Burma showing signs of reforms

RANGOON, BURMA — When Eleven Media Group sent a photographer to take pictures of flooding in central Burma last year, police suspected subversion and detained the journalist for three days.

(Khin Maung Win/ASSOCIATED PRESS) - Burma democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi, left, and Labor and Social Welfare Minister Aung Kyi appear at a recent news conference.

This week, the Rangoon-based publisher printed not only photos of buildings submerged by yet another round of floods but also the picture and words of opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi and two other veteran foes of the government.

Burma’s political “weather is changing,” said Than Htut Aung, Eleven Media’s chairman, who, like many others here, believes that for the first time in decades, one of the world’s most repressive states is serious about reforming its autocratic ways.

In recent days, Rangoon, Burma’s biggest city, has swirled with unconfirmed reports that a new government installed in March is about to release possibly hundreds of jailed political prisoners. The inmates range from dissident writers and veteran democracy campaigners to purged military insiders such as reform-minded intelligence officers ousted in 2004.

“I think the change is real, or it should be real. We have to push to make it a reality,” said Eleven Media’s chairman, a former student activist who controls four weekly journals.

Whether Burma, also known as Myanmar, really is set on new course is a question now stirring excited and also anxious debate not only here in Rangoon but also in Washington, where officials are discussing whether to add some carrots to a policy previously focused on promoting change through economic sanctions and other sticks.

When Burma got a new president, former military commander Thein Sein, in March even optimists didn’t expect much, if anything, to change. The new leader -- a longtime ally of now retired but still feared military strongman Senior Gen. Than Shwe -- took office after an election widely dismissed as a fraud designed to solidify the military’s grip.

Since then, however, overtures to Suu Kyi, a Nobel Peace Prize winner and standard-bearer of Burma’s resistance to autocracy, a raft of new legislation and a general easing of previously harsh controls on public discourse have surprised even critics of Burma’s government and also Western diplomats.

The biggest surprise came last week when the president, in a letter to parliament, announced he was halting a hugely unpopular Chinese-financed dam project on the Irrawaddy River. The government, said the president, “is elected by the people and has to respect the people’s will” -- a novel departure in a country where, since a military coup in 1962, governments have either ignored the people or, as happened when citizens took to the street in protest in 1988 and 2007, silenced them with gunfire and mass arrests.

Eleven Media played a leading role in voicing public opposition to the dam and stoking nationalist fury at China’s growing economic clout in Burma. “Our country is in danger of becoming a satellite state of China,” said Than Htut Aung, the chairman.

The new government, or at least elements of a still largely opaque leadership, apparently agree: Official censors have allowed unusually frank discussion of deals struck with China under Than Shwe, who ruled from 1992 until this year.