There is no shortage of bad rulers in the world. Nations suffer under tyrants, sadists, fanatics, paranoids and just plain blunderers. The repressive military chiefs in Burma, who prefer their sad police state be called Myanmar, are all of that. They're also just plain weird.
Burma, a former British colony of 43 million people, has been rendered a basket case by repressive and isolationist military rule. A Texas-size land wedged between Thailand, China and India, it is among Asia's poorest nations despite a wealth of natural resources. It struggles with one of Asia's worst AIDS epidemics and has 60 percent of all malaria deaths on the continent. The tuberculosis rate is the world's highest.
Instead of plotting a strategy to confront that humanitarian crisis, Burma's enigmatic strongman, Than Shwe, is preoccupied with another priority. In November, he ordered the nation's capital moved from the picturesque but dilapidated colonial-era site of Rangoon--or Yangon, as the government renamed it--to remote Pyinmana. That is a rural hamlet 200 miles to the north that lacks running water.
Given two days' notice to pack up offices and prepare to move, thousands of government workers were forcibly relocated and are now living in refugee camp-like conditions. Those who try to leave have been threatened with being hunted down like army deserters, according to Western news reports.
The official line is that Pyinmana is more suitable as a capital because it is more centrally located than Rangoon. But diplomats consider the abrupt move bizarre even by the mercurial and secretive standards of the Burmese government.
There's lots of guessing about Than Shwe's motives. One theory centers on fears of invasion stoked by a U.S. initiative at the United Nations to press for democratic reforms. Washington also wants the release from house arrest of opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi (pronounced ong san soo chee), a Nobel Peace Prize winner.
Another theory given much credence in Rangoon involves a prediction by astrologers that the government would fall if Than Shwe didn't act quickly to establish a new capital. Many Burmese hold a strong faith in astrology and numerology, and government decisions in the past have been linked to those mystical beliefs.
Burma has suffered under military rule for more than four decades. It has retreated into an isolation and grinding poverty that stands in stark contrast to the rapidly developing nations around it. Despite Burma's public health crisis, lack of cooperation from the government recently led the Switzerland-based Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria to cut off $87 million in funding to battle those diseases.
Little attention gets focused on Burma these days. Yet, even in remoteness, its problems can have a dangerous spillover effect. It is one of the world's largest opium producers. Repression, economic woes and ethnic strife create a constant flow of refugees, threatening to export Burma's disease problems to neighboring lands.
If little else, Burma should stand as a vivid cautionary tale to the world about how misguided rulers can do great harm to their people.