Many Burmese admirers of George Orwell like to say that the 20th century's greatest literary commentator on totalitarianism could never have written his masterpiece “1984” if he had not spent his formative years in Burma.

Indeed, some add, only half-jokingly, that “1984” is in fact a sequel to his first novel, “Burmese Days,” his indictment of British colonial rule in a country where he had spent the years 1922-27 as an assistant superintendent in the Indian Imperial Police. But whereas “Burmese Days” describes a dysfunctional system of governance, “1984” is a full-blown dystopian nightmare.

Yeni is news editor of the Irrawaddy magazine. He can be reached at [email protected].

Had he lived to see Burma as it is today, Orwell would probably have felt that life does indeed imitate art. His vision of a society in which “Big Brother” and the “Party” seek power entirely for its own sake has come true in the country where he first learned the naked truth about the nature of oppression.

Sometimes it even seems as if Burma's ruling generals have been turning to Orwell's fiction for inspiration. The current regime—the “State Peace and Development Council,” which rules by fomenting conflict and keeping its citizens impoverished—seems to take perverse pleasure in twisting the meaning of words. Slogans such as “War is Peace,” “Slavery is Freedom” and “Ignorance is Strength” would not look out of place on the front page of a Burmese state-run newspaper.

Now that the junta has announced its laws for this year's election, we can add another Orwellian slogan to its repertoire of insults to the intelligence of the Burmese people and the international community: “Election is Selection.”

Under the new election rules, which have so far been released only in Burmese, existing political parties wishing to participate in the vote must first expel members serving prison sentences; any party that fails to do so faces dissolution.

But in a country with more than 2,000 political prisoners, this is clearly intended to weaken or disqualify genuine democratic contenders such as the National League for Democracy, whose leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, is under house arrest on trumped-up charges.

To add to the opacity of the election laws (which some observers suspect will not be released in English, just to make matters more confusing for foreigners with an interest in seeing how the election is conducted), the regime has also ordered local newspapers and journals not to write anything “negative” about them. Indeed, all coverage of election-related issues must be “optimistic” and essentially indistinguishable from that found in the state-run media.

To further narrow the field of prospective candidates, the Technical Regulations for Political Parties Registration law also requires that all political parties pay a 300,000 kyat (US $300) fee to register, while individual candidates must pay 500,000 kyat ($500). The regulations also state that parties may spend a maximum of 10 million kyat ($10,000) for each candidate running for a seat in parliament—a measure that will favor the relatively well-off, who are, overwhelmingly, those connected to the junta.  

It is little wonder, then, that Tomas Ojea Quintana, the UN special rapporteur on human rights in Burma, concluded after a recent visit to the country that the election was unlikely to be free and fair.

All the indications are that Burma's Big Brother, Snr-Gen Than Shwe, has called the election only to pass on the torch of power to a hand-picked successor. Although it is not immediately clear who that will be, it is evident that he has already begun a pre-election process of elimination.

By the time the Burmese people are allowed to “choose” their new leader, it will already have been done for them. After all, this is Burma, where “Dictatorship is Democracy.”

Yeni is news editor of the Irrawaddy magazine. He can be reached at [email protected].