Word: burma
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Eight years later, as Ne Win himself once admitted in a rare moment of candor, Burma is "in a mess." The economy, almost totally nationalized, has virtually ceased to function. Last spring the state-owned distribution system collapsed altogether, and Rangoon shoppers who queue up before dawn are lucky if the shelves are not totally bare a few minutes after the People's Stores open. Prices have risen fivefold since 1962, but rice exports, once the largest in the world, are down to less than a third of their precoup levels...
...countryside, Burma has a whole series of wars in progress. Private armies led by hill-tribe warlords wage a running battle for autonomy with the despised lowlanders from Rangoon. Rangoon and Peking recently agreed to exchange ambassadors once again (they were recalled during the Cultural Revolution in 1967); yet the Chinese have been quietly supporting a new group of Communist insurgents who have frequently bloodied Ne Win's 150,000-man army in clashes in Burma's sparsely populated northeast. Something less than half of the country (pop. 27 million) is really under Rangoon's control...
...Budding Castro. U Nu has been trying to get his own campaign going in Burma since mid-1969, when he staged a number of phony fainting spells and got Ne Win to let him seek "medical treatment" abroad. Last November he alighted in Thailand, where he was granted political asylum. He moved into a Florida-style villa in one of Bangkok's heavily American suburbs and started to style himself as a budding Castro. For many months, as he told TIME Correspondent Stanley Cloud last week, he and his group of aging Burmese exiles lived "from hand to mouth...
Whatever it comes from, the backing has been sufficient to finance a clandestine operation equipped with a $5,000 offset press, radio transmitters, and something like 3,000 recruits who range into Burma from four border training camps. It costs roughly $7 a month to supply each man with food, crisp new U.S. fatigues and M1, M-2 and M-16 rifles. General Bo Let Ya, who organized the Burmese army in the 1940s and now heads U Nu's "war council," claims that his commanders draw only $7 a month, plus 25? in "pocket money." Though the Thais...
Fits of Rage. U Nu will have to rally considerable support within Burma if he is to have anywhere near the "100% chance of success" that his followers claim. He is in tight with the Buddhist priesthood, and he is still regarded as something of a holy man by the Burmese peasantry. By promising them virtual autonomy in a future United States of Burma, he has managed to get the Karens, the Mons, the Chins, the Shans and other hill minorities to join him in a United National Liberation Front. He can claim at least theoretical support...