Word: rangoons
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...anymore, you can't. The side-wheel riverboats that Rudyard Kipling wrote about in the far-off days of the Empire are disappearing fast. At least a third of the ancient riverboats of Rangoon's nationalized Irrawaddy Flotilla Co. is laid up for lack of parts. The rest operate with dismaying irregularity. Like just about everything else in Burma, they have suffered in the grip of economic and political paralysis that strongman Ne Win calls "the Burmese Way to Socialism...
...Rangoon, queues of would-be shoppers form in the dingy light of false dawn, long before the rising sun has set the golden stupa of the Shwe Dagon Pagoda aglow. For hours, as crows caw mournfully above the dirty streets, they stand in line at "people's stores," ration cards in hand, waiting for a chance to buy rice, bread, soap or a bit of cloth to make a longyi, the Burmese sarong. But when the doors open, the shelves, as often as not, are bare...
...severe are the shortages that a standard joke in Rangoon, which averages 100 inches of rain a year, is that if the government decided to nationalize water, there would be a drought. Rice exports continue to decline, dropping from 1,800,000 tons in 1962 to an expected 600,000 tons this year...
Four-Legged Economy. The mood is all the gloomier in Rangoon because many people had felt Ne Win was on the verge of making some overdue changes. Last year, in what seemed to be an effort to broaden his political base, he set up an "internal unity advisory board" composed of 33 old politicians, including former Premier...
Like their counterparts in other Southeast-Asian states, Burma's hill people resent being ruled by a lowland majority. Rebel organizations operate in the mountainous regions, and China has exploited discontent among the hill people as an inexpensive way of making mischief for the Rangoon government. Ne Win himself earlier this month admitted that his army had lost 133 men during the first eight months of this year in skirmishes provoked, he said, by "Burmese Communists." In the Pegu Yoma mountains north of Rangoon, on the other hand, the Burmese army has scored heavy gains against the "White Flag...