You want to get online? That will cost two years' average salary for the hook-up fee and a decade's wages for a year's dial-up subscription. The cost of having an unlicensed computer and modem is up to 15 years in jail.
Welcome to the Internet in Burma, where recent add-ons to a 1996 computer law reflect an increasingly nervous military regime's determination to fend off the "democracy technology".
The new regulations, issued in mid-January, vividly illustrate dot.com by diktat. Backed by the threat of jail, the regulations forbid "any writings detrimental to the interests of the Union of Myanmar" (Burma), and any writings related to politics. Web pages can only be created with state permission, and Internet account holders are responsible for ensuring no-one else uses their account. While the announcement will ensure Burma's place on the list of the world's top 20 "enemies of the Net" created last year by Reporteurs Sans Frontieres, its purpose was more a warning to the population than a substantive change to the already draconian approach of the ruling State Peace and Development Council (SPDC).
For ordinary people, just being heard talking about email - like mentioning the name of pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi who is under semi-house arrest in Rangoon (and due to receive the Freedom of Dublin next month) - is enough to attract the attention of Burma's ubiquitous military intelligence informers. While effectively banning the population from Internet access, the generals have been attempting to put the Net to work for themselves. The result has been to turn the technology of transformation in the majority of the world into something sinister and dangerous in Burma.
"The Internet in Burma has become one more tool for repression," says Zar Ni, the Chicago-based founder of the Free Burma Coalition (FBC), an activist group which organises on the Net.
"In Burma under the junta, all technology is put to the use of the dictatorship, whose priority is political survival first and last. Junta representatives use the Net to misinform, divide and intimidate," said Larry Dohrs, a Seattle-based FBC member.
"Before the Net, the regime had no real voice in the world. Now, it has its own platform to woo naive potential tourists and provide information for business interests. The multilingual www.myanmar.com attempts to paint Burma as a peaceful, beautiful, welcoming place. Most people will not be fooled by the blatant disinformation, but inevitably it gets through to some," says Pat Raleigh of the Burma Action Group in Ireland.
The SPDC also uses discussion lists such as BurmaNet to post daily bulletins from military intelligence, the Office of Strategic Studies, and sometimes from Burmese embassies. Pro-democracy activists dismiss the routine posts as a deadly dull attempt at "psychological warfare".
Tapping into the Net does help the regime to keep tabs on its foes. "The Net must certainly be helping the junta to build a data base of potential and known `enemies of the state' and `external destructive elements', which is how it describes human rights activists and supporters," added Zar Ni.
Since an Internet training workshop in Rangoon in July, organised by the World Trade Organisation, and attended by military intelligence, staff from the foreign affairs and commerce ministries, the regime has been talking up the wonders of information technology. Its leader, Gen Khin Nyunt, told a symposium last October: "Information technology has become an indispensable tool in our daily life . . . Myanmar is fully aware of the importance of information technology in nation-building."
If a US-based firm can overcome the generals' notoriously inefficient and paranoid bureaucracy, e-commerce may even make an entrance in the country which came last in a recent global economic freedom survey (Ireland came sixth). A new site (www.myanmarmade. com) promises that crafts, gems, clothes and music from the cripplingly poor country will soon be available at prices "so cost-effective that it would seem too good to be true".
But don't hold your breath for Myanmarmade - the generals have a way of dashing the hopes of would-be allies, including wannabe Internet entrepreneurs from the West. Two years after receiving permission to set up the first email service in Rangoon in 1997, London-based computer firm Digiserve (www.digiserve.com) was telling potential investors in the US that "with no domestic competition" the potential growth for its Eagle IT group of companies in Myanmar was "limitless". However, a December issue of Asiaweek magazine reported that Eagle's email service was abruptly terminated on December 13th. Two weeks later investors' hopes were dashed for good when the regime announced that it would be the sole provider of Internet services in Burma. On the same day, the Oslo-based Democratic Voice of Burma (DVB) radio station reported that a computer officer at the War Office in Rangoon, along with five instructors from Eagle's computer school and another computer school, had been arrested. The reason, according to the DVB, was: "the proliferation in Rangoon of reports carried by the opposition web page, BurmaNet". The January warning was broadcast on televisions around the country.
For Rangoon, there are clear lessons to be learned from neighbouring China's decision to allow limited access to the Net, a system which is proving impossible to control. Beijing, with its gradually opening economy, may be learning to live with a trade-off between the desire to reap the economic benefits of the Net and discomfort over the prospect of a better-informed population.
For Burma's military regime, such a compromise is impossible. "They have no support among the population," said a Bangkok-based economic consultant. "Fear and absolute control are the only survival weapons the military has got."
sbarron@iol.ie