Myanmar's last royal laments a crumbling nation

By Ed Cropley

PYIN U LWIN, Myanmar (Reuters) - With a twinkle in his eye and the cheeky grin of a man half his age, 84-year-old Taw Paya does what few in Myanmar are prepared to do: speak out openly against the ruling military junta.

But this is no gung-ho dissident, courting the wrath of one of the world's most repressive governments.

Taw Paya is the sole surviving grandson of the former Burma's last monarch, King Thibaw, exiled to India by the British in 1885. The blue blood flowing in his veins does not make him immune to recrimination, but it certainly helps.

"People are still respectful of the royal blood," he told Reuters in the sitting room of his red-brick colonial-style villa, built in 1947, the year before the southeast Asian nation claimed its independence from Britain. A woolly hat is pulled low over his forehead and his jacket is buttoned up to the neck to ward off the early morning chill of Pyin U Lwin, a hill-station popular with British officers seeking escape from the sweat and dust of Myanmar's central plains.

There is little else to cover his disdain for the 46 years of unbroken army rule that have transformed Myanmar from the rice bowl of Asia into a deeply impoverished international pariah. "There's nothing good in Burma any more," he said, recalling the apparent Golden Age of early independence in which food was cheap and plentiful -- in stark contrast to the galloping inflation and deepening poverty that sparked September's monk-led protests.

"How will it change? That's the big question," he said. "Nobody knows how to unravel the trouble we're in. There's no answer as long as these chaps are in power. We have to hope for change, but I don't think it'll be realized while we're alive."

RIGHT ROYAL MESS

Taw Paya's mother was allowed back to Burma in 1919, but kept under close watch by British imperial rulers fearful of the lingering respect accorded to the royal line. The military, which seized power in a 1962 coup, has been no less restrictive.