Mon State, between Ye and Tavoy on the Andaman Sea. This is Burma's great secret. Although human rights organizations have documented the testimonies of the slave workers on the new death railway, few outsiders have seen it and the slave camps along the route. This is because much of Mon State is closed to foreigners. It is Burma's gulag. SLAVES OF SLORC In making a film for British television, my film-making partner David Munro and I entered the country under the subterfuge of travel consultants. We headed south, leaving Rangoon well before dawn, traveling over spine-gutting roads, often without headlights. We passed watchtowers and

groups of prisoners in chains, quarrying rock. Those guards at roadblocks were junior, asleep, or uninterested; money fluttered across to them. The towns in this remote part of the country are a step back in time, as if the British Raj were temporarily away at the hill stations. Ancient sewing machines whirred on balconies; the roads were filled with bicycles, not cars; carbon paper, radiograms, and sleeveless sweaters were for sale. Tavoy has streets of decorous teak houses, the biggest with lace iron balconies. Others are dungeon-like, with iron bars and damp trickling over torn posters of coy women holding parasols.

People considered us with due curiosity; a whole generation here has seldom laid eyes on Europeans. To talk openly to foreigners is to beckon interrogation and worse. Hotels must copy guest registration forms to as many as 14 different authorities. On the day we arrived in Tavoy all "independent travelers" were told they had to leave. Fortunately, all the roads out were closed, and the ancient Dutch-manufactured Fokker aircraft of Myanmar Airways had been commandeered by a general. We calculated that we had about a day and a night to find the railway before we were caught. Following the line of embankments north into the jungle, we succeeded in getting lost, then by chance came upon a clearing that presented what might have been a tableau of Victorian England.

Scores of people were building embankments and a bridge across a dry river bed that is now, with the arrival of the monsoon, an ochre-colored torrent. From out of jungle so dense that its bamboo and foliage formed great wickerwork screens, they were carving the railway.A 20-foot-high embankment had been built with earth dug by hoe and hand from huge holes. The skilled were paid about $.50 a day. The majority were slave laborers, of whom many were children. Laboriously and clumsily the child workers wrested clay from the excavations, sharing a hoe among three. One little girl in a long blue dress struggled to wield a hoe taller than herself, then fell back exhausted and with a wince,held her shoulder. The children carried heavy loads of mud mixed with straw in baskets

and dishes on their heads and clearly agonized under the weight. They poured them into a vat and grinder, turned by two tethered oxen. The sticky clay, now almost as hard as rock, was gathered by two children, one of them small enough to fit up to his shoulders in a hole directly beneath the grinder. Horrified, I watched a load of clay, like fresh cement, tip over him, almost burying him. I reached under his arms and pulled him out. The others laughed, as if this was normal. How many children are trapped and injured and die like that? As many as 300 adults and children have been killed or have died from disease and exhaustion, according to one estimate. There were at least 20 other bridges in the vicinity and children were working on all of them. Every village along the way must

give its labor "voluntarily," regardless of age or the state of people's health. Advanced pregnancy is no excuse. If people protest that, as peasant farmers, their labor is all they have to keep them and their families alive, they are fined and their possessions confiscated. If a whole village objects, the head man is beaten or killed and all the houses razed. "I saw one old man accidentally drop his load into the river," a former civil servant told me in a nearby safe area controlled by the Karen National Union. "As he tried to retrieve it, the soldiers shot him in the head. I could see the water turn red with his blood, then the river carried him away." A man who escaped with his wife told me: "I saw people dying because of landslides or fever.

Some of the bodies were never found, only the head or a foot. They didn't bother to bury the bodies properly, with a funeral. They just dug a hole and left them there." His wife, Min, said, "I feel for the children. They are too young to anticipate danger, so they are vulnerable. They are the ones who die first." I asked her if she knew why she was being forced to work in this way. "We were told nothing," she said. "We overheard we were building a railway so that a French oil company could run a pipeline through, and foreigners came to look over the site." The oil company is a partnership between a US company, Unocal, and Total, which is part-owned by the French government. They are building a $1 billion pipeline that will carry

Burma's natural gas into Thailand. The deal will give the Rangoon generals about $400 million a year over 30 years. Since they put an end to democracy in 1990, it is estimated that SLORC has received 65 percent of its financial backing from foreign oil companies, including Britain's Premier Oil and America's Texaco and ARCO. In its 1993 report on human rights abuses throughout the world, the US State Department says SLORC "routinely" uses slave labor and "will use the new railway to transport soldiers and construction supplies into the pipeline area." Unocal says

reports of slave labor are a "fabrication" and both the oil companies deny the railway is linked to the pipeline project. But more than 5,000 troops have already been shipped to the pipeline area and army patrols protect Total personnel. Although taken aback by the sudden arrival of two Europeans on the embankments, the chief engineer admitted to me that the railway was being built mainly with "volunteers." He said that the children made bricks for the army,which sold them to the construction company. As we talked, soldiers guarding the "volunteers" began to emerge from their tent. We left expeditiously.

HELPING HANDS Western entrepreneurs in Burma claim that foreign investment has multiplied tenfold since 1992. "It's not so much a gradual pick up," said Pat James, a Texas businessman , "as a skyrocket." This claim is disputed by, among others, a recent report in The Economist. The World Bank and IMF have yet to lend the generals a penny. However, what has begun in Burma is a familiar process in which a dictatorship's crimes against its people are obscured and "forgotten" as foreign businesspeople seek to justify what the East Asian governments and the US call "positive engagement" and the Europeans and Austral- ians call "critical dialogue." The prize is a cheap labor colony that

promises to undercut even China and Vietnam. Most Western governments, together with Japan, are running a "two track policy" on Burma: offering public support for Aung San Suu Kyi while pursuing, often in secret, long-term business links with SLORC. Tax havens, such as the British Virgin Islands, are used to move money to Burma; this is the route used by Unocal, the US oil company. In spite of criticism by the Clinton administration and Secretary of State Warren Christopher's recent description

of a "new tide of repression in Burma," US policy is business as usual: "not to encourage or discourage trade." After visiting Rangoon in June and "conferring" with SLORC, President Clinton's special envoy, William Brown, praised the role of ASEAN, the Association of South East Asian Nations, which has since offered SLORC full membership. Calling ASEAN "that noble organization," Brown reaffirmed US policy as "constructive engagement" with Burma. (This was the term used by the Reagan administration for US support of the apartheid regime in South Africa). Brown also said that "the issue of forced labor has diminished" in the

week that the International Labor Organization reported that SLORC was forcing its people The prize is a cheap labor colony that promises to undercut even China and Vietnam; the price is slavery. into forced labor "on a massive scale and under the cruellest of conditions."

In a letter to the Far Eastern Economic Review, a State Department official, John Shattuck, sought to play down Brown's remarks. "While there are undoubtedly fluctuations in the use of forced and compulsory labor within Burma," he wrote, "the fact remains that such serious violations of internationally recognized worker rights are widespread and remain a matter of grave concern to the United States." The "two-track" policy is exemplified by the role of Britain. While Nelson Mandela was in London last July, feted by a

British establishment that once did everything in its power to undercut him, his fellow Nobel Peace Laureate, Aung San Suu Kyi "Asia's Mandela" was being quietly abandoned, with the British now undercutting her. On June 12,a day Suu Kyi appealed to the world not to do business with SLORC, a senior official of Britain's Department of Trade and Industry arrived in Rangoon to "evaluate the commercial prospects" of British support for the regime. Mike Cohen, head of export sales to Asia, met an official of the SLORC's investment agency in the week the junta decreed a 20-year prison sentence for anyone attending

meetings outside Suu Kyi's home. On the day Cohen flew into Rangoon, Jeremy Hanley, the British Foreign Office minister, told Parliament that the British Government supported "democratic reform and human rights" in Burma. "We have made it clear to SLORC," he said, "that the resumption of normal relations is conditional on progress in those key areas. He added that the Department of Trade had "pulled the plug" on future British trade missions to Rangoon. What the minister neglected to say was that, even as he rose to address Parliament, Cohen was flying into Rangoon to "evaluate" the next trade mission. In fact, the British government

has funded two recent trade missions to Burma and an international seminar in London called, "An introduction to Burma the latest Tiger Cub," at which speakers described "the real visionaries" in SLORC. For all the European Union's pretensions on human rights, European companies, backed by their governments, are among SLORC's biggest underwriters. The Total oil company, building the oil and gas pipeline for the regime, is part-owned by the French Government. Germany is SLORC's longtime supplier of weapons-grade machine tools. On July 15, a meeting of European foreign ministers in Brussels formally blocked a

call by the European Parliament for sanctions against Burma. At the same time, the EU Council of Ministers "welcomed" Burma's membership of ASEAN's Regional Forum. So it is with Japan, another of SLORC's major underwriters. Although Japanese foreign minister Ikeda Yukihiko is said to have privately criticized SLORC, Tokyo continues to hand the junta $48.7 million in "aid." The great zaibatsu, Mitsui, Mitsubishi, Honda, and Nippon Steel are in Rangoon. NHK, the Japanese national broadcaster, has issued a remarkable directive that the video footage it owns showing the Burmese army shooting down demonstrators "is prohibited for use by anybody in the world,

even by NHK in Japan, because it's too delicate and might threaten Myanmar's (Burma's) stability. ... Please erase the material in your library." And so it is with Australia. On July 22, Foreign Affairs Minister Alexander Downer was reported in the Australian press to have taken "a tough line" on human rights abuses in Burma. He immediately contradicted this by declaring that Australia "would not stand in the way of Burmese membership of the ASEAN Regional Forum." In the last year, the number of Australian business delegations visiting Rangoon has doubled. The largest fence in Burma, advertising the Australian beer, Foster's, shields an army watchtower from

the gaze of tourists. By far Burma's biggest backer is China,which has armed SLORC on a barter system that has seen many of Burma's natural riches, such as its gemstones and teak, go to China. Chinese business interests are now so well ensconced that Mandalay is often referred to as "a Chinese city." Leading the "tiger" investors is Singapore, whose state arms company came to SLORC's rescue in 1988 at the height of the pro-democracy demonstrations when troops were running out of ammunition. The collaboration of Thailand has been critical to SLORC's survival.

The Thai Petroleum Authority will be the sole importer and consumer of the gas that comes through the French/US-built pipeline. The deal is little different from the logging, mining, and fishing concessions which Thai interests have negotiated with Rangoon since "development" in their own country has all but destroyed its principal natural resources. Part of the unstated deal is that the Thai military sends back Burmese refugees who manage to cross the border. In April 1993, Thai troops burned down two refugee camps in an operation, reported the Bangkok Nation, "probably related to the gas pipeline." Thousands of ethnic Mon refugees have since been forced back into Burma,

many straight into the hands of the SLORC military. On the border, where the pipeline will enter Thailand, SLORC troops display pens distributed by the French oil company, Total, in their uniform pockets. "Total is coming," said one of them with a broad smile. Burma's most profitable export is illegal. More than half the heroin reaching the streets of US and Australian cities originates in the "golden triangle" where the borders of Burma, Laos, and Thailand meet. Under SLORC, heroin production has doubled. In a study, Out of Control, two researchers, Dr. Chris Beyrer and Faith Doherty, conclude

from a long investigation for the South-East Asian Information Network that SLORC has allowed heroin to circulate freely and cheaply in Burma in the hope that it "pacifies" the rebellious young. *10 According to his son, the infamous drug lord Kuhn Sa is living comfortably on Inya Lake in the center of Rangoon with the support of military intelligence. While drugs bring in quick cash, it is tourism on which SLORC pins its hopes for foreign exchange and, above all, international respectability. "At last the doors to Myanmar, the magic golden land, are open," waxes Dr. Naw Angelene, the director of tourism, in an official handout. "Roads will

be wider, lights will be brighter, tours will be cleaner, grass will be greener, and with more job opportunities, people will be happier."11 One of the biggest foreign tour operators in Burma is the Orient Express Group, which operates "The Road To Mandalay," a "champagne-style cruise" between Mandalay and Pagan in a converted Rhine cruiser. The cabins, says the brochure, "are not simply luxurious"; there is a Kipling Bar and a swimming pool. When I found it at anchor in the heat and mosquitoes, The Road To Mandalay looked squat and sturdy rather than luxurious. Once on board, however, it seemed the perfect vehicle for pampering tourists in one of the world's 10 poorest countries.

Like an air-conditioned bubble, it is constantly cleansed of the smells and noise and dust of the land through which it glides. In the "staterooms" the television rises at the foot of the bed and, presto, there is Rupert Murdoch's satellite TV. In February, the captain of The Road To Mandalay welcomed his inaugural guests. "They might have been, the cast from an Edwardian novel" wrote London Times travel writer Peter Hughes,"a prince and two princesses from the Endsleigh League of European Royalty, our own Princess Michael of Kent among them; a duke; a marche and marchese; a film star, Helena Bonham-Carter; and assorted lords and ladies whose names tended to be the same as their addresses. Those without titles merely

had money." The actual road to Mandalay has recently been converted into an expressway for tourists. For the local people forced to work on it, it is known as "the road of no return." According to Amnesty International, two workers who tried to escape were executed on the spot by soldiers. Another eight were beaten until they were severely injured; one was hacked to death with a hoe. When I interviewed James Sherwood, the American chair of Sea Containers, which runs the Road to Mandalay tours, he described the Burmese generals as "rather bright, well educated, dedicated men who are trying to

improve the country." He said he had contacted the CIA about the "allegations" of human rights violations and it was "confirmed to me these allegations were untrue." Aung San Suu Kyi was two years old when her father was murdered. What distinguished the movement he founded was its complex attempt to apply a blend of Buddhism, socialism, and democracy to the freely elected governments that followed. The ideas of Nehru, Sun Yat Sen, Manzini, and Voltaire were adapted. Marx was virtually re-invented as a disciple of Buddha. But this flowering coincided with a period of turmoil as the ethnic peoples demanded autonomy.

In March 1962, the army stepped in and seized power. Its leader, Ne Win, became Burma's Stalin. He displaced whole populations, built labor camps, and filled the prisons with his enemies, real and imagined. His wars against the ethnic peoples were unrelenting and vengeful. He abolished Burma's lively free press; and along the way he made himself extremely rich. In 1984, the Far Eastern Economic Review reported that the privately chartered jet taking him to a Swiss health clinic "was delayed because chests of jade and precious stones carried on board had been stacked incorrectly and had to be reloaded." Three years later Burma ignominiously applied for Least Developed Country status so that it could qualify for relief on its massive foreign debt.

In 1987, the leader who dubbed himself "Brilliant as the Sun" produced his coup de grace. Without warning, he withdrew most of the country's banknotes, replacing them with new denominations that included or added up to the number nine. According to his chief astrologer, nine was Ne Win's lucky number. The people of Burma did not share his luck. As most of them kept their savings in cash, most were ruined. In a nation now so impoverished, the fuse was lit. By March 1988, the regime was at war with the students at Rangoon University. The moment of uprising came

precisely at eight minutes past eight on the morning of the eighth month of 1988. This was the auspicious time the dock workers, the "first wave," chose to strike. Other workers followed in succession; and in subsequent days and weeks almost everyone in the cities and towns, it seemed, showed a courage equal to those who stormed the Berlin Wall the following year. Without guns, ordinary people began to reclaim their country. Then the slaughter began. The army fired point blank at the crowds and bayoneted those who fell. In Thailand and Norway,I have interviewed the exiled witnesses to these epic events,

most of them speaking publicly for the first time. "One of my friends was shot in the head right there, in front of me," said Ko Htun Oo, a former student. "Two girls and a monk were shot next to him." Another student, Aye Chan, said, "A lot of flame was coming out of the crematorium which was surrounded by troops. They weren't even identifying bodies, so the parents would never know. The dead and wounded were all mixed up. They just burned them alive." Another spoke of hearing a wounded schoolboy cry out for his mother as he was buried alive in the cemetery: "The caretaker didn't want to do it," he said, "but the soldiers had guns pointed at him." Now well into his 80s, Ne Win

remains the center of SLORC's power. His former aide, the secret police chief, Lt. Gen. Khin Nyunt, is "Secretary One." Behind sunglasses, Khin Nyunt's pudgy face appears at least five times in every copy of the official daily. His seminal work goes under the catchy title, "The Conspiracy Of Treasonous Minions Within The Myanmar Naing-Ngan And Traitorous Cohorts Abroad." One wonders how many of the gallery of faces in its pages are dead. Pol Pot and his gang turned out similar tracts. "Secretary One" is the man whose job is silencing "heretics": those like the lawyer Nay Min serving 14 years for "spreading rumors" to the BBC, and the UNICEF researcher Khin Zaw Win serving 15 years for sending "fabricated news" to the UN,

and the writer San San Nwe sentenced to 10 years for "spreading false information injurious to the state." Last year the general subjected a US senator, John McCain (R-Ariz.), to an hour-long harangue about how SLORC was holding back the "red tide," then played him a videotape showing "communists" beheading villagers with machetes: footage so sickening that McCain's wife had to leave the room. The aim was to convince the senator that Aung San Suu Kyi was a front for "red subversives." DEMOCRATIC LEGACY The taxi dropped us far from the long green fence of number 54 University Avenue. Our cameras were concealed in shoulder bags; a figure in sunglasses stood up to

watch us. We peered through a hole in the corrugated iron gate and a face asked our names. Inside, another sunglasses told us to write down our names and occupations. We then crossed an imaginary line into friendly territory and were greeted warmly by Suu Kyi's assistant, U Win Htein, who was arrested with her and spent six years in prison, mostly in solitary confinement. He led us into the house, a stately pile fallen on hard times, overlooking a garden that tumbles down to Inya Lake and bordered by a fence equipped with alarms, a reminder that this was one woman's prison. Aung San Suu Kyi wore silk and

orchids in her hair. She is a striking, glamorous figure who looks much younger than her 50 years and appears at first to carry her suffering lightly. Only in repose does her face offer a glimpse of the cost and the grit that has seen her through, though when she laughs this vanishes; it is like a blind closed and open. We talked in a room dominated by a huge portrait of the father she barely knew, painted in the style of Andy Warhol by the artist Soe Moe at the height of the 1988 uprising. I asked her if her release from house arrest was a cynical exercise by the regime to

give itself a human face. "I think they also miscalculated that the National League For Democracy was a spent force," she replied, " and that releasing me was not going to make any difference. ... " "But with such a brute force confronting you," I asked, "how do you reclaim the power you won at the ballot box?" "We are not the first people to face this dilemma. In Buddhism we are taught the four basic ingredients for success: first, you must have the will to want it; then you must have the right kind of attitude; then you must have the perseverance; then wisdom. ... " What struck me was her extraordinary optimism, fueled,

it seemed, by her Buddhist principles that draw a stark contrast with the realities outside. This changed when I mentioned foreign investment. I said that the British Foreign Office minister, Jeremy Hanley, had told Parliament that "through commercial contacts with democratic nations such as Britain, the Burmese people will gain experience of democratic principles." She laughed. "Not in the least bit, because the so-called market economy is only open to some. Investors will help only a small elite to get richer and richer. This works against the very idea of

democracy because the gap between rich and poor is growing all the time. The same applies to tourism. They should stay away until we are a democracy. Look at the forced labor that is going on all over the country. A lot of it is aimed at the tourist trade. It's very painful. Roads and bridges are built at the expense of the people. If you cannot provide one laborer you are fined. If you cannot afford the fine, the children are forced to labor." In his moving introduction to Freedom From Fear, a collection of essays by and about Aung San Suu Kyi, Michael Aris quotes from a letter she wrote him

shortly before they married: "I only ask one thing: that should my people need me, you would help me to do my duty by them ... if we love and cherish each other as much as we can while we can, I am sure love and compassion will triumph in the end." I reminded her about this. "I asked him," she said, "to be sympathetic when the time came ... and he said, `yes'. ... During my house arrest the longest period we were out of touch was two years and four or five months. I missed my family, and I worried about my sons very much because the young one was only 12, and he had to be put into boarding school. But then I'd remind myself that the families of my colleagues in prison were far worse off." She revealed that in her isolation

she had difficulty breathing and would lie awake listening to the thump-thump of her heart, wondering if it would fail. There were times when she did not get enough to eat and her weight fell to 90 pounds. "Weren't you terrified?" I asked. "When I was small," she said, "it was in this house that I conquered my fear of the dark. I just wandered around in the darkness and by the end, I knew all the demons weren't there." During the first years of her house arrest, soldiers were ordered to lie with their ears to the ground so as to detect her "tunneling" to the house next door. They failed to grasp that she had no intention of escaping, or seeking exile. Outside, her name became a byword and people would pass her house just to be reassured by the sound of her playing the piano. When it stopped there were rumors that

she was dead. "That was when the string broke," she said. "I was pumping too hard. I have a hot temper, so I took it out on the piano!" "Will Burma be free in the foreseeable future?" "Yes!" she replied unhesitatingly. "That's not just a dream?" "No, I calculate it from the will of the people and the current of world opinion. ... I knew I'd be free ... some day." The next day I joined the crowd outside her gate waiting for her to speak. The people were different from any I had seen; they were smiling, talking freely with each other, as if waiting for a gig to start. There were betel nut sellers and cheroot vendors and a man with a block of ice ingeniously balanced in a red sock, selling cups of cold water.

With the grace and courtesy that is never deferential and is so much part of the Burmese character, people made way for the foreign Gulliver, offering a cushion for me to sit on. When Suu Kyi appeared she was flanked by two other figures of principle and courage: General Tin Oo and U Kyi Maung, a former colonel, the vice-chairmen of the NLD, both of whom have spent years in prison. The clapping and whooping lasted minutes. She now looked grey and drawn. Yet she had people in stitches as she carefully mocked the dictatorship, using irony and parable (so I was told; she spoke only in Burmese). As they laughed, I counted the spooks in sunglasses,filming, photographing, watching. Their arbitrary power was like a presence. Recently, a young man tried to ease the crush by moving the barrier and was

bundled away and given a two-year sentence. At the end of her speech, people asked questions. She leaned over the spikes in the fence and listened intently, replying expressively. An old monk pushed through and asked her if she would join him in prayer; and she did. Most did not linger. A man told me he never went straight home after a meeting. "If they follow you," he said, "things start to happen. The power goes off; the kids are sent home crying from school." When I asked him if 1988 could happen again, this time successfully, he said: "Imagine a pedestrian crosswalk. The traffic never seems to stop for the pedestrians. One or two dart across. The majority wait impatiently at the curb, then they surge across, until the traffic has lost all its power. Well, we are

all back at the curb now, waiting impatiently." At that, he looked over my shoulder and walked quickly away. Desmond Tutu like Aung San Suu Kyi, a Nobel Peace Prize winner said recently, "International pressure can change the situation in Burma. Tough sanctions, not constructive engagement, finally brought about a new South Africa. This is the only language that tyrants understand." What is hopeful is that there is the promise of sanctions in a remarkable disinvestment campaign already well underway in America. Based on the boycott of apartheid South Africa, selective purchasing laws have been enacted by a growing number of US cities,including San Francisco and Madison, Wisconsin.Massachusetts has passed its own selective purchasing law,which has brought

pressure on corporations based in the state, such as Gillette although Gillette says it is no longer in Burma. These make municipal contracts with companies that trade with or invest in Burma illegal. New York state is considering similar legislation; and one of the biggest investors in Burma, Pepsi Cola, with its headquarters in upstate New York, has partially withdrawn. Rep. Byron Rushing, who wrote Massachusetts' selective purchasing law, told me: "In the case of South Africa, we were able to put pressure on a whole range of companies, like General Motors, Coca-Cola, Pepsi Cola, and most eventually withdrew. And that really added to the pressure on the white government. That was a victory. As for Burma, it's not going to happen overnight, but we have started. The civilized world should follow."

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