TO the Burmese, who love a puppet play, they are like three characters in a drama: the evil king, the fallen prince and the fair prisoner. But to appalled spectators in foreign embassies here, the play has taken a sudden turn for the tragic.
The king is Than Shwe, the senior general in Burma, who has adorned himself with regal trappings, switched his junta to one-man rule and ordered the government to move to a new city whose name, Nay Pyi Daw, means “royal capital”.
The fallen prince is General Khin Nyunt, purged from his fiefdom in military intelligence, who languishes under house arrest, his hopes of a lucrative “moderate” policy in ruins. And he now shares that plight with the fair prisoner he sought to make his political partner, Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel peace prize winner.
Guards slouch outside both their houses in leafy suburbs of lakes and gardens built by the British rulers of colonial Burma in the days when this impoverished land was the richest producer of timber, rice and commodities in southeast Asia.
Meanwhile, Than Shwe, 74, and his wife Kyaing Kyaing, have adopted the airs of ancient Burmese royalty, taking elaborate titles and performing temple rites once reserved for kings and queens, under the guidance of astrologers.
They have built a residence in the new capital for which Italian marble was deemed inadequate and replaced by choice polished stone from China, the junta’s keenest friend.
Confined at home, Khin Nyunt has watched his associates thrown into the depraved conditions of Insein prison and seen the leader discard his schemes to lure Suu Kyi, who won a democratic election almost 16 years ago, into a transitional administration.
“She made a grave miscalculation by not making a compromise with Khin Nyunt while he had the power,” said one international official here. “Now they will make her irrelevant.”
There is deepening concern over Suu Kyi’s medical and psychological condition. Sources in Rangoon disclosed she had not been seen by any outsiders, including her doctor, for more than two months. Suu Kyi, 60, underwent major abdominal surgery in 2003 in Rangoon.
Fortified by Buddhism and meditation, with only a maid and a shortwave radio for company, she is enduring a second long spell in isolation. During her last confinement, her husband, the British academic Michael Aris, died in 1999. She has not seen their adult sons, Kim and Alexander, for years.
Two weeks ago a special envoy from Malaysia, Syed Hamid Albar, asked to see her, but Than Shwe refused. “He is not interested in a dialogue with her,” said a western envoy. “He clearly has his own plans now.”
The United Nations envoy sent to mediate, Razali Ismail, has resigned in despair and no replacement has been named.
Last week the junta’s newspaper mouthpiece, the New Light of Myanmar, accused Suu Kyi’s party, the National League for Democracy, of consorting with “terrorists”. It printed names, ages and curious personal descriptions of 22 “terrorists” who, it said, had come to Rangoon to plant bombs.
Than Shwe has just sent his soldiers on a foray through the eastern jungles against rebels, driving hundreds of refugees across the border into Thailand with tales of rape and murder.
Thousands of hapless officials, meanwhile, have been marooned in the new “capital”, a cluster of administrative buildings and bachelor dormitories 20 miles from the railway town of Pyinmana, in central Burma.
