Word: burma
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Thousands of gaily costumed tribal folk, dressed in bright robes shimmering with beads and bangles, poured through the streets of Rangoon as Burma celebrated its 20th annual Union Day, marking the joining of Burma proper with four tribal states. Unfortunately, there is not a great deal to celebrate. Communist-led tribal bands in the interior are stepping up an ugly guerrilla war. Burma is nervous about the erratic course of Red China, with which it shares a wide-open 1,200-mile border. Even worse, the country's pell-mell plunge into socialism has pell-melled right into chaos...
...Even Burma's own leaders are some what embarrassed about it, and are having a few second thoughts. General Ne Win, the tough, ascetic strongman who nationalized everything in sight after he took power in a 1962 coup, has put the production and distribution of 34 basic food items back into private hands, and last week had an agent in Eastern Europe to seek advice about how to run a socialist country without going broke. Last week the government also released 182 political prisoners from its jails and hinted that some of the 2,000 others still locked...
...Rust. Despite these shifts in direction, Burma still remains one of the most determinedly socialist and neutralist nations in Southeast Asia. Ne Win has nationalized more than 90% of Burma's industry and created a socialist bureaucracy that would give even Moscow the shivers. The distribution system, handled by military men with no economic experience, distributes almost nothing. While warehouses bulge with goods that often rot or rust away, store managers are faced with too many customers and too little merchandise. They stage lotteries, giving successive winners the privilege of buying whatever is left on the shelves, which...
Last week Time Correspondent Louis Kraar wound up a tour of the capital and countryside, and found Burma a nation that has effectively buried its old colonial past but lost something of itself in the process. "Rangoon, once a great British-style city of banks and trading companies, now moves at a languid 'people's pace,' " reported Kraar. "The grand old Victorian buildings, now grubby and ghostlike, hover over wide, almost empty streets. Identical green and white signboards over nearly every shop proclaim 'People's Store'-though the Burmese people find very little indeed...
...that is a fact most Americans grasped nearly a decade ago. He glooms on and on about the high moral and material cost of the Southeast Asian war, yet fails to point out the considerable gains the American stand has already helped to produce: a realigned Indonesia, a bolder Burma, a convulsion within China itself...