Burma: Soldiers Of Fortune

Reportage / Getty Images for TIME
Ruling class Army cadets at ease in a juice bar in Pyin U Lwin, home to top military academies for training officers

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Hardwired
The red sign blocking the main entrance to the half-built Yadanabon Cybercity looks innocuous enough to someone who doesn't read the local language, a swirl of curved Burmese letters and numbers. But the people of Burma have been conditioned to fear this sign: "This area is under military order 144," it says. "Shoot to capture." It's a measure of Burma's peculiar mix of isolationist paranoia and technological ambition that its future Silicon Valley has been declared a military zone inaccessible to normal civilians. Inside the 4,050-hectare construction site, I drive along empty stretches of tarmac, past plots of land that will soon boast offices for Burma's biggest crony companies: Htoo Trading, Tay Za's conglomerate; IGE, headed by the son of Burma's Minister of Industry General Aung Thaung, who is barred by the European Union; Redlink Communications, owned by the sons of the junta No. 3, General Thura Shwe Mann, one of whom is on the U.S. visa blacklist. Thai, Malaysian, Russian and Chinese firms have staked their ground too. Burma's state media reports that foreign companies have so far invested $22 million in the first phase of Yadanabon.

Ever since images of protesting monks escaped from Burma during the crushed demonstrations of 2007, the regime has been scrambling to centralize control over the Internet. Thousands of websites have been blocked, cyberdissidents jailed and debilitating strikes launched against exile-media websites. Yadanabon will be the nerve center of Burma's Internet operations. But it's not all computer cubicles and high-tech wizardry. On a point overlooking the famous hills of Shan State, $200,000 vacation villas are being built. One model drawing shows a BMW SUV in a garage, and the half-finished houses already feature Tudor trimmings and spacious verandas. Nearby, a farmer toils on a sliver of land that has belonged to her family for at least three generations. Soon the Cybercity will eat up this tiny plot too. The woman doesn't expect any compensation since she received nothing when the rest of her fields were confiscated a year ago. "We are little people, so we cannot complain," she says. "All we can do is concentrate on feeding ourselves."

The man entrusted to oversee Yadanabon is neither a businessman nor even an adult. But being the grandson of junta leader Than Shwe brings perks. A scrawny soccer fan with no discernible skills on the pitch, Nay Shwe Thway Aung was once added to the Burmese national team when prominent Japanese player Hidetoshi Nakata went to Rangoon for an exhibition match. Other privileged Burmese youth have made an impression off the field. The most notorious was an informal collective of military offspring called Scorpion, which was forced to disband after two members spooked the junta No. 2, General Maung Aye, by riding up to his car on motorcycles and making menacing gestures. Maung Aye responded by outlawing most motorcycles in Rangoon, a ban that still holds today.

Even beyond Scorpion, there are plenty of other rich kids roaming Rangoon. At the packed JJ nightclub where the bidding at "model shows," as prostitute auctions are called, reaches $2,500 for a comely maiden one manager complains about the impunity with which military officers and their sons operate. "They drink for free and can pick girls for free," he says. "Nobody dares say no; otherwise we will be finished."

Flying High
There are no such diversions in Naypyidaw, the austere capital that takes a good hour to cross in a car an hour in which I pass perhaps a dozen other vehicles. When I visited two years ago, I figured the barren landscape dotted with little more than grandiose ministry buildings and golf courses would eventually be filled with normal signs of life. But today, save the occasional color-coded civil-servant housing complex or shopping center already deteriorating under the unrelenting sun, the capital is still a monochromatic emptiness, as if Mark Rothko took to urban planning. The rumor goes that Naypyidaw was built without nightclubs or bars to prevent princelings and their cohorts from bad behavior.

So the party goes on in Rangoon instead or in Singapore, where some wealthy Burmese maintain homes and bank accounts. Riding one afternoon in Rangoon in a dilapidated taxi that saw its best days four decades ago, I hear a deep-throated purr behind me. Turning around, I spot a sunflower-yellow Lamborghini careening past the potholes of Strand Road. The taxi driver knows the luxury car well. It is a plaything of Tay Za's family. Later I spot the same vehicle, along with several Mini Coopers and a Ferrari, parked at the mansion of the man the U.S. Treasury Department calls "an arms dealer and financial henchman of Burma's repressive junta." In June, Tay Za is believed to have helped the Burmese regime buy even flashier modes of transport: 50 Karakorum light attack aircraft from China. (His aviation company is also credited with brokering last year's deal for the Russian MiGs.) All these new planes will surely please the DSA cadets, who perhaps one day can graduate from computer games to real fighter jets. For the "triumphant elite of the future" like the rest of Burma's pampered classes even the stratosphere is within easy reach.