A beautiful, nasty country: the long-running woes of Burma.

THERE are few countries in the world more charming than Burma; there are few countries in the world that have been consistently worse governed. Whether these two facts are connected in any causal way I will leave political scientists and philosophers to decide.

There is, of course, nothing whatever to be said in favor of the military rulers of Burma. Judged by almost any conceivable standard, they have ruined their beautiful and richly endowed country. They have impoverished and looted it, and suppressed every last vestige of freedom. They have profiteered from the longest-running civil wars in the world, unable or unwilling to end the conflicts that are the raison d'etre of the huge but ragged army that they control, and that are therefore the ultimate source of their seemingly perpetual hold on power.

Medical services are appalling, and a very high percentage of the most educated Burmese, industrious and intelligent, leave the country as soon as they are able. The austerity that the military rulers have consistently demanded of their subjects has been matched only by their taste for the vulgar high life. It is said that the daughter of Than Shwe, the head of the junta, was weighed down with diamonds at her wedding, a video of part of which is available on the Internet.

Prominent members of the military regime, powerful, rich, but relatively uneducated, are said to build Buddhist stupas for themselves at Pagan, the famous capital of the first Burmese empire, which was overthrown by Genghis Khan. Hundreds and hundreds of medieval temples dot the plain; the new additions thus imply that the junta is a continuation of Burmese tradition and culture.

The army has been in power for 45 years, ever since Ne Win's coup of 1962. Caprice and contempt for the wishes of the people marked his regime from the very beginning. For example, Ne Win (like many Burmese, and like Sir Isaac Newton) was a devotee of numerology, the art--or science, as devotees no doubt think it--of divining meaning from numbers. In 1963, Ne Win suppressed the 50-and 100-kyat notes without compensating those who held them, and substituted some of the oddest denominations in the world: 15-, 35-, 45-, 75-, and 90-kyat notes, the penultimate also suppressed a little later, inflicting further misfortune upon the people of Burma. (By their denominations shall ye know them: Albania, Cuba, and the Soviet Union shared a taste for the denomination of their currency in notes of 3--lek, pesos, and rubles respectively.)

Apparently, Ne Win believed that if he got the denominations of the notes right, he would live to be 90. His theory turned out to be true: He lived until he was 91, dying in 2002.

The current rulers have not only renamed the whole country and the largest city Myanmar and Yangon respectively, but removed the capital to a place called Nay Pyi Daw (Place of the King), which, like most artificial capitals, is utterly forlorn, built in the style favored by the late Nicolae Ceausescu in his "systematizing" stage. Here bureaucrats are housed in identical modern blocks, jerry-built and destined to rot and molder after only a very short period of use. The only reason given for the removal of the capital from Rangoon has been that Rangoon is susceptible to foreign sea-borne invasion.

Extreme xenophobia has long been one of the most salient characteristics of military rule in Burma. Ne Win virtually closed the country to foreigners, under the pretext of following the Burmese path to socialism. The only party permitted was Burma Socialist Programme, Ne Win's own. At first after his coup foreigners were allowed into the country for only 24 to 72 hours at a time, though this was later extended to a whole week. Foreign investment was discouraged, and while Ne Win himself went to London or Switzerland for medical treatment, and had some of the characteristics of a playboy, the official line was that the country should be autarkic, that is to say that it should produce and provide everything for itself. This autarky was less extreme than that of, say, North Korea, Cambodia, China, or even Paraguay under its first dictator, Jose Gaspar Rodriguez de Francia, but it was sufficient to keep Burma isolated from the rest of the world. Burma was for long the only country on earth where the cars were even older than those in Cuba. When Ne Win took over, it was the largest exporter of rice in the world; soon it could barely feed itself.

Ne Win and his government ascribed this poverty to the anti-Burmese machinations of foreigners and imperialists, but in 1988 unrest was so widespread that this was no longer even remotely plausible. Under pressure of demonstrations, a coup was organized, widely believed to have been orchestrated by Ne Win himself: At any rate, he remained the eminence grise of the new military rulers until 1998.

The army, known as the Tatmadaw, restored order by killing up to 3,000 demonstrators, but at first the new regime appeared liberal by comparison with Ne Win, despite its sinister acronym, SLORC, the State Law and Order Restoration Council. It opened the country up to foreign investment, the members of the government of course benefiting personally from this. It even allowed elections in 1990, but when it did not like the results it annulled them, following the model of the Algerian military regime after the inconvenient vote it had allowed. Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy won 59 percent of the Burmese popular vote and 80 percent of the seats in the assembly. A vote was one thing, but power was another: and in Burma, power still grew out of the barrel of a gun. Fundamentally, not much had changed.

The contemporary story of Burma, then, is that of the prolonged triumph of evil: of quite unnecessary poverty, of unbridled corruption, of terrible backwardness despite advantages such as vast natural resources and intelligent people to exploit them, and above all of ruthless political tyranny.

And yet disturbing questions raise themselves in my mind. Aung San, who negotiated independence from Britain, and was Aung San Suu Kyi's father, was assassinated along with six of his close associates even before independence; uprisings occurred in the army and among non-Burmese ethnic groups immediately on independence. The parliamentary regime was not only fractured but ineffectual and corrupt. If countries don't necessarily get the governments they deserve (who can deserve a government as bad as Burma's?), neither can such governments be said to grow out of completely alien soil. Nor will the problems of ethnic diversity and antagonism in Burma be easily resolved.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Why should we worry about Burma? If we are merely self-interested, we shouldn't worry much. It is not a serious threat to any of its neighbors, much less to the rest of the world, and the high-mindedness of Western leaders is not always completely credible or convincing. Chevron continues to operate in Burma, and when President Sarkozy called for further sanctions it was noticeable that he did not suggest the withdrawal of the French oil company, Total, from the country. Such Western economic sanctions as have been imposed have operated to increase the influence of the Chinese in Burma.

The Chinese have been only too delighted to step into the breach and are already by far Burma's largest customer and principal patron. They will not want to see Burma slide into chaos, any more than they will want a flourishing democracy that has been brought about by demonstrations and popular action, indeed a democracy of any kind, on their doorstep.

Here I have a personal confession of a completely discreditable nature. I loved Burma under Ne Win, instead of hating it as I know I ought to have done. I recognize that it was deeply oppressive and impoverished, and yet it had a seductive charm that derived precisely from the preservation of its distinctiveness. It had been spared the choking traffic, constant scurry, and intense commercialization of the countries of Southeast Asia. Everything was run-down and close to ruins, but as every aesthete knows ruins have charms that new office blocks or elevated highways do not necessarily have. People had very little in the way of material goods, but they seemed to have time and the dignity that time confers upon action. I did not look forward to a world in which there were no Burmas, only Singapores, and I was far from alone in my reaction. Very few people who went to Burma developed any moral fervor about changing it for the better.

I know that this was a highly improper response, that it was placing casual preferences above the wishes of millions of Burmese, to say nothing of its disregard of the cruelties inflicted upon opponents of the regime. Like most people, the Burmese want to be rich and free, and my aesthetic reservations were not so much as dust in the balance. Yet the history of Burma in the last three quarters of a century also gives rational grounds for doubt. Hope springs eternal, of course, but so does disappointment.

Mr. Daniels is the author of Utopias Elsewhereand other books.