Myanmar Is Left in Dark, an Energy-Rich Orphan

Myanmar Is Left in Dark, an Energy-Rich Orphan - New York Times: "In the balmy waters of the Bay of Bengal, just off the coast, an Asian energy rush is on. Huge pockets of natural gas have been found. China and India are jostling to sign deals. Plans are afoot to spend billions on new ports and pipelines.

Yet onshore, in towns like this one, not a light is to be seen — not a street lamp, not a glow in a window — as women crouch by the roadside at dawn, sorting by candlelight the vegetables they will sell for two cents a bunch at the morning market.

Paraffin and wood are major sources of light and heat. People receive two hours of electricity a day from a military government that is among the world’s most repressive.

But attempts at outside pressure to prod the government to address its people’s needs and curb abuses have faltered, in large part because China’s thirst for resources has undermined nearly a decade of American economic sanctions.

Critics say that Washington’s policy has handed Myanmar, formerly Burma, to China. Still, as President Bush prepares to meet with leaders at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit meeting in Vietnam on Nov. 17, one topic on his agenda will be how to keep up the pressure. He is not likely to find cooperation, not from rivals like China and Russia, nor even countries like Singapore and Indonesia, which trade freely with Myanmar.

In numerous encounters in Myanmar, where most speak with extreme caution to foreigners and almost always anonymously for fear of jail, people joked sardonically that China was the “big daddy” and that soon it would “own” Myanmar. “China is a good friend of the government, not of the people,” one woman said. “They are like brother and brother-in-law.

India, thirsty for energy to fuel its own fast-growing economy, sees Myanmar as a place where it needs to contain China. In the late 1990s, democratic India switched its policy toward Myanmar from antagonism to friendship.

In a similar vein to the dissidents in Eastern Europe in the 1980s, the woman said she believed change had to come from inside the country. But unlike Poland under Soviet rule, no unions are allowed in Myanmar, and most kinds of formal associations are considered suspect.

She said she held classes at her home on how to be more confident, how to strategize. She was trying to spread her classes to Buddhist monasteries and Christian churches, she said.

“Only education can change people because people don’t know anything,” she said. “Only about 10 percent of the people know what is going on.” Sometimes she was in such despair, she said, that she believed that the only way to win against the government was “to think like them.” ”