Inside the golden fortress of the generals, empty streets and musty corners

Another was cutting unruly leaves from palm trees and pruning unruly rhododendrons.

It was the height of an orchestrated election season in Myanmar, but there was no traffic.

There is never traffic in Naypyidaw.

Built at the beginning of this century, Naypyidaw, the capital of Myanmar, means “abode of kings.”

In reality, it is a vast bunker for the top brass of this Southeast Asian nation, who have held onto power for more than half a century.

With its defensive design and gigantic scale, Naypyidaw is testimony to the junta’s fear of invasion and its taste for the trappings of the tropical totalitarianism.

When I arrived in Naypyidaw in December, it had been more than five years since I had visited Myanmar’s unusual capital.

Much has happened since then:

a military coup in 2021 that once again overthrew an elected government, the reimposition of a culture of fear in which a single word can lead to prison sentences, and a rampant civil war that has claimed thousands of lives and displaced 3.5 million people.

Despite everything, the junta, led by General Min Aung Hlaing, He has taken refuge in Naypyidaw.

While the rest of the country suffers—from electricity and food shortages, from air and drone strikes—the generals live in luxurious villas spread across a hot plain, far from the people they have spent decades repressing.

In Naypyidaw, there are charging stations for electric vehicles and sculpted topiaries.

Late last month, as the junta began the month-long election period that Western nations have called a farce, photographer Daniel Berehulak and I were given permission to watch Min Aung Hlaing vote in the capital, along with a group of Myanmar journalists.

Naypyidaw is divided into strict zones:

the military zone, the hotel zone and the ministerial zone.

Many kilometers separate each sector and some, such as the parliamentary area, have been particularly depopulated since the 2021 coup d’état.

Well before dawn, we gathered on the side of the road, next to the Ministry of Information.

Then we got on a bus, an old vehicle that still maintains the route it traveled decades ago in Japan.

At a checkpoint near the commander-in-chief’s office, marked with a striking sign with multicolored lights, a Chinese-made X-ray machine examined the underside of each vehicle.

We lined up at a booth to be checked in and scanned with another Chinese technology.

But after some journalists were prosecuted, the system appeared to fail.

We entered the military zone, normally prohibited for civilians, without being scanned.

In a chandeliered hall, a red carpet was rolled out and several generals, dressed in fine silk sarongs, came to vote.

We saw Min Aung Hlaing leaving with him left pinky stained with purple ink.

He smiled the typical smile of someone who has left nothing to chance in these elections.

The National League for Democracy, winner of the last two elections, has been dissolved.

Its civilian leader, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, is now imprisoned somewhere in Naypyidaw.

The NLD’s resounding victories in 2015 and 2020 extended to the capital, where the electorate is made up of civil servants, military families and the armies of aides who keep the capital clean.

But to the generals, it was inconceivable that NLD candidates, including a formerly imprisoned rapper and a political poet, would have triumphed in the military’s custom-built city.

The overthrow of the civilian government by the military in 2021 was justified as a solution to the alleged electoral fraudeven if international observers had declared that the 2020 elections were free and fair.

The precise moment of the coup was accidentally recorded on a live broadcast from Naypyidaw, as armored vehicles rumbled behind a woman recording a funny aerobic routine.

Officially, Naypyidaw has around one million inhabitants.

Like so many things in Myanmar, the population figure is a farce.

While generals decorated their mansions, officials, forced to move here from the bustling former capital, Yangon, were given dreary quarters in color-coded buildings:

green for the Ministry of Agriculture and blue for the Ministry of Health.

Even some senior managers recognize the deficiencies of the new capital.

“I like Naypyidaw, but those who move from Yangon may not like it,” General Zaw Min Tun, a spokesman for the junta, said in a rare interview.

“But we are soldiers. We have to live here. We are used to more difficult places than Naypyidaw.”

In the days following the 2021 coup, Myanmar erupted in protests.

Merchants, drivers, gardeners, cooks, jewelers, loggers, the occasional daughter of a general: they all marched through the wide avenues demanding the resumption of civil government.

Perhaps it was not surprising, then, that the first deadly crackdown on the national peaceful uprising occurred in the capital, when a sniper killed a 20-year-old woman who was near a bus stop.

A polling station for the current election season is located at a school across the street from where the woman was shot.

Some Naypyidaw residents quietly told me that they had been ordered to vote to counter an attempted boycott by the Myanmar government-in-exile.

In 2015, U Phyo Zeya Thaw, the rapper who was jailed for his political lyrics, won a parliamentary seat in this constituency.

After the coup d’état, he was convicted of terrorism, a farce according to human rights groups.

It was executed by the junta in 2022.

Naypyidaw is only two decades old, but it has aged reluctantly.

Decentralization has accelerated since the coup, with chipped roof tiles and mold invading corners.

Hotel occupancy is terrible.

The only regular guests are foreign military advisers and Asian businessmen willing to negotiate with a regime that has been subject to international financial sanctions.

So few cars circulate on the wide avenues that a line of white oxen can stroll through the numerous streets without fear of being run over.

At the Naypyidaw Zoo, where I once saw penguins with their mosquitoes gliding in their air-conditioned enclosure, I was told that all the birds had died.

The main exhibits, an emaciated white tiger and a pair of lions named Michael and Cindy, seemed dispirited.

At the entrance, two 14-year-old boys sweated in animal costumes, earning about 60 cents for 10 hours of work.

When an earthquake hit central Myanmar in March, causing thousands of deaths, hundreds of buildings were affected in Naypyidaw.

The earth swallowed the ground floors of the officials’ homes.

Many of them are now homeless, including women working in the Ministry of Agriculture, who have been relegated to bamboo shelters.

Despite COVID-19, the coup d’état and the 7.7 magnitude earthquake, uncontrolled construction continues in Naypyidaw.

An enclosure for the auspicious white elephants — in fact, they are pinker — has been expanded with animals brought from the western edge of Rakhine, where armed rebels have taken over most of the state.

In 2023, Min Aung Hlaing inaugurated the world’s largest seated marble Buddha, a beatific work of 5,000 tons of stone, more than 18 meters high, which cost almost $30 million to build.

About half of Myanmar’s population currently lives in poverty.

“Politics should not be mixed with religion,” said Ashin Nanda, a Buddhist monk in Naypyidaw.

Despite the generals’ ostentatious displays of faith, their capital fortress is not impenetrable.

From Naypyidaw, the view of the plains of central Myanmar ends at the Shan Hills.

Just on the other side of the mountains, Myanmar’s civil war rages.

Last year, armed rebel drones flew over the capital.

Early on December 28, the day of the first vote, a bomb exploded near a school that served as a polling station in Naypyidaw.

A day later, a rebel militia briefly took control of part of the highway linking the capital to the city of Mandalay; guerrilla soldiers wandered along a highway meridian illuminated by bougainvillea.