On the streets of Rangoon "the Lady" is a fridge magnet. Once banned under the censorship laws of Burma's former military regime, Aung San Suu Kyi's image now adorns an array of trinkets for sale in its biggest city. In the teeming central market, traders hawk T-shirts and canvas tote bags featuring a pop-art reworking of her face. A fashionable art gallery sells portraits of the Nobel laureate at a price well beyond the reach of all but the richest Burmese.
Foreign visitors – a mixture of potential investors and curious tourists – can pick up Suu Kyi keyrings and pens in the shiny new departure lounge at Rangoon's international airport.
The commercialisation of Burma's best-known former political prisoner is a metaphor for the changes happening in what was one of the world's most cloistered countries, and one that is replete with irony.
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Suu Kyi, who was released from house arrest in 2010, looks presidential when she gazes from the front pages of Burma's newspapers – a great number of them privately owned and set up after media restrictions were relaxed – but she remains constitutionally barred from running for president as the country approaches a landmark election next year.
Many Burmese see her fate as a bellwether for how far their country's much-trumpeted reforms have gone – but also how far it has yet to go. The euphoria that greeted Burma's tentative steps towards democracy a few years ago has given way to worries that the progress has stalled at best or rolled back at worst.
"Is everything hunky-dory? No, not yet. Absolutely not," the US secretary of state, John Kerry, said during a recent visit. "There are still things that need to be done."
Conversations with a range of Burmese on our recent reporting trip showed that to be something of an understatement. From sophisticated Rangoonites to the rural poor struggling to make ends meet, the ambitious returned diaspora, former political dissidents, and Buddhist monks, there was a sense that Burma was on the right path but that not everyone was benefiting, and few could hazard a guess as to the final destination.
"Our country has changed, there is no doubt about that," says Soo, who was forced to flee to Thailand when he and fellow activists were targeted by the junta in the 1990s. Several of his friends were imprisoned. Now he lives with his family in northern Burma, where he works as a guide and hopes to set up his own tourism business. "There is a kind of freedom, but it comes slowly, and we worry we might lose it again."
Persecuted minority
Among the most concerning issues are the plight of the Rohingya, a Muslim minority in western Burma, displaced in huge numbers by repeated attacks, and the related rise of a populist movement based on Buddhist chauvinism that threatens delicate coexistence in an ethnically and religiously diverse country.
Diplomats also fret about an apparent backsliding on some recently granted press freedoms – earlier this year five journalists were given lengthy jail terms after publishing a contested article on a weapons factory – and a more lukewarm approach than expected from foreign investors considered vital to building an economy hobbled by decades of state control.
Long isolated by the secretive, brutally repressive military juntas that ruled it since 1962, Burma, also known as Myanmar, now finds itself right in the middle of this century's most potent geopolitical theatres. Its strategic location between China and India is one of the main reasons Burma has been courted by the US and Europe, both of which tried to coax its political and economic opening-up in return for the lifting of stiff sanctions.
Changes, including the freeing of Suu Kyi, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991 for her pro-democracy struggle, and her participation in parliamentary byelections in 2012, ostensibly brought five decades of military dictatorship to an end.
Burmese officials have embarked on a series of reforms, including partial economic liberalisation and an easing of the draconian laws that had previously stifled the media and any prospect of civil society. The government has released more than 1,300 political prisoners and professed, on paper at least, a commitment to human rights.
Those efforts have brought rewards. The US and the EU began to loosen sanctions, with the latter lifting the last of its travel, financial and individual sanctions in April last year.
As a result Burma is experiencing a rapid transformation, one that is most visible in Rangoon – also known as Yangon – its commercial heart and largest city. In the shadow of the golden Shwedagon Pagoda glossy billboards advertise expensive condominiums next to posters proudly noting Burma's chairing this year of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. Another hoarding nearby announces the latest round of Myanmar's Got Talent, a television show.
Construction cranes dot the skyline of a city where many colonial-era neighbourhoods remain in a kind of suspended animation, their crumbling buildings a testament to the days when the British presence in Burma included George Orwell, who spent five years with the Imperial Police Force here. "We have a property boom in Yangon," says one local estate agent, an ethnic Chinese woman with chic bobbed hair. "Prices are soaring."
http://www.information.myanmaronlinecentre.com/inside-burma-2/
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