For decades, they have been two of the world’s most reclusive nations: Myanmar, run by a cabal of generals, squelched any attempt at democratic change and kept the country’s most popular figure under strict house arrest for years.
North Korea, run by the same family as a Stalinist dictatorship since the 1940s, simply sealed itself off. Outsiders were rarely allowed to visit, tourists were long unknown and the only way ordinary people could escape the country’s extreme poverty and political repression was to steal across the border into China.
However, in very different ways, the two nations have opened themselves up over the past year or so, allowing the world to peer behind the political curtains they had so laboriously erected.
Both now have foreign journalists arriving in unprecedented numbers (though the visits are tightly restricted in North Korea). Both have had observers predicting momentous changes. Both governments have insisted — repeatedly — that they are working to improve the lives of their citizens.
So how much change has there been? That is more complicated.
The question is debated relentlessly in Myanmar, asked by everyone from wealthy businessmen with military connections to pro-democracy political activists. Though skeptics abound, “hope” has become the country’s political watchword.
However, for observers of North Korea, the answer is far more definitive, and far less optimistic.
“None,” said Andrei Lankov, an academic on the North at Seoul’s Kookmin University, when asked if he had seen signs of significant change since the December death of long-time ruler Kim Jong-il and the rise to power of his young son. In his opinion: “The young dictator is still controlled and surrounded by the old guard, the same people who for many years formulated and executed his father’s polices, so it is too early to expect any noticeable change.”
Less than two years ago, though, similar talk was common in Yangon, Myanmar’s former capital, when a November 2010 national election was widely dismissed as a political sham stage-managed by the generals. Only in recent months has that pessimism begun to lift.
“We are now seeing some changes we didn’t expect,” said Yin Sein, a 59-year old high-school teacher in Yangon.
First, hundreds of political prisoners were freed — more than 650 in the past year. Then, in April, the opposition party led by Aung San Suu Kyi won a landslide victory in historic by-elections. Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel Peace Prize-winner who had spent more than 15 years under house arrest, now sits in the Burmese parliament.
Today, little feels repressive about Myanmar. Unlike Pyongyang, a funereal town that basically shuts down at nightfall, Yangon has long been a city of neighborhood bars, sprawling markets and storefront restaurants with plastic tables on the sidewalk.
Now, with the end of military rule, even protests have come into the open, as people test their new-found freedoms.
Every night this past week, 100 people or so have gathered at the Sule Pagoda, a major Buddhist shrine in central Yangon, to vent their anger about the rolling electrical blackouts that plague the city. Hundreds more come simply to watch.
Two years ago, such a protest almost certainly would have been met with tear gas, baton-wielding policemen and trips to jail. Today, the police watch calmly from a distance, and after a few hours they politely ask everyone to leave.
However, things are seldom clear in Myanmar. The generals, some of whom grew immensely rich during decades of military rule, still wield great power over Myanmar’s politics. Old laws remain in place that would enable them — if they felt threatened, or believed democratization was moving too quickly — to once again seize complete power.
Myanmar has become a country of political contradictions, a place where local officials no longer stage middle-of-the-night checks to look for unregistered visitors in private homes, but where many people register their guests with the authorities anyway. The laws requiring registration, after all, are still on the books.
It is a country where restrictions have been lifted on long-oppressed political parties, but where many people are still too afraid to talk about politics on the telephone.
“We are not sure what is underneath this veneer of change and how sustainable these changes are,” Yin Sein said.
Even Aung San Suu Kyi warns against the dangers of undue optimism.
“We are at a point in history when there is a possibility for transition, but I do not think we can take it for granted that this transition will come about,” she told reporters recently.
“I sometimes feel that people are too optimistic about the scene in Burma,” she told a conference in Washington, speaking on a video link.
However, if the people of Myanmar have learned the art of pessimism through decades of military rule, the people of North Korea have learned they should not even contemplate change — at least not publicly.
North Koreans have spent years in prison for questioning the legitimacy of the Kim family: Founding ruler Kim Il-sung, his son Kim Jong-il and now his grandson Kim Jong-un. If many observers and foreign governments had hoped that Kim Jong-il’s death would pave the way for political reform, there has been little sign of change.
“If such change is to happen [and this is a big if], it will take place only after Kim Jong-un’s people assume ... some independent power — that is, in a couple of years at the fastest,” Lankov said in an e-mail.
In many ways, North Korea can appear frozen in time, with one family in power for more than 60 years, and its dreary, poverty-battered cities decorated with Soviet-style propaganda posters.
So any change can seem momentous, from the dozens of journalists allowed into North Korea in April to cover the 100th anniversary of the birth of Kim Il-sung, to the growth of its tourism industry. Some observers saw sparks of change when North Korea publicly admitted the April failure of a rocket launch it said was intended to carry a satellite into space (though much of the world insists the launch was cover for testing long-range missile technology). In January, The Associated Press opened its newest bureau in Pyongyang.
The vast majority of those outsiders, though, normally glimpse only the lives of everyday North Koreans through the windows of their tour buses. For the most part, they see only what the Pyongyang government wants them to see, whether massive rallies in support of Kim Jong-un or huge monuments that glorify his father and grandfather.
In Myanmar, journalists now travel easily across much of the country, talking to anyone from top officials to poor farmers to opposition leaders. Not so in North Korea. Visitors rarely see the cities that have almost no electricity, or the homes of people struggling with immense poverty. They rarely leave Pyongyang — North Korea’s showcase capital — and certainly meet no political prisoners.
In addition, while some people in Myanmar are afraid to talk about politics on the telephone, few people in North Korea even have access to international phone lines.
However, even if few signs of internal change are being seen in North Korea, it is evident people there can increasingly see the outside world.
While North Korea’s government-controlled media allow little except praise for the Kim family, the spread of technology — from inexpensive DVD players to cheap, handheld radios — means there are now many ways for North Koreans to get around their government’s media roadblocks.
Most North Koreans have no access to the Internet, but they can increasingly buy DVDs smuggled in from China. Those DVDs show everything from South Korean soap operas to recordings of foreign news broadcasts.
“This year, North Koreans can get more outside information, through more types of media, from more sources, than ever before,” said a recent report commissioned by the US State Department and conducted by consulting group InterMedia.
“Despite the incredibly low starting point, important changes in the information environment in North Korean society are under way,” the report said.
Additional reporting by Aye Aye Win and Todd Pitman.
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