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 juntaÂ’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.”
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