Burma Special: A nation in waiting

14 August 2006 (Newstatesman) - It is a society infested with spies, where people live in terror of a hardline military regime, yet the pro-democracy movement can still make its voice heard. Will the UN Security Council at last help Burma unseat its brutal junta? By Peter Popham

When I first visited Burma for the Independent in 1991, months after Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy (NLD) had won a landslide election victory, the country was known as a quaint relic of empire. Western visitors were obliged to take an expensive, one-week guided tour of the country by bus and shaky old Fokker plane. But if the idea was to deflect our gaze from contemporary misery to glorious heritage, it did not succeed. As the tour bus took us through Rangoon 's outskirts, our guide scoffed at the patriotic exhortations on the billboards, and pointed out the new roads that had been constructed by forced labour. In Bagan, that amazing plain, full of temples, another guide told me that the entire population of a village had been uprooted and forced to move en masse several kilometres to the south to make way for new hotels and restaurants. When I told him that I wanted to see where the villagers had been dumped, a bicycle was procured and late that evening I was taken to meet them. [Read details]