Myanmar 1

Myanmar, a southeast Asian country that was formerly known as Burma, has been under military rule in one form or another since 1962, when General Ne Win staged a coup that toppled a civilian government. The current junta, formed in 1988, threw out the results of a democratic parliamentary election in 1990 that was overwhelmingly won by the party led by Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the daughter of Aung San, one of the heroes of the nation's independence from the British Empire in 1948.

After years of deadlock and stagnation in the country, change is coming, but strictly on the junta’s terms. There is guarded hope among business people and diplomats that Myanmar may be gradually moving away from years of paranoid authoritarianism and Soviet-style economic management that has left the majority of the country’s 55 million people in dire poverty.

In November 2010, Myanmar’s main military-backed party won an overwhelming victory in the first election in 20 years, in a vote that was carefully engineered by the military to assure its continued grip on power. The election was widely seen as an attempt to legitimize military rule behind a mask of civilian government, after a half century of unambiguous military rule. The National League for Democracy, headed by Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi, declined to take part, saying campaign rules were undemocratic and unfair.

In January 2011, the country's ruling generals convened the first meeting of Parliament in more than two decades, a move they say completes the transition to a multiparty democracy. Officially the opening of the two-chamber Parliament will mean the dissolution of the junta. But it does not appear to be the dawn of unfettered democracy. A quarter of the seats are reserved for the military, and a military-backed party controls more than 80 percent of the rest, allowing the generals to effectively retain their power, albeit in a less hierarchical system.

Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi, a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize and the country’s leading dissident, was held under house arrest for most of the last 20 years. She was freed a week after the elections and is now seeking to rebuild her pro-democracy movement.

The junta weathered popular unrest in 2007, which it put down violently, and the death and destruction unleashed by Cyclone Nargis in 2008.

2007: An Uprising Crushed

In August 2007 a decision by the government to sharply raise fuel prices led to street protests. After small demonstrations by students, the situation turned more serious when large numbers of Buddhist monks, who are widely revered, joined in. Some monks chanted "Release Suu Kyi." Over 100,000 participated in processions led by the monks, who marched to the gate of Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi's home where she greeted them. It was the first time she had been seen in public for four years.

The resulting government crackdown, witnessed abroad in smuggled photographs and on videotape, drew worldwide condemnation. Although the government acknowledged the deaths of a dozen people, the United Nations said it confirmed at least 31 deaths.

2008: Cyclone Nargis

On May 3, 2008, Cyclone Nargis ripped through the Irrawaddy Delta and Myanmar's main city, Yangon. Nearly 85,000 people died and 54,000 are still listed as missing.

The cyclone was one of the deadliest storms in recorded history. It blew away 700,000 homes in the delta. It killed three-fourths of the livestock, sank half the fishing fleet and damaged a million acres of rice paddies with seawater. The magnitude of the disaster forced the regime to react to outside pressure. The secretive and xenophobic junta, which fears an invasion by Western powers, agreed to accept air shipments of foreign aid after international outrage at their initial failure to help victims.

The Junta Administrates Elections

In May 2009 Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi was charged with violating the terms of her house arrest after a bizarre event in which an American man swam across a lake and spent two days at her villa, claiming that he had come to save her from assassination. A court sentenced her to 18 months of additional house arrest, ensuring that she would remain in detention, with limited communications, through the parliamentary election in 2010.

A successful offensive against the Karen militants in June 2009 brought the Myanmar junta closer to its goal of national consolidation before the elections.

The junta said the multiparty election would usher in the first civilian government in almost five decades, but were criticized as a sham by many Burmese exile groups. Among many restrictive measures in the country's election law, criminal convictions barred candidacy. That included Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi and U Win Tin, a founding member and strategist for the opposition party.

Parliament last met in Myanmar under the one-party rule of Gen. Ne Win, who formally retired from politics in 1988 during a time of unrest, but the country has not had a genuine multiparty system since 1962, when the military took power in a coup.

Signs of Change in the Economy

Myanmar’s military government has quietly begun the largest sell-off of state assets in the country’s history, including more than 100 government buildings, port facilities and a large stake in the national airline.

The rush to privatization vaguely resembles the vast sell-off in Russia after the Soviet Union collapsed. Many of the assets are being sold to businessmen allied with the military, reinforcing the strength of a class of oligarchs and military cronies.

The military has also issued permits for private hospitals and schools, neither of which were officially allowed before. It appears to be lifting some of the punitive restrictions on the ownership of cars and motorcycles. The country is taking steps to revive its troubled but potentially lucrative rice exports.

Visits to Myanmar by international economists, including teams from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, used to be “dialogues of the deaf,” one Western diplomat said. But that has changed. Joseph E. Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize-winning economist who visited Myanmar in December, said the ministers and military officials he met were eager for advice about stimulating growth and promoting private enterprise.

Neighboring countries have responded by pushing harder to end Myanmar’s international isolation, including an effort to lift the economic sanctions imposed by the United States, the European Union and other Western countries.