Sharing the Shame

Candor in a military dictator is a rare quality, and self-criticism rarer still. But Burmese Strongman General Ne Win offered both in abundance at a recent Rangoon seminar of his Socialist Program Party. The topic: potholes in Ne Win's "Burmese road to socialism," launched soon after he took power in 1962 and began nationalizing every thing in sight. The economy, confessed the general, "is in a mess." So much so, he added, that "if Burma were not a country with an abundance of food, we would all be starving."

The reason that no one is starving is that farming is the one sector of the economy Ne Win has left in private hands. Some 23 million Burmese live among lush paddies in a land larger than France, and there is plenty of rice for all. There is plenty of almost nothing else. Such essentials for the rice pot as onions, chili peppers, salt and cooking oil are now tightly rationed, available only in the state-run "people's stores"--or on the booming black market. Part of Ne Win's "Burmanization" program included driving out the Indian and Pakistani shopkeepers. Burmese replacements in the people's stores have yet to show much aptitude for retailing: one Rangoonese wrote his newspaper, sarcastically congratulating the government for a widely hailed increase in the production of eight items, none of which were available in the stores. Another reported being offered a lottery ticket that promised as first prize the next umbrella to become available in his local people's store.

Ne Win admitted that "willy-nilly" nationalization had not worked out well. "It was like having caught hold of a tiger's tail," he said, "but there was nothing else to do but hang on to it." After all, he pointed out, Red China, Russia and the U.S. have occasional economic troubles; it is his proud boast that Burma borrows the best from both Communism and capitalism while keeping isolated and independent of each. Maybe, suggested some in the seminar, Brigadier General Tin Pe, until recently head of the people's stores and the most Marxist officer in Ne Win's Cabinet, was to blame for the distribution snafu? No, insisted Ne Win manfully, "the brigadier is not alone responsible for it. The entire government, including myself, is to blame. They have done it collectively and are responsible for it collectively."

Whereupon, in the best socialist tradition, Ne Win enjoined his colleagues to keep looking for collective solutions.

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