Misery piled upon misery

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: The drastic increase in fuel prices last month, which made life even more difficult for ordinary Burmese and set off the latest round of protests, was only the latest proof of the junta’s catastrophic economic incompetence. After seizing power in 1962, the regime pursued the ‘Burmese Way to Socialism’—isolationism combined with a military takeover of businesses. A capricious decision to withdraw most banknotes in late 1987 sparked massive protests the next year, which were bloodily quelled. This triggered Western sanctions and the suspension of loans from the World Bank and other multilateral agencies. But any economic damage done by these is as nothing compared with that wreaked by the junta’s continued repression, corruption and economic cackhandedness.

It is often noted that before 1962 the then Burma was the region’s rice-bowl. It is less well known that the country still produces a rice surplus. However, the regime’s travel restrictions, its rampant corruption and the lack of decent roads mean that many Burmese still go hungry. The situation is worst in the border areas where Myanmar’s ethnic minorities live. Most rice merchants are military men with no interest in feeding minorities who might rise up against them. Farmers trying to take produce to market are stopped at army checkpoints by bribe-hunting officers. The WFP says that about a third of Burmese under-fives are ‘chronically malnourished’, one of the world’s highest rates.

The regime is reckoned to spend less than 2% of its budget on health care, compared with over 40% on the armed forces. Infectious diseases are as widespread as in poor African countries. A report in July from Berkeley and Johns Hopkins universities in America said Myanmar had one of the world’s highest rates of tuberculosis and that drug-resistant forms of both tuberculosis and malaria were spreading. HIV infection has broken out of high-risk groups and become a general epidemic. But restrictions on aid workers’ movements forced the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria to pull out in 2005. The International Committee of the Red Cross, often the last NGO to leave, has also had to curtail its operations.

To starvation and sickness are added the trials of forced labour, sometimes as porters for the army in mine-infested areas, and reports of the army’s recruiting child soldiers. The economy is growing at perhaps 3-4% but much of the growth comes from the exploitation of natural resources—from gas to gemstones—whose proceeds mainly benefit the regime’s pampered families.