Myanmar's new capital: remote, lavish, off-limits

IHT-Khaleejtimes

NAYPYIDAW, Myanmar - The bamboo forests and sugarcane fields that once covered the gently sloping hills here have been replaced by hulking government buildings, roads so long and straight they resemble runways and a vast construction site marked by a sign that could be read as a metaphor for the entire project: "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 travelers appreciate potholed pavement because many roads are nothing more than dirt tracks.

Workers in Naypyidaw are building multi-tiered, 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 a tenth that for Myanmar citizens.

It would be easy to write off the move to Naypyidaw as a caprice of the paranoid and 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 cellular phones 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 them 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 250 kilometers per hour, or 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, say residents. The leader of the junta, Senior General 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, which is near the sea.

"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 U.S. diplomat in Yangon. "We are not," she added.

The military came to power in a coup four and a half decades ago, and the prospect of being deposed by force may not be an irrational fear. People in Myanmar regularly ask foreign visitors whether the United States has plans to knock out the leadership. When British, French and U.S. warships sailed to waters off of 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.

"You're coming to save us, aren't you?" a diplomat remembers the callers saying.

Steve Marshall, the representative in Myanmar for the International Labor Organization, says the army, too, feared invasion when the ships, which have since left the coast, were stationed offshore. A colonel whom Marshall described as a senior government official told him that the military sent extra personnel to prepare for 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,"' Marshall said.

Perhaps owing to their military discipline, the generals organized Naypyidaw like a living 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.

It's difficult to judge the city's size, but it feels smaller than the government's claim of one million inhabitants and 7,000 square kilometers -- 10 times bigger than Singapore.

A huge pagoda is being built atop a hill, matched in size only by the Parliament complex. Myanmar's military dictatorship has no sitting Parliament, so the building, once completed, may sit empty for a while. The generals have vowed to hold "multi-party, 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 their proxy party was badly defeated by the party of Aung San Suu Kyi, the democracy leader.

That is not to say Myanmar's masses are unrepresented in Naypyidaw. Thousands of workers, many of them who look like teenagers, are helping construct the place, hacking away at embankments, carrying huge stones and shoveling dirt.

Naypyidaw, which means royal capital in Burmese, is far from the country's main population centers, but it is not totally isolated. It is 16 kilometers from the small city of Pyinmana and is near the main road and railway line between Yangon and Mandalay, the former royal capital farther to the north. But it is remote enough that most people in the country were unaware that it was being built until it was officially unveiled in November 2005.

"They built in secret," said a doctor who lives in Pyinmana. 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. "It was never in the papers."

Engineers from China, which has a relatively close relationship with Myanmar's leadership, are also helping build a giant 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 and keeps the lights on in Bangkok.

The total cost of building Naypyidaw remains a mystery, but Sean Turnell, an expert on the Burmese economy with Macquarie University in Sydney, says the consensus estimate is 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 and features dozens of animals from white tigers to 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 zoos seem as appropriate as penguins in the tropics.

The penguins, which were donated by zoos in Thailand and China, require constant air-conditioning, and they eat fish shipped in from Thailand because they could not stomach the local river fish.

"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."