Slow train through a forgotten
capital By Dylan C Williams
YANGON - It's monsoon season in Myanmar's
forgotten capital of Yangon, a time when flooding
overwhelms sewage canals, infectious disease
festers, and the already impoverished population's
misery intensifies.
The slow commuter
train that circles Yangon's outlying townships
passes through a vast landscape of clapboard
shanties situated in and around trash-strewn pools
of untreated black sewage.
Public-health
experts say infectious diseases run rife in these
areas, including high rates
of tuberculosis, malaria and chronic diarrhea.
Recent independent assessments indicate that
malnourishment among children over the age of one
runs as high as 35%. [1]
Ill-health is
readily apparent in the inordinate number of young
commuters with distended bellies and unsightly
untreated growths hanging from their faces and
appendages. While this correspondent took the
three-hour journey, a woman holding a rash-covered
infant spontaneously broke down in tears.
She and the train's other riders represent
some of the most disadvantaged people in what is
one of the world's most mismanaged and poorest
countries. And recent political and economic
developments indicate that their plight is likely
to get worse before it gets better.
Over
the past four decades, Myanmar's uninterrupted
line of military-run regimes created these
decrepit townships, forcibly relocating masses to
relieve population pressure on the green and leafy
capital city, where senior generals and their
family members maintain posh spacious residences
behind razor-wire-strewn high walls.
With
the ruling State Peace and Development Council's
sudden move in 2005 to a newly built capital at
Naypyidaw - 400 kilometers north of Yangon and
replete with plans for four new golf courses - the
reclusive junta has apparently abandoned its
responsibility for maintaining Yangon's declining
townships.
There is a palpable sense in
traveling through these semi-urban areas that the
old capital is teetering on the brink of social
collapse. In 2005, Myanmar ranked among the bottom
10 countries for health spending, earmarking less
than 0.5% of gross domestic product. Now,
Yangon-based expatriates say that the sanitation
situation in the townships has deteriorated
markedly since the junta pulled up roots and moved
north that same year.
Yangon-based World
Health Organization representatives declined to
comment on the current public-health situation in
the city's outlying townships; a WHO
representative based outside of the country who
recently visited Yangon would only say that local
health workers are doing the best they can with
"close to zero resources".
When the WHO
presented its global list of health-care
performances recently, Myanmar ranked 190 out of
191 countries surveyed. Local WHO-affiliated
doctors receive the kyat equivalent of about US$7
per month and are required to pay their own travel
expenses when called to combat outbreaks of
disease, according to one Myanmar medical
professional.
Senior junta members,
meanwhile, frequently fly to Singapore for their
personal medical treatments.
Misery,
woe and corruption Endemic corruption [2]
has long hobbled social-service delivery, and
there are indications the situation has worsened
since the junta moved north. A Yangon-based
expatriate researcher contends that municipal
workers frequently sell off a proportion of the
gasoline they are rationed to run garbage trucks
and that refuse is now seldom if ever collected in
the poorest townships.
One local woman
working with a multilateral aid agency told Asia
Times Online that municipal officials had turned
off the furnaces of the crematorium halfway
through the incineration of her deceased
grandmother. She said they only agreed to reignite
the flames when her family agreed to pay a bribe.
A free funeral service run on public donations had
emerged to fill the social-service gap, but
municipal authorities recently refused to renew
the body-collecting outfit's operating license.
To be sure, misery, woe and corruption are
nothing new to Myanmar's township residents. Their
lot worsened in 2003 and 2004, a two-year period
over which the national economy contracted and
inflation hovered around 20%, according to
independent assessments. [3] Yet the present
deterioration in the townships' already abysmal
standard of living is taking place amid an
economic mini-boom that the junta has monopolized
for its own benefit.
The Commerce Ministry
this week reported that Myanmar's trade volume had
jumped 40% to $7.9 billion on the just-ended
fiscal year. That growth entailed a record trade
surplus of $2.1 billion, led by substantially
higher natural-gas exports, according to the
ministry. It said it expects foreign trade to
exceed $8 billion in the fiscal year that ends in
March 2008.
A large proportion of those
energy resources are being sent to China to fuel
that once-poor country's extraordinary economic
growth. There are bigger plans in the works for
building a massive new pipeline to pump Myanmar's
natural-gas resources directly into southern
China's Yunnan province - overtly bypassing dire
local energy needs.
It's an irony not lost
on even Yangon's downtown residents, who
consistently suffer from rolling power blackouts.
Nor is it lost on China, whose Foreign Ministry
this week released an uncharacteristically
critical report expressing dismay over how such a
"poor" country could afford such an "expensive"
move to its newly built capital Naypyidaw.
How much of the country's billion-dollar
energy bonanza is being diverted to build new
ministry facilities, military installations, golf
courses and private residences at Naypyidaw is
altogether unclear. The reclusive regime has not
publicly released financial figures related to the
new capital's construction costs - though
officials have been quoted in the state-controlled
media saying the massive project would not dent
the national coffers.
There has been much
debate inside and outside Myanmar concerning what
really motivated the junta abruptly to move the
national capital from Yangon to Naypyidaw. Some
have speculated that fears of a preemptive US
invasion, similar to its armed intervention in
Iraq, drove the junta to its inland,
mountain-covered redoubt.
But the slow
train that snakes through Yangon's hangdog
townships suggests another possibility: the
junta's more legitimate fears of a social revolt
among the once nearby, now distant, old capital's
woe-begotten citizens.
Notes 1. See Christopher
Len's and Johan Alvin's "Burma/Myanmar's Ailments:
Searching for the Right Remedy" published by the
Central Asia-Caucasus Institute Silk Road Studies
Program, March 2007. 2. Global corruption
watchdog Transparency International in its 2006
global survey ranked Myanmar as the
second-most-corrupt country in the world, lagging
only Haiti. 3. Official statistics indicate an
average GDP (gross domestic product) growth rate
of 12.6% over the six-year period from 1999-2005,
which if accurate means Myanmar would have been
the fastest-growing economy in the world.
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