping construct the place, hacking away at embankments, carrying huge stones and shoveling dirt. Naypyidaw, whose name means royal capital in Burmese, is remote enough that most people in the country were unaware it was being built until it was officially unveiled in November 2005. ?They built in secret,? said a doctor in Pyinmana, a small city about 10 miles away. Six years ago he and other residents noticed Chinese engineers in Pyinmana?s coffee shops. ?Only when they started coming did we know the government was building something,? the doctor said. Engineers from China, which has a relatively close relationship with Myanmar?s leaders, are also helping to build a hydroelectric dam on the Paunglaung River that will offer a steady supply of electricity to the new capital. The government is widely assumed to have built Naypyidaw with revenue from the sale of timber, gems and natural gas. Last year Myanmar received $2.7 billion from Thailand for natural gas, which is piped from the Andaman Sea. The total cost of building Naypyidaw remains a mystery. But Sean Turnell, an expert on the Burmese economy with Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, said the consensus estimate was around $4 billion to $5 billion. In a country where per capita annual income is $280 ? less than 80 cents a day ? opposition groups say the money could have been better spent. The contrast between the grandiose architecture of Naypyidaw?s buildings and the poverty of the surrounding countryside is jarring. Civil servants have two golf courses at their disposal, and the large zoo, which would not look out of place in Singapore or Sacramento, houses dozens of animals, including white tigers, zebras and kangaroos. On a recent afternoon, the animals greatly outnumbered the visitors. Outside the zoo?s gates, farmers live in flimsy thatched huts and till rice paddies with water buffaloes. From this vantage point the zoo seems as appropriate as penguins surrounded by tropical jungle. ?This zoo is a government fantasy,? said a woman selling souvenirs and soft drinks near the empty ticket counter. ?Business is terrible,? she said. ?The people around here are villagers. They don?t have money to spend.? :twisted:
