Myanmar’s writing on the wall

Yangon, Myanmar – The writing is on the wall – literally – in Myanmar.

Alongside the many groups demanding more freedoms and reforms from Myanmar’s quasi-civilian government, graffiti artists have added their colourful missives to Yangon’s streets.

The spray-painted messages – some political, others whimsical – have proliferated on the walls of the city, one of the more visible signs of change as Myanmar’s former junta loosens its grip on the country.

“Plug the city, plug the country,” one graffiti artist sprayed below the image of a television set with feathered wings in mid-flight. A power cable and electric plug dangle in the air from the TV – a reference to Yangon’s regular power cuts, which are an ever-present reminder of Myanmar’s poor infrastructure.

“Money Laundry, 4 U Right?” is sprayed on another wall on Kaba Aye Pagoda Road. The words are accompanied by a deft rendition of a front-loading washing machine and a dollar sign in its glass door. Alongside the image, the graffitist has sprayed the initials of several of Myanmar’s top banks. In a country where corruption is legendary – Myanmar ranked only above Afghanistan in Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index 2011 – it doesn’t take much to decipher the meaning.

Across the road, the graffiti is a simple appeal in red paint on a dirty concrete wall: “Dear President Thein Sein, in your second wave, please give us more power (electricity wise)…”

Another painted message near Yangon’s zoological gardens warns those who inform for the authorities: “f–k snitches.”

Until recently, the most prominent street signs in Yangon were giant billboards warning of Western conspiracies and extolling the heroic virtues of Myanmar’s military. But the billboards have been crowded out now, or replaced, by advertising for upcoming Burmese rock music concerts, household electric appliances and cosmetics.

Alongside the graffiti, new cars in Yangon are another of the visible signs that something has changed in this city of some six million people. Old buses and battered Toyota taxis, the type abandoned in Bangkok 30 years ago, were once the only vehicles that bumped along the city’s narrow streets, where dilapidated British-colonial buildings and cracked pavement slabs bear the marks of the country’s neglect.

‘The Lady’ returns

Now there is a familiar face you see everywhere in Yangon: She adorns T-shirts, her portrait hangs on walls in homes and businesses, it graces the front of Burmese newspapers and magazines, key rings, hats, and mugs.

Banned until recently, the iconography of Myanmar’s opposition party leader Aung San Suu Kyi, or “The Lady” as she is known, permeates the city and beyond.

Suu Kyi spent 15 years under house arrest until her release in November 2010. Merchandisers are making up for every second of her enforced invisibility.

On a recent morning at Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy headquarters in Yangon, throngs of party supporters, young and old, urban and rural, came and went. Adding to the jamboree of meetings and strategy planning for NLD youth activists, a stall was erected at the entrance to the weathered office where more Suu Kyi T-shirts, baseball hats, badges, DVDs, and posters were selling briskly.

Plainclothes military intelligence officers who once kept close tabs on the NLD office are no longer to be seen.

Tin Oo, the deputy leader of the NLD, was holding the fort when Suu Kyi addressed parliament last month – another of the momentous changes in this country.

“They cannot stay any longer as a totalitarian government now, that is my first [answer],” Tin Oo said, describing President Thein Sein’s reforms, which have included the release of political prisoners, an end to press censorship, economic liberalisation, and the promise of free and fair elections in 2015.

“They cannot go on. Everything is set on the economic condition. And those conditions were gradually deteriorating from a long time ago,” Tin Oo said.