By Justin Huggler, Asia Correspondent | Published: 28 March 2007
The outside world has got its first glimpse of the secret capital Burma is building deep in the jungle.
In 2005, the ruling military junta abruptly announced that the capital was moving from the leafy colonial city of Rangoon on the coast, to an area of malaria-infested jungle 250 miles inland. At the time it was still served by steam trains.
One of the world's most secretive countries - arguably only North Korea is more closed off - was moving its government to a closed city that was off-limits to outsiders. Since then, the reason for moving has remained a mystery.
But yesterday foreign journalists were finally allowed to see the new city, Naypyidaw, at the annual Armed Forces Day parade. And they also got a rare glimpse of the junta's elusive chief, General Than Shwe, the man who rules the destiny of millions of Burmese.
What they found was a planned city on a large scale. The parade ground where General Than Shwe addressed the troops is huge, and overlooked by three 33-foot high statues of the country's most famous kings. According to reports, the city is spread out so that buildings are divided by huge empty spaces.
All the hotels are grouped together in a single area called the "hotel zone". Across an expanse of empty land, apartment blocks are being built for bureaucrats who are being forced to move to the new city, painted in incongruous pastel shades that evoke nothing so much as a Milton Keynes uprooted and transplanted to the jungle.
In the "government zone", ministries are several miles apart from each other. Most bizarre of all is the "military zone", said by reporters who were in the city yesterday to be a fortress. The roads have been made extra wide so they can double as military runways. There are anti-aircraft guns and missile silos. It is in the midst of this security that General Than Shwe lives, now cut off from the rest of the country, as well as the outside world.
"I urge you to exert efforts, hand in hand with the people, to build a peaceful, modern, developed and disciplined democratic nation," the junta leader urged soldiers yesterday in his army day address, insisting that the country is following a "roadmap to democracy", despite all appearances to the contrary.
Nobody really knows why General Than Shwe decided to move the capital to Naypyidaw. The official version is that Rangoon had become too crowded and congested, but nobody believes that. Some in Burma say the move was prompted by the advice of the general's favourite astrologer. Burma's leader is notoriously superstitious, like the former dictator Ne Win, who had banknotes printed in absurd denominations because he insisted that they all be divisible by his lucky number, nine.
But others have suggested it may have had more to do with a burst of rhetoric against the junta from the US at the time. With the US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice sounding threatening, the junta may have looked west towards Iraq and decided to plan for the worst. Naypyidaw appears to be purpose-built to be easily defended - and is far harder to attack than coastal Rangoon.
An Indian journalist who managed to get inside Naypyidaw ahead of other foreigners last month, Siddharth Varadarajan, has another theory. The city, he wrote in Himal South Asian magazine, "will not fall to an urban upheaval easily. It has no city centre, no confined public space where even a crowd of several thousand people could make a visual - let alone political - impression.
"Naypyidaw... is the ultimate insurance against regime change, a masterpiece of urban planning designed to defeat any putative 'colour revolution' - not by tanks and water cannons, but by geometry and cartography."
Changing names