PYAPON (Myanmar) - IN THE dried mud of the Irrawaddy delta, workers are welding together the final pieces of a natural-gas pipeline that the country's ruling generals say will keep the lights on in Yangon, Myanmar's main city, after years of debilitating blackouts.
Military officers are campaigning for planned elections this year as if their careers depended on it, announcing dozens of projects. These include the plan for 24-hour electricity in Yangon that the ruling junta leaders hope will win the affection of a population that, in many parts of the country, despises them.
The elections would be the first since 1990 when the party of opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, the National League for Democracy, won a landslide victory, a result that was ignored by the generals and recently nullified.
The coming elections are seen as unlikely to transform Myanmar's politics.
But Professor Sean Turnell, an expert on Myanmar at Macquarie University in Australia, said the elections had created a window for economic changes, a situation he described as similar to Indonesia's transition from socialist rule in the 1960s.
'I don't see this as a coherent liberalisation,' he said. 'But economic changes seem to have happened almost by accident, and people are grabbing at what they can.'
Read the full story in Friday's edition of The Straits Times.
NEW YORK TIMES
