Democracy in Burma today is at a fledgling stage, and still requires patient care and attention," General Than Shwe told Burma in late March, during his annual speech to mark Armed Forces Day. He also warned, "Some parties look to foreign countries for guidance and inspiration; they follow imported ideologies and directives irrationally." But the general's carefully laid plans for next year's elections – including ensuring that the country's iconic pro-democracy leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, remains in detention – may have been derailed by his own arrogance and disregard for the people.
Since Gen Than Shwe's confident pronouncement in March, almost everything has gone wrong for him. First, the long-restive ethnic groups that have signed ceasefire agreements with the junta have defied instructions to hand in their weapons and join a border police force instead. More recently, the general has been taken aback by the overwhelming international reaction to his plans to put Suu Kyi on trial (on trumped-up charges) and lock her up in jail until after the elections. As a result of these hitches, the expected electoral law, which will spell out the procedures for the elections slated for March 2010, has yet to be announced.
Even the gods seem to be against the generals. In a highly superstitious society such as Burma, the collapse of a temple can send shockwaves through the country. So when the Danok Pagoda, on the outskirts of Rangoon, crumbled to the ground on 31 May (see pic), it was seen as a bad omen for the regime. Indeed, it was seen as particularly ominous for Than Shwe himself, as only weeks earlier his wife had overseen a blessing ceremony in which worshipers fixed a diamond orb (which she had donated) to the top of the pagoda. While that ceremony had been widely publicised in the captive local media, the pagoda's collapse, killing more than a dozen people, was almost completely kept out of the press.
Nevertheless rumours of the collapse circulated quickly, and this, on top of last year's devastating Cyclone Nargis, was readily seen by much of the public as evidence of the gods having deserted the generals. "It's clear retribution for trampling and killing the monks," one Rangoon resident told this writer by e-mail, referring to the military's brutal crackdown on the Saffron Revolution of September 2007. At that time, Buddhist monks led massive street protests against rising fuel and food prices, and more than a hundred people were killed in the subsequent official reaction.