Soldiers and citizens will sing the national anthem. For many in attendance, the song's first line - "Till the end of the world, Burma!" - may seem wryly appropriate. Compared even with the old dilapidated political and commercial capital of Rangoon, their new jungle-encircled home may indeed seem like civilisation's very edge.

Until now, Pyinmana has been a small rural town clustered around sugar mills and a railway lumber yard on the country's main rail line, halfway between Rangoon and Mandalay, the last independent Burmese kingdom's capital before Britain seized the country in 1885.

The new capital is said at the moment to be largely a construction site, with new buildings, military barracks, government offices and homes for civil servants rising on 10 square kilometres of cleared land to the west of the existing town. There are unconfirmed reports of extensive tunnelling at the main site and missile-proof caves built in nearby mountains.

It is closed to non-Burmese, a ban likely to prevail until at least mid-year. However, a new Foreign Ministry building is said to have already opened for business and embassy sites designated. Needless to say, the relocation to Pyinmana already worries foreign diplomats, for whom Rangoon is already quite enough of a hardship post.

Why the move? It is simple, Information Minister Brigadier Kyaw Hsan told a press conference: "[Pyinmana] is centrally located and has quick access to all parts of the country."

Other reports say that because Washington has placed Burma on a list of "outposts of tyranny" that includes North Korea, Cuba, Iran, Zimbabwe and Belarus, the ruling junta fears a US invasion. Pyinmana would be less accessible than Rangoon to the US Marine Corps.

Whatever the reason, anyone who wishes the Burmese well can only despair at the news that the Than Shwe government appears to be retreating to an inland fortress city.

In recent years, the closest approximation to the evacuation of a large city for political-military purposes was the emptying of Phnom Penh on Pol Pot's orders 31 years ago next month.

The Khmer Rouge eventually fell from power; Than Shwe and his cronies remain as Asia's most isolated ruling group. Yet there is no country more in need of contact with the world. As US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice recently put it, Burma "is now out of step with the entire modern experience of the region".

The late General Ne Win, who in 1962 seized power from a democratically elected government, began the rot by launching "the Burmese way to socialism". The series of grotesque experiments with Marxism-Leninism resulted in a catastrophic economic decline that persists to this day.

Moreover, the command of the economy by the Tatmadaw (armed forces) made it possible for officers and their families to involve themselves deeply in corruption. Transparency International, the anti-corruption watchdog, lists Burma as one of the world's second most-corrupt nations, on a par with Haiti. Only Bangladesh and Chad rate lower.

The economy that in the mid-20th century was one of Asia's most promising has been stagnant for more than four decades. One-third of its children are believed to be malnourished. One of Asia's best-educated nations of the immediate post-colonial period now has half of its children dropping out of school after five years.

Inflation is estimated to have risen by as much as 50 per cent. Rising rates of HIV, Aids, bird flu, tuberculosis and malaria put more than Burmese at risk when refugees flee to neighbouring nations.

Protest demonstrations, mostly involving students, broke out in 1988 and 1989 but were brutally suppressed by the army. Underestimating the masses' revulsion, the junta permitted surprisingly free elections in 1990, but this effort to restore democratic rule went awry: an 83-per-cent landslide vote endorsed the National League for Democracy, led by Aung San Suu Kyi, daughter of the hero of national independence, General Aung San. The junta annulled the election; Suu Kyi, awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991, has spent most of the years since under house arrest.

Since 2002, the government has been on an accelerated arms-buying spree. It has upgraded navy and air-force weapons and increased the size of the army - from 180,000 men in 1988 to around 395,000 today, says London's International Institute for Strategic Studies.

Speculation from some quarters notwithstanding, an imminent US invasion is most unlikely, given Washington's currently more-serious distractions in the Middle East and Korea, and there are no other plausible external threats. The large military force is needed to confront continuing insurgencies by ethnic minorities fighting what they see as often-brutal oppression by the ethnic-Burmese majority.

But even more ominous for the Than Shwe junta are those 1988-89 protests and that 1990 vote. And therein might lie an important pointer to Pyinmana's mysteries and Burma's fate.

A people-power revolution of the kind that recently overthrew corrupt regimes in East and Central Asia and Europe must surely be a possibility in Burma. But it may no longer be enough for, say, a cleric-worker-student alliance to seize the biggest city.

In Pyinmana, the Tatmadaw has raised the hurdle. Any would-be revolutionaries in Rangoon must now contemplate a march to a vast bunker 400km to the north.

The Straits Times is a member of the Asia News Network.

Anthony Paul

The Straits Times

Singapore