Word: burma
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...Rangoon, one of Southeast Asia's more dilapidated capitals, workmen are busily scrubbing years of grime from the curbstones. Newly painted red-and- white pavement glistens, and gardeners are trimming shrubs in Maha Bandoola Park, next to the Sule Pagoda. All that effort by Burma's seven-week-old military government is part of an official campaign to "Keep Rangoon Pleasant." The cleanup is an attempt to polish the military's tarnished image -- and that has doomed it from the start. "They think we will like them if they clean up the city," says a shop clerk on Merchant Street...
...General Saw Maung, who took power in a coup last September. Since then, more students and other protesters have been arrested or shot. Government employees deemed sympathetic to the democracy movement are being purged from their jobs. Troops are everywhere, even in the compound of the Shwedagon Pagoda, Burma's holiest shrine. "They have stripped away the pseudosocialist camouflage that ((former President)) Ne Win put over the army in the 1970s," says a Western observer in Rangoon. "It has always been a military government. Now it's a nakedly military government...
While maintaining a choke hold on the country, the government talks up economic reform and democratic elections, as yet unscheduled but expected to be held in February or March. Newspapers are filled with announcements, widely ignored or disbelieved, of new rules encouraging private enterprise and foreign investment, and Burma is no longer officially termed a socialist republic...
...underground, others have formed political organizations. Foremost among them is the Democratic Party for New Society, which says it has 100,000 members. Former Prime Minister U Nu, ousted by Ne Win in 1962, has declared a "parallel government," consisting of old officials like himself. Even the former ruling Burma Socialist Program Party has transformed itself into something called the National Unity Party...
Ronald Reagan has presided over neither the democratization of the region nor the disintegration of the Communists -- no winners, only losers. The new Administration must find a better policy. -- The military tightens its chokehold in Burma, even as it promises reforms and elections. -- For the first time in eleven years, all of Pakistan' s parties are taking part in a national political campaign...