The FT : By Amy Kazmin in Auk Chang, Burma
Published: September 21 2009 03:00 | Last updated: September 21 2009 03:00

Shortly before rice planting began this season, about 120 men, women and youngsters in the village of Auk Chang were recruited by Burma’s Union Solidarity and Development Association to build a two-storey replacement for a dilapidated school.

For their month of gruelling physical labour under the blazing sun, the villagers received breakfast, coffee and tea each day, but no money.

“This is the off season. They have nothing to do so they are volunteering,” declared a local USDA official. “Their children will use the school.” Nearby, villagers dug trenches for the school’s foundation, surrounded by fluttering red banners crediting the USDA for donating the steel frame and bricks for the new building.

It was a classic exercise of political campaigning, -junta-style.

With Burma’s military regime due to hold parliamentary elections next year, the generals have been working frenetically to ensure the polls deliver a legislature sympathetic to their interests. They are desperate to avoid a repeat of 1990, when the opposition National League for Democracy shocked them with its landslide victory.

Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel laureate leader of the NLD, which was never permitted to take power, is likely to miss the legislative campaign after being sentenced in August to 18 months’ house arrest for allowing an American intruder to shelter in her bungalow. Many other political dissidents are in prison, under sentences as long as 65 years , for their roles in mass protests in 2007 after a sharp rise in fuel prices.

But keeping prominent critics confined will not be sufficient for the regime’s strategic aims. The generals must also ensure the elections offer voters the semblance of choice from an array of diverse candidates so they can claim legitimacy for the polls to their own population and the international community.

“They will tell [UN secretary-general] Ban Ki-moon, or other Asian allies, ‘We have an inclusive electoral process,’ ” says Maung Zarni, research fellow on Burma at the London School of Economics.

To that end, the generals are recruiting prominent local businessmen, ethnic leaders, civil servants and respected community figures with no record of active opposition to the regime to run as candidates.

“They want credible people they can control,” says one local businessman.

With a quarter of the seats in the new parliament reserved for military appointees and with the assumption the army will find plenty of pliable candidates, the generals are not adverse to playing wild cards either: analysts say the junta has even approached some former and current political prisoners as potential candidates to lend credibility to the contest.

Yet the real key to the generals’ strategy is the USDA. Formed in 1993, the USDA is run by the regime’s top generals, who portray it as a genuine popular social movement, with 24m members and 15,000 offices, penetrating even remote rural villages. But most Burmese view the association as little more than the long arm of the regime.

When campaigning starts, many of the USDA’s top and mid-ranking leaders are expected to enter the field. So the organisation has launched a big effort to build schools, health clinics and other facilities in rural areas, hoping displays of largesse translate into popularity for those it backs.

“They want something in the form of the popular vote, and they are bribing people by going to different communities with cash and promising to repair schools and hospitals,” says Mr Zarni. “They are doing this using people’s money – state allocated cash.”

Despite the generals’ machinations, a western diplomat says the military-controlled process could evolve in unexpected directions and that handpicked candidates could turn out to be not as docile as expected.

“It is going to shake the glass up a bit,” says the diplomat.

“It will create new structures which are toothless at the beginning, but may gain teeth over time.”

While Burmese have few illusions about the so-called “disciplined democracy” their rulers are offering, some still hope for improved, more rational governance, after five decades of erratic military rule.

Social organisation used to mobilise the masses

Burma’s military regime created the Union Solidarity and Development Association in 1993 to mobilise the population behind it after the shock defeat of the pro-military National Unity Party three years earlier, writes Amy Kazmin in Auk Chang, Burma .

Registered as a social organisation, the ostensibly apolitical USDA claims more than 24m members, including civil servants, business people, students and factory workers, though many are believed to join out of compulsion to keep jobs, remain in business, or retain other privileges such as university enrolment.

With Senior General Than Shwe, the junta chief, as its primary patron, the USDA is thought to have extensive business interests, while also receiving direct state support to carry out its mission.

The junta has sought to raise the USDA’s profile as a social welfare group, letting it play a highly visible role in the relief effort after Cyclone Nargis last year, and trying to partner it with foreign non-governmental organisations operating in the country.

The group has its headquarters in a huge, new Rangoon building and has 15,000 branches nationwide,

USDA-mobilised thugs have been blamed for violent attacks on dissidents, incidents the regime has dismissed as spontaneous outbursts of popular anger.

The USDA is also used to mobilise the public for mass rallies supporting regime programmes, denouncing critics and last year’s constitutional referendum, which controversially went ahead within days of the devastating cyclone.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009.