FOR BURMESE, REPRESSION, AIDS AND DENIAL

YANGON, Myanmar -- To inoculate themselves against any outbreak of
democracy, the generals who run this hermit dictatorship have
undertaken two urgent missions of self-preservation.

Seeking support from the Buddhist majority in what used to be called
Burma, the junta is sprucing up old pagodas and building new ones at a
pace and on a scale that experts say is without precedent.

Nearly every day, a top general travels by armed motorcade to a
recently restored pagoda. As state television records his piety, the
general removes his shiny shoes and inspects a newly gilded Buddha.

The junta has a rather more robust Plan B. In an autumn that has been
unkind to autocrats — Slobodan Milosevic failed to steal an election
in Serbia and the youngest son of Indonesia's ousted president,
Suharto, was convicted of corruption — the generals here are taking no
chances. They have locked up nearly all their political opponents.

In late September, they again ordered the house arrest of Daw Aung San
Suu Kyi, the opposition leader whose party won a huge victory in a
1990 election that the generals ignored. Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi, the
winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991, has spent more than 6 of the
last 11 years under house arrest.

Senior leaders of her party have been imprisoned or placed under house
arrest. Two of the most influential monks, who wrote letters that
begged the generals to talk to Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi, are being
watched by military intelligence.

The army halted huge pro-democracy demonstrations 12 years ago by
killing several hundred people and jailing thousands more. Since then,
the generals have doubled the size of the armed forces, to more than
400,000, though Myanmar, with a population estimated at 50 million,
faces no serious foreign threat and has made peace with most of its
armed ethnic minorities.

Military analysts say the buildup, which coincides with a steep
decline in spending on schools and health care, is primarily aimed at
preventing or, if need be, crushing civil unrest. Large numbers of
troops are stationed in or around major cities.

In the last five years, the junta has forcibly resettled tens of
thousands of potentially restive poor people from city centers to
distant slums. It has closed most urban universities and sent students
off to remote rural campuses. Labor unions and private civic
associations are banned. No elections are scheduled; none seem likely.

The generals have made it a crime to own a computer modem, send
e-mail, sign on to the Internet or invite a foreigner into a private
home.

Since seizing power 38 years ago, the military dictatorship has
renamed the country, renamed this capital (formerly Rangoon) and
renamed scores of other cities, towns and religious shrines. Every few
years, the generals rename themselves.

After the 1988 retirement of the founding dictator, Gen. Ne Win, his
handpicked successors decided to call their junta the State Law and
Order Restoration Council, known inside and outside the country as
Slorc. In 1997, as the generals opened the country to foreign
investors and tried to soften their image, the name was changed to the
State Peace and Development Council.

S.P.D.C., though, has not caught on. People seem to relish calling
their self-appointed leaders "Slorc."

The generals have also stopped allowing foreign journalists into the
country, especially Americans. But Slorc, starved for foreign
currency, began admitting sizable numbers of tourists after 1996,
which it proclaimed "Visit Myanmar Year."

This reporter visited the country in late October and early November
as a tourist after the Myanmar authorities had failed for nearly five
years to grant journalist visas requested by The New York Times.
Citizens can go to prison here for talking to foreign reporters. For
that reason, this article omits the names and blurs the identities of
people who were willing to explain what life is like in a nation
studded with giant green billboards that warn, "Crush all internal and
external destructive elements as the common enemy."

In Jail, Fried Rat Is a Delicacy

A former political detainee had been in prison for about six years
when a cellmate told him about "Visit Myanmar Year." On hearing the
news, he remembers laughing for hours in his prison cell. "We said
that if any foreigner visits our cell for one night, then he will know
the real Burma," he said.

He is in his 40's and was arrested by military intelligence for
associating with a banned political party. He was sentenced to 10
years in prison at a secret trial where there were no civilian
witnesses. He did not have a lawyer.

Human rights groups say his experience is typical. There are about
1,400 political prisoners in Myanmar, according to an American Embassy
count.

The former prisoner's incarceration began when guards forced a
stinking blue cotton bag over his head and asked him questions for
four days without allowing him to sleep. He said the bag, which kept
him from seeing the faces of his changing cast of interrogators, was
fouled with sweat, mucous and blood.

"It smelled very awful," he said, "so bad you can't even imagine
it."

He was later caught with a magazine in his cell. At the time,
prisoners were not allowed to read or write. His punishment was three
months in solitary confinement without access to a toilet or a shower.
Unlike some unlucky prisoners who were not allowed to clean up after
themselves, he said he was occasionally permitted to scrape excrement
from his cell.

For years after that, his only reading material was the odd scrap of
newspaper he sometimes found in the wrapping of cheroots, local cigars
that prisoners often traded for food. On one shard of newsprint, he
said, he read the obituary of a cousin.

The International Committee of the Red Cross began making prison
visits here in May 1999 and some prisoners now have access to reading
material.

The prison where the man was confined is in an isolated rural area
more than 200 miles from his hometown. His wife and mother could
afford to visit him once every three months. They were allowed to talk
to him for only 15 minutes in a room where one guard took notes and
another made sure he never touched his wife or his mother.

In the months between those meetings, he said, he rehearsed all the
things he wanted to tell his family. After years of practice, he said,
he and his wife and mother learned to talk and listen at the same time.

The two women brought food that the former prisoner believes kept him
and several of his prison friends alive.

In the long gaps between their visits, he said, he and other prisoners
supplemented their diet of beans by catching and eating toads, bats
and rats. They fried their catch on tin plates heated by burning
plastic bags. He said rats were the heartiest meal one could catch in
prison.

"Actually," he said, "it was very rare to see a rat. Everyone was
after them."

Deep Poverty, Still, Bright Smiles

Half a century ago, Norman Lewis, a British travel writer, noted that
the Burmese "emerge into the sunshine immaculate and serene."

"There is no misery that manifests itself in rags and sores," he wrote
in "Golden Earth" in 1952.

Although badly damaged by World War II, Burma then had the best health
care system, the best civil service and the highest literacy rate in
Southeast Asia. It since has become one of the world's poorest, least
developed and most disastrously governed countries.

The World Health Organization this year ranked Myanmar second to last
among 191 nations in the quality of its health care services. (Sierra
Leone was last.) Most people here live on less than a dollar a day, 4
out of 10 children are malnourished and the government spends 28 cents
a year per child on public schools, according to United Nations
agencies and the World Bank.

Yet the paradox of serenity and elegance persists.

Most women and men still wear longyis, or sarongs, many woven in
brilliant colors. At rush hour in city traffic, women have a poised,
almost regal way of sitting sideways on the backs of bicycles.
Passengers on insanely overcrowded buses don't become impatient.
Children smile at strangers from faces that their mothers have painted
with sweet-smelling sandalwood paste.

Rural areas appear to exist outside of time. Surrounded by
emerald-green fields of rice, spotless bamboo houses are perfumed with
garlands of flowers. Oxcarts outnumber cars. Every morning,
preadolescent monks in crimson robes walk the streets, ringing bells
and chanting — and adults, in response, fill their bowls with rice and
fruit.

Unlike prosperous Thailand next door, where 90 percent of the forest
has been cut down, this country still has about half its forest cover.
There is almost no paper trash in the villages; people value paper.

The charming countenance of the people and the seductive beauty of the
countryside, however, are misleading.

Western governments and United Nations agencies say the generals
preside over an increasingly toxic mix of heroin- and
amphetamine-smuggling, drug-money laundering, high-level corruption,
forced labor, sexual exploitation of young women and an AIDS epidemic
of African proportions.

Some of this results from peace deals the junta has struck in recent
years with armed ethnic groups in the northeast of the country. Partly
because Slorc does not have the power to stop them, these ethnic
groups grow opium that is smuggled to China and India and make
amphetamines sold in Thailand. Myanmar is the world's second-largest
producer of opium, after Afghanistan. Slorc is not believed to be in
the drug business itself, but it welcomes money from those who are.

"The government actively encourages the investment of narcotics
profits in the Burmese economy, as part of a strategy to wean the
ethnic organizations from heroin production and to offset the shortage
of foreign investment," according to the Country Commercial Guide
published by the American Embassy in September.

Many of the country's new hotels and offices have been built with drug
money, the report said, which added that laundered narcotics profits
have also supplemented government spending on roads and bridges.

The State Department and several human rights groups say the junta,
despite repeated denials, continues to use forced labor to build
government projects and supply porters for the army.

"Porters who no longer can work often are either abandoned without
medical care or assistance, or executed," said this year's State
Department report on human rights, citing what it said were credible
reports.

The experiment in allowing foreign investors into the country is
floundering, as top generals have begun to seize the profits and
assets of successful companies, according to local business executives
and Western diplomats.

Scores of foreign businesses, including major Japanese companies like
Toyota and All Nippon Airways, have fled the country in the last year.
A dentist who treats resident foreigners in Yangon said that in less
than 12 months, the number of Japanese businesspeople in his patient
pool has fallen to 300 from 700.

Acting on orders of the prime minister, Senior Gen. Than Shwe,
soldiers last year occupied a brewery in Mandalay after it became
profitable with the help of $6 million in foreign investment. The main
investor, Win Win Nu, a businesswoman living in Singapore, told The
Far Eastern Economic Review in November that the success of the
brewery made it "an easy target for greedy soldiers and
bureaucrats."

Denial Deepens an AIDS Plague

By far the most serious public-policy problem in Myanmar is AIDS. The
government's owns figures (which have not been made public inside the
country) show that the infection rate among prostitutes has soared to
levels that epidemiologists say compare to those in Africa.

The infection rate among prostitutes in Myanmar's two largest cities
averaged 47 percent last year — three times the rate in Thailand.

"There is a catastrophe in Burma," said Dr. Chris Beyrer, an
epidemiologist and director of international AIDS training at Johns
Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health. "It is what happens with
an epidemic when you do nothing."

The epidemic followed a huge increase in heroin addiction among users
sharing needles, said Dr. Beyrer, a specialist in AIDS in Southeast
Asia. A Slorc-financed report four years ago found that heroin use
jumped "dramatically" in 1988, the year the democracy movement was
crushed. According to Dr. Beyrer, that was when a flood of cheap
heroin hit the market.

A uniquely Burmese culture of sharing needles in tea stalls has
contributed to an addiction rate that Dr. Beyrer said is among the
highest in the world. A government study in the mid-1990's, which was
deemed to be too sensitive to be released in Myanmar but was made
available to scientists abroad, found that 4 percent of men and 2
percent of women were heroin users.

About 57 percent of users injecting drugs have H.I.V., the virus that
causes AIDS, according to the most recent government figures. The
virus has since moved from drug users into the sex industry, which Dr.
Beyrer said has grown rapidly in the last decade — particularly among
teenage girls — because of increased poverty and government programs
of forced relocation.

Two prominent doctors in the country said the generals are in denial
about AIDS. Counseling is virtually nonexistent; condoms, which were
banned by the generals until 1993, are prohibitively expensive for
most people. Free AIDS testing is rare, and most people cannot afford
the $10 test to determine if they have H.I.V.

Once a patient is diagnosed, the doctors said, he or she usually dies
within three months. There are virtually no anti-H.I.V. drugs in the
country. There is also an acute shortage of antibiotics for
tuberculosis, the biggest killer of infected people here.

The virus is also spreading in jails, where prisoners can obtain food
(often, a single egg) for a blood donation and where transfusion
equipment is often reused without cleaning, according to Dr. Beyrer.

The disease is spreading, too, in monasteries around Mandalay,
according to a doctor who lives there. He said many infected young
men, shunned by their families, move into monasteries to die. The
doctor said he has treated a number of monks with AIDS, several
elderly. Before they died, some of the monks told him that they
contracted the disease by shaving their heads with razors shared
inside the monastery.

News about the AIDS epidemic, the flight of foreign investors or the
country's reliance on drug money never appears here. All publications
are censored, in a process that takes about a month for magazines.

State-controlled daily newspapers and the evening television news
concentrate on flowery accounts of the generals' doings, as well as
long interviews with senior officers instructing the masses on correct
ways to grow vegetables.

"The fact is people turn off the TV when the news is shown," Brig.
Gen. Zaw Tun, a deputy minister for national planning, dared to say at
an economic conference in July, according to American diplomats who
have talked with people who attended. "Only after the news hour, they
switch the TV on again to view Chinese movies."

The general has since lost his job.

Long Shadow of 'The Lady'

"The lady," as people here who are afraid to whisper her name call
her, has again been locked up. It is dangerous to go near her heavily
guarded home in Yangon.

But even inside her house, where each morning before dawn she
meditates, exercises on a Nordic Trak and listens to the BBC World
Service, the Voice of America and Radio Free Asia, Mrs. Aung San Suu
Kyi torments the generals.

The official press can't quite decide what to call the 55-year-old
woman, who returned here in 1988 after 20 years in England. They use a
number of snide and vulgar nicknames: "the stunt actress of
democracy," "puppet doll," "England returnee miss" and, in a sneering
echo from the Clinton White House, "that woman."

She often is called "Mrs. Aris," a reference to her late husband, Dr.
Michael Aris, an Oxford historian who died last year of cancer,
although in Burmese usage a woman is not called by her husband's name.

The junta's problem with her actual name is that it invokes the memory
of her father, the most famous and revered man in this country's
history, Gen. Aung San. He effectively created modern Burma before he
was assassinated in 1947. He was a gifted military leader who believed
in democratic, civilian government. The day of his murder is an
important national holiday.

General Aung San's daughter also happens to be a fine public speaker
and a knowledgeable student of Buddhism. Despite Slorc's campaign of
pagoda-building and its effort to discredit Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi,
several senior monks said she enjoys the loyalty of many of the
country's 400,000 monks.

When the generals do let her out of her house, she consistently
demands that all negotiations begin with recognition of the 1990
election. Her party won 80 percent of the seats; most of those who won
are in prison.

Until those negotiations begin, she says, she will support the
sanctions on investment, travel and arms sales that have been imposed
on Burma by the United States and several Western countries. (She
insists that the country's name is Burma.)

She has said, too, that her party will not be vengeful. The generals,
however, do not believe her, according to Western diplomats who speak
to them. They reportedly fear that they and their families will be
forced to surrender their fortunes and will face prosecution or execution.

In the dismal stalemate, the government is still trying to explain why
it never really lost that parliamentary election.

"Some of the voters wrongly cast their votes," argued The New Light of
Myanmar, a government daily, in a full-page post-election analysis
that ran in October, a decade after votes were counted. The piece
reasoned that citizens misunderstood their patriotic duty in 1990
because they had been intoxicated by the "personality cult" of a
"super political actress."

How the Dead Make an Impact

It has become a political act here to bury the dead.

Slorc decreed in the mid-1990's that many urban cemeteries be closed.
Some graves were moved, more were paved over. It was part of urban
renewal in Yangon, Mandalay and several other cities, as Slorc geared
up for "Visit Myanmar Year."

The generals ordered new cemeteries built about 15 miles outside of
Mandalay, far enough that bereaved families had to hire a motorized
hearse. At $15 a funeral, many poor people in Mandalay found they
could not afford to bury their loved ones.

Private civic associations are illegal (as are private outdoor
gatherings of more than five people), but two years ago about 20
individuals in Mandalay decided to take a risk. They raised money to
buy a hearse and found a senior monk who allowed them to park it at
his monastery.

For a while, censors refused to allow the funeral society to be
mentioned in any publication or the broadcast media. But the burial
movement became a word-of-mouth sensation in Mandalay, and word of it
spread to other large cities where generals had closed cemeteries.

Swamped with donations from Burmese who could spare a few dollars and
are reared in the Buddhist tradition of giving, the Mandalay funeral
society raised money for eight hearses and had lots of cash left over.
Founders of the society began buying medicines for poor people in
hospitals. Last month they distributed about $1,000 worth of drugs to,
among other patients, a woman with an ovarian tumor, a child with
amputated feet and a man with cancer of the rectum.

Their success is apparently angering the generals.

"They say it makes them look bad," said one member of the group who
has been warned to stop giving medicine to the sick. "They think we
are rivals, but we are not rivaling them."

Censors now allow local magazines to mention the funeral society, but
all references to the distribution of free drugs are strictly banned.

Bleak Present, Bleaker Future

Burmese people talk hopefully, but passively, about the propitious
power of the number 13. It's been 12 years since the uprising that
nearly toppled the generals, they say. Next year, surely, something
good will happen.

But the lockdown of Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi and party leaders has, for
the time being, halted all movement toward peaceful political change,
opposition members admit. An armed insurrection against the army seems
even less likely. The junta is stronger than ever.

Outside leverage is limited. The generals maintain relatively peaceful
relations in the region and are especially friendly with China, their
principal source of arms.

This country has perhaps the most fertile farmland in Southeast Asia,
and usually produces enough rice and other food for its people.

Finally, diplomats discern no significant divisions within the junta.
They say the generals know they have too much to lose.

Slorc, then, seems secure. The generals seem to have unlimited free
time to inspect pagodas and make speeches about the glory of the
precolonial past. That was when Burma was ruled by kings who built
thousands of Buddhist shrines — a crusade for which they expected to
accumulate merit.

Photographs now on display at many spiffed-up pagodas show grateful
citizens bowing to their generals, as they bowed centuries ago to
their kings.

"It is propaganda," said an elderly monk in the north of the
country.

No matter how many pagodas they restore, he added, the generals will
come back as rats.